2nd Roadtrip (the North)

Time always passes by much too quickly and there are so many thing I would like to talk about but I simply don't have the time...So here is just a short overview about what had happened here since my last entry.

2nd Roadtrip, North

First of all I went with Eveline, a very good friend of mine from Switzerland, and Petra to the North, for another Roadtrip. This time we only left for 2 days but we decided to rent a car because we would be more flexibel. It was great fun! We drove around in the countryside just outside of Dublin, trying to find the Hills of Tara and see some nice places on the way (like the gravehill where you had to ask the farmer for the key..) but we got lost and did a nice detour.

But we met many nice Irish people who showed us the way, explained it to us, drove in front of us or simply tried to help us get out ;-) It sounds bad now but it actually wasn't. It was funny and amazing to see how friendly those people are and it made us all think whether this would be similar in Switzerland (and somehow we all doubted it..). But we finally made it to the Hills and decided to drive over the city of Trim to visit the castle (where the movie Braveheart was filmed) and had lunch.

We afterwards followed with our trip up North. As there is no border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland (which belongs to the UK) it is very hard to realise when you've crossed it. But the prices for gas and the speed sign were different (pounds and miles). It was fun to drive with speed sign in miles if your car only has a tachometer in kilometres. We spent the night in Belfast but we didn't see a lot of the city. We went to eat in a pub/restaurant and ordered a drink at the end. They however showed a price for a glass but brought us a pitcher and said that didn't have a glas. When we showed them the menu where the price for the glass was listed they gave us the pitcher for the price of the glass! So we had a nice and cheap evening :-).

On the second day we drove trough the countryside and along the coast to the giant causeway. This natural stones on the shore look like a giant "way" and the legend goes that a giant wanted to build a way to his love who lived on another island. Here are some pictures.

Weekend with my parents

Last weekend my parents and Laurence came to visit me. It was very nice seeing them again and showing them around "my" city! We had a great time altough it rained for the first time in 3 weeks. We did some sight-seeing and a musical pub crawl which was great fun. Here some picutres

Exams

At the moment I have exams. That't the reason I need to study and don't have a lot of time for blogging. But I promise that I will write about a couple of other (funny) things that happened here in Dublin.

Road trip part II

I know that my last entry was very short and maybe didn't satisfy your curiosity. Therefore I would like to give you more information about my road trip. Those days on the road made me finally realize that I was in Ireland. Ireland as the country most people see it, the "green island" with lots of sheep and farmers, narrow streets and small houses and rain. With the exception of the latter ;-), this idea is true. Ireland is a beautiful island, very green, very narrow streets and many farmers and sheep. The people are extremely friendly and several times we were offered help when we seemed lost (and sometimes were).

Don't get me wrong, Dublin is a great city and I love it, but capitals and big cities are rarely a true picture of the country and neither Zurich nor Geneva are typical of Switzerland (I know that they are not the capital). Ireland has a beautiful landscape, astonishing coast-lines, cute little towns with picturesque houses and a funny road system. The streets are narrow and have many blind bends but still the sign shows a speed limit of 100! How anyone can drive that fast without loosing control of the car and the road is a mystery (at least for us). Many Irish cars (=locals, not tourists) passed us while we drove and some of them very fast. On the other hand they hardly ever drive faster than 100 on the streets where you COULD drive faster because they are wide, have several lanes and you can actually SEE where you're going, not just guessing what may lie ahead...and the road sign are so small..oculists must make a fortune in this country! The sign are usually are visible two seconds AFTER the turnoff...but hey, we had fun :-). We ended up at nice places, talked to friendly people telling us that we are lost or completely at the wrong place or just smiling knowingly when we turned...and we drove on the left! With one European Union they still can't manage that everybody drives on the same side of the road..it wasn't that difficult actually, just sometimes a little funny we were shouting-drive on the left, after we entered the road or: you are too close to the side, drive more to the right". ..

The trip led from Dublin to Kilkenny where we had our first stop and turned onto the scenic drive, a "nice" route with very small signs, mostly visible after the junctions and many turns. Once in Cashel, we visited the church "Rock of Cashel" and drove onto Cobh, just a little outside of Cork in the South. This was a very nice little town directly on the sea with beautiful houses where we spent the first night.

On the second day we drove through the Ring of Kerry (which is a nice route along the cost-line, a circle starting at Killarney and the streets were sometimes REALLY narrow, especially if there was a lorry crossing...we skipped the town Killarney and drove onto the Dingle peninsula which was one of the highlights of the trip. In Dingle we spent the second night in a hostel and got to spend more money for our dinner in one of the finest fish restaurants of the island as for the night...

As there was no breakfast at the hostel we got to leave really early and managed to see most of the peninsula before the other tourists woke up which was perfect. We passed Tralee and went onto to Tarbert where we took the ferry to Kilrush. It was still early in the day so we headed further north and even got to see the Cliffs of Moher on that day! We spent the night at a small town called Ballyvaughan in a completely new bed & breakfast.

After a "cooked breakfast" with sausages, beans and bacon, we left on the next morning to see the landscape called "burren". A must, as Karin's surname is Burren :-) This landscape looks very lunar as there are just stones. The great variety of plants can only be seen at second glance. But even in this remote area we managed to locate a place to spend money: a perfumery! After "some" shopping we headed for our final destination, the town of Galway. In Galway we spent some hours with shopping (again *lol*), eating and enjoying the sun before we squeezed into our beloved red Nissan Micra called "Ed" for the final hours of our journey back home to Dublin. We returned him safely and hope that his next owners will treat him with the same love and that they might laugh as much as we did while enjoying his company!

Holiday!

A friend of mine recently published the following sentence in her blog : silence on the blog can mean two things: either there is too much going on and there's simply no time to post. or there is nothing happening that is worthwhile babbling about. (http://cileia.blogspot.com/2007/03/better-right-than-kind.html)

In my case there is too much going on, way too much, to be presice. There are so many things I wanted to do and should have done during those two weeks off at Portobello:

• think about my future (once again, I refer to Cileia's blog and my comment on her last entry) and send out my CV for the internship I need to do back home in Switzerland
  
• send emails to the few friends who didn't forget about me already (there seem to be not too many though)
  
• study for my exams at Portobello (we still have no clue when they will take place and what we're supposed to learn for them but hey, we still have two weeks to go so why bother with dates and requirements already?!)
  
• finish the presentation for strategic management about the merger of SWISS and Lufthansa
  
• write postcards to the above-mentionned friends and some others who then might remember me ;-)

I could go on with that list but as I told you, I don't have time. So to close a long story short, I didn't! I didn't deal with most of those points and instead followed the advice of the postcard sender and enjoyed life! I decided to travel and visit more of my host-country, to get to know the country-side and to finally start driving (on the left and driving at all). So I left for a roadtrip last Tuesday with Petra, Franziska (a friend of her) and Karin (one of my best friends). 4 days of driving around and visiting places. Amazing! As a picture speaks for more than 1000 words (bad German translation), I will let my pictures do the talking and finally work on my presentation...

Rock of Cashel

Cobh

Karin and I

Posing at the beach

Dingle Peninsula

Cliffs of Moher

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