Underwhelmed by Crumpets, Impressed by the Rest

For Easter Break, I went with Isabel to see the UK. We started planning way back in February, so we were really excited to finally head off. Isabel came up the day before and our flight wasn't until late in the evening, so we had a bit of time to be able to hang out and to pack strategically (we decided not to check our bags, and the carry-on restrictions were redonkulous).

I'll keep the play-by-play to a minimum, so instead of a long narrative, I'll just write a little bit about each stop on the grand tour.


Brighton: a lovely city on the coast, about an hour outside of London. Apparently it was quite a skeezy place back in the day. Londoners would come out here for a "dirty weekend" with hookers and booze. No joke, we went to a museum that said that. But the city also has a great little pier with a ferris wheel and carousel and arcade, and lots of cool little shops and restaurants on the boardwalk along the beach. While we were walking, we found this little open-air book sale and picked up a couple of books to read on the several train rides we had coming up. We also had the requisite fish and chips for dinner.

These are just off the beach along a wide promenade. I think
in the summer they open up and you can put chairs and stuff
in them. They're worth quite a lot; one was selling for £10,000!

After a quick overnight in London (really, we were in and out of the city without seeing the light of day), we were off to Edinburgh.

I think we had a bit of time to kill before the train, so we grabbed some snacks. Isabel got a pack of crumpets, which I've heard about a lot, but I must have built them up in my head too much and they were not at all what I expected. They're kind of like a thick, moist English muffin. Not much flavor and actually pretty weird when cold. The package recommends toasting and eating with jam, and I think that would make a big improvement.

I, however, went with something a bit more safe and got some lemon creme cookie sandwiches. For 86 cents it's probably the best thing ever. SO GOOD. And it came in a huge pack so they lasted all the way until Belfast.

We accidentally discovered Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross
Station while we were waiting for our train. Awesome!

The train ride between London and Edinburgh is supposed to be one of the most beautiful in the world, and I think that could be true. 

Two nights in Edinburgh wasn't quite enough, but we had time to do quite a bit. I definitely want to go back though. It's just a beautiful old city with lots of museums, a castle, some old ruins, and fun little shops selling all kinds of things.

The view from the top of Arthur's Seat, a mountain/hill
right in the middle of the city. Totally hikeable in 2-3 hrs.

In the bar at our hostel.

New-agey air quality management. 

Thought about stealing this just in case I needed it in a few years

This is supposedly the place where J.K. Rowling came
up with the idea for Harry Potter. Once again, we came
upon it by accident.

From there we went north to Inverness and Drumnadrochit, the latter a tiny little town on the edge of Loch Ness. They have an interesting little Loch Ness Monster museum there, complete with myth-busting explanations for all the Nessie sightings in the last century. 

All scientific hope may be gone, but I still believe in Nessie!

The town isn't as close to the water as it looks on the map, so it was more like a 45-minute hike along the road out to Urquhart Castle, the really famous castle that is actually right on the lake. The big bummer was that you can't even get close to the castle without paying a pretty expensive entrance fee. We asked about a student price and Isabel got the response, "Students have to grow up sometime, you know." Yeah, but students also have to eat. I missed this comment while I was talking with the other worker, but once I heard about it I got a little worked up. The whole time we were visiting I kept thinking of whiz-bang comebacks: "yeah, well...your mom has to grow up!"

Even with the snooty ticket people, the castle was pretty cool. It's just an old ruin, but you can climb up one of the towers that's still standing, and the lake just kind of spreads out in front of you. When the fog comes in it's pretty neat.

The hills on our walk out to Loch Ness

Most tempting festival I think I've
ever seen.

While we were waiting for the bus back to Inverness, it started raining. Luckily there was a little shelter at the stop, so we waited inside. The cool part was that we saw an entire rainbow, including both ends. Like less than 100 meters away from us. No pots of gold though.

From Inverness we headed south and east to Belfast. This involved what amounted to an entire day of traveling, including I think three trains, a bus, a ferry, and a taxi.

