A Spring Break Visit, An Afternoon in London, Dublin on St. Patrick's Day, etc.

Grace decided to come visit me on her spring break. And so she arrived, after having missed her international connection in Atlanta due to weather and about five hours late, for a pretty calm evening. We walked around the city a little. We ate delicious crêpes (galettes, really) at a place very near my house. We drank cider. And then we slept until she no longer felt tired. Her resiliency to jetlag, on a first time abroad, was to be commended.

That afternoon, we had a lunch of thoroughly French cheeses (some of which were growing Penicillium) and bread, and Vianney met us, complete with rollerblades, at my place. He brought a milk bottle full of canelé dough, which was delicious and which inspired us to get some canelés while we were in Bordeaux. We climbed the 231 stairs of the Tour de Pey-Berland, which is associated with the cathedral right next to my apartment. The view was spectacular, though there was some considerable haze obscuring the horizon line.

We walked to Place des Quinconces, where the fair was in progress. We ate some cotton candy, which, in France, can be basically any flavor you want it to be, from coconut to anise, though from our sampling (lemon and blackcurrant) mostly just tastes like cotton candy.

We took a walk along the river, and met Amy for dinner at Place St. Pierre. We ended up going to a pretty hippie-like establishment which was selling its lack of air conditioning as an earth-friendly gesture (though I doubt any of the area restaurants have air conditioning). We had a plate of ham, pickled bell peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, and slices of baguette with a black cherry jam. A very interesting and pretty tasty meal.

After dinner we headed to my friend Carley's surprise 21st birthday party (she's Canadian, so you needn't think it was THAT kind of 21st blowout) where we whiled away the night with Erasmus students, associated French kids, and gummy Smurf-shaped candy, and where I modeled several ridiculous ways to wear party hats. The pictured way displays the strange expression my paternal grandmother used to make when I was particularly in her way in the kitchen.

What comes next was a trial devised by the gods of French appliances. Grace's only pair of jeans needed laundering before our trip to London and beyond, so we put them in my washing machine around 1 a.m. The same washing machine as, you might recall, greatly resembles a cheese grater and was non-functional for several months. I set my alarm for about two hours later, so I could wake up and drape them over the heater to dry. But when I woke up, the washer was still going. And thirty minutes later, still going. And thirty minutes after that, still going. At some point, I failed to reset my alarm and woke up at 5:20 to the sound of the washing machine, still washing away. I had to unplug it to get it to unlock, and set about frantically trying to get them to dry before our departure time (6:45 in the morning). We mostly succeeded, though Grace burned herself trying to pull her jeans on at the last minute (the buttons 'n' things get hot when you put them directly on the heater).

An hour of bus-riding later, we made it to the airport. The flight was uneventful. We spent an afternoon in London, taking tea at the Ruben(s) hotel (delicious scones. Also, clotted cream is not at all like it sounds) and seeing Buckingham Palace, Westminster, Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square.

We went to sleep relatively early, had a disappointing but colorfully-served breakfast of toast and corn flakes in our London hostel, and departed for the train station. We took a train from London to Holyhead, in Wales, and then a ferry from Holyhead to Dublin, Ireland. The ferry was sort of absurd, in that it had a gift shop and an arcade and a movie theater and a restaurant and a bar and five decks for cars but no way to get outside and look at the ocean.

Arrival in Dublin was pretty easy. The ferry line had a bus that took us to a point about a block from our hotel. The hotel turned out to be remarkably nice, for the price we were paying. I was increasingly surprised that it was even listed on the hostel bookers' website, as we discovered its various features. It had a wall of windows, and a towel warmer that worked off of the heat from the bath water, and all manner of things I wasn't expecting to get.

Jonahan's friend Aoiffe, from Nanterre, met up with us at the hotel and took us out and around. I regret not having taken any pictures with her. She was very kind to have met us at all, but told us what all the prominent sights were. The city was packed, and we went to several places before we could find a place with a table that could seat and serve us. We ended up at a pub she'd never been to before, where I had a dish made of beef that had been braised in Guinness, and some mashed potatoes. Delicious, and representative of how obsessed with Guinness the town was. We went to the Stag's Head, which was apparently the first pub in Dublin to have electricity, and which James Joyce frequented. We ended up at a bar underneath our hotel, whose music's persistent bass threatened to keep us awake when we went upstairs for a pretty early bedtime.

We slept in until the parade started, and what we found was a wall of people. A film of people, maybe, on every available surface. The statue photo might illustrate how many people there were -- not only could we NOT see the parade, but there was nowhere left to climb up in order to do so. There were a lot of people. People who brought their own ladders for their kids to stand on. People who had no fear for the safety of their spinal cords. People who, already drunk and covered with four-leaf clover tattoos, should not have been in charge of children.

We followed the parade route through a claustrophobic tunnel of people and ducked down a side street and into the first pub that looked like it had room for us to breathe. We both agreed that the decor was more suited to a coffee or tea shop than a pub, but I ordered shepherd's pie and Guinness for lunch (also breakfast). Grace had a green beer with her pie, which made the waitress a little confused. I'm not sure if she was confused why one would drink the green beer or why Grace wanted to substitute the pint in the lunch deal with a smaller-than-half-pint drink, but she did acquiesce.

After lunch we spent some considerable time walking around Dublin. We discovered St. Patrick's Park, where there were families picnicking and where he is said to have baptized people centuries ago. And his Cathedral, which had more monuments and statues and plaques than any other I've seen in Europe.

My favorite part of the church was the old knights' apparel arranged in the...choir...area (okay, so I need to improve my English vocabulary about churches), circa 1870.
We walked around the shopping district of Dublin, for Grace's sake. She was greatly amused by several places, and I tried not to get in the way. What I did notice was that, in the shopping areas of Dublin, I heard a lot of French spoken. Make of that what you will.

Next was a trip back to the hotel to stash purchases, and a supper of pear cider and chicken+rabbit paella at that thumping bar/restaurant downstairs from our hotel. It was my first time eating rabbit, I think, and it wasn't bad. I'm not sure it was my new favorite thing, or anything, but I enjoyed it.

What followed dinner was a pub crawl of epic proportions, where people filled the streets and drank copious amounts of beer despite the police, garbed in neon yellow, taking away their open containers and scowling with a disapproval that seemed to be not so much for the drinking in the streets, but for bitterness of not joining in. This was a strange cultural difference from France, where drinking in the streets is perfectly okay, provided there are no glass vessels on holidays in crowded areas.

Everyone in Dublin was friendly and welcoming, which I might have expected from the moment the Irish customs officials welcomed us and promised to give us a few days on our visas, you know, in case we missed our ride of our Ireland. And what a contrast from the ridiculous questioning the UK customs' office subjected us to. It's like they expected us to try and immigrate at any moment.

There were people in the streets. There were guys with guitars, my favorite of which was leading a rousing chorus of various Oasis songs each time we passed him. There were little drum corps, with breakdancers. There were foreigners of many nationalities, and every time an Irish person noticed we were foreign they would welcome us and offer us a drink. That was nice, since I kind of expected Dubliners to be irritated at the influx of newcomers and sort of hostile. All in all, everyone was great. We drank cider and Guinness.

And Guinness, by the way, really is better in Ireland. I kept being told this by everyone, but I assumed it was just starry-eyed tourists on their first Guinness brewery tour saying it. It's possible I'm affected, too, but man. I'm sold.

I wish there were pictures from this endeavor. My camera, however, is by nature bulky and perhaps too valuable to me to risk in a large crowd. There were a lot of people wearing green. A lot of people drinking pints (no halves in Ireland -- that kinda thing stays in France where it belongs). A lot of American music (power ballads about going home to southern states, mostly, and a lot of Johnny Cash). A lot of Irish music.

And, my favorite part of the evening -- the Girondins of Bordeaux playing soccer on the big screen during the Champions League versus the Olympiakos, from Greece. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. We won, and I cheered. In two languages.

It was an excellent night. The next morning, we woke up ridiculously early and walked to a bus, which took us to the ferry, and Grace battled her stomach the whole boat ride to Holyhead. We missed our train to London because the screens that told us which platform to wait at misled us. That extra hour and a half waiting on the next train was spent trying to get Grace to eat again (and therefore stop shivering). The train ride back to London wasn't too bad.

We bought some food at the train station and walked back to the same hostel we'd used on the way out. We went to bed, like old ladies, exhausted at 8 p.m., while everyone else in our room was checking in and coming in and out, getting ready to go out drinking. We woke up at 3 a.m. to catch a 3:58 night bus to a train station, the Gatwick Express train from London Victoria to the Gatwick airport, and a 7 a.m. flight from London to Bordeaux. I got Grace to her check-in and security checkpoint, and then we parted ways. I rode the bus for an hour from Merignac to Bordeaux centre, and spent about an hour trying to fall asleep. I felt something much akin to jetlag, and was exceedingly tired all day, before going to bed at a semi-normal time. I was somewhat hopeful of retaining that diurnal sleep schedule, bu here it is 3:30 a.m. and it doesn't seem so likely to happen.

Tonight was France versus England in the last match of the Six Nations rugby tournament (France won! lots of fun...except for the English, I guess) and hanging out with various French/English/American acquaintances and friends at the Charles Dickens and Dick Turpin's.

I think it might be time for sleep, now.