In the morning, we speed-walked to get to a grocery store that reminded me of Fred Meyer to get enough food for the entire day. We got sandwiches for lunch and soup for dinner. Problem: no spoons or bowls, and the soup came in cartons. Solution: straws. My tomato soup had unexpected chunks of real tomato so it made it a little harder to drink than I imagined. But it was an easy dinner to eat/drink in the waiting area for the ferry while playing Words With Friends.

Belfast was also really nice. Unfortunately we spent the only full day we had there on a bus tour out to Giant's Causeway, so there were just a few hours on the last morning to walk around a bit. I think I'd like to come back here too. It has some interesting-sounding museums including a brand new Titanic museum, and the shipyard where the Titanic was built.

Giant's Causeway was awesome. Isabel managed to score us two seats on the tour for free because our hostel, which also runs this tour, never returned any of her several emails about it. The trip made a few stops at various places, but the real highlight was the Causeway. It's a crazy formation of rock pillars that extend out into the ocean from some cliffs and hills and stuff. Isabel, who is a geologist, was super excited.

Giant's Causeway

Silly tourists. It's like cows are rare or something.

The big yellow thing that says H&W is where the shipyard
is that built the Titanic.

Belfast City Hall

Best name of a bar/concert place ever: Filthy McNasty's.

From Belfast we moved on to Dublin. Dublin seemed to be more visitor-accessible, although that may be due to the fact that our hostel was a bit more centrally located, and we had a little more time to wander around. There were lots of little green gardens and churches and, of course, the original Guinness Brewery. 

St. James' Church!

After our visit to the Guinness Storehouse, enjoying our
free pint in their 360-degree viewing platform/bar.

We took another bus tour, this time to the Cliffs of Moher on the east coast of Ireland. This was with the same tour company as the last tour, but the guide was awesome. He was funny, told stories and jokes the entire trip, and we got to sit right behind him and look out the front window as we went. He has this crazy stroke of luck where the weather is always nice when his tour group gets out of the bus, and then it starts pouring rain as soon as they get back on. The case was the same with us - we had fabulous weather at every stop, and the rain came down sooo hard while we were driving.

If you look closely in this picture, you can see a little footpath along the edge of the cliffs with people walking along it. That's technically not part of the visitor's area; you kind of have to climb over this stone barrier and walk along a barbed wire fence to get out there. Our tour guide recommended not going out there, but to at least be careful of updrafts that could knock you off-balance and make you fall off the cliff.

The official area was nice, but you can't really get a good look at things because of all the grassy bits that extended out beyond the barrier to the edge of the cliff. So...

...We hopped the barrier.

On the edge of the cliffs, facing away from the ocean

As you can see, the view is pretty spectacular. I think it was my favorite stop for the entire trip. I could have sat up there on the cliffs for hours.

Last stop: London. I think London is one of those cities that sounds amazing, but the reality is still that it's just another big city. It's crowded and tourists make the most horrible pedestrians ever. They're always stopping to take pictures or walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk or walk too slow or carry too much stuff and don't pay attention to how much their bags swing around.

But I think we still had a good time. We took the recommendation of an older couple we met at the Guinness Storehouse and visited the Tate Britain museum. It's huge and confusing. There's kind of a middle area you have to work your way back to in order to go to a new section, but somehow even if you do that you still end up in the new section somewhere in the middle instead of the beginning, so the narrative and explanations are kind of jumbly. But all the stuff they had there was pretty cool.

Once again, there wasn't enough time to do everything, so we just walked around a lot and mostly visited the outside of other buildings, just to get kind of a feel for the city. We found this amazing farmers' market and had some delicious samples of cheese and what I think was Turkish Delight.

Hipsters exist in Britain, too!

I was probably too excited to see this bridge, but in one
of the Harry Potter movies it gets torn apart by
the Death Eaters and I wanted to see it.

And then, all too soon, our two week trip was over. It was a fantastic time to get out of my normal territory and see some more places I've never been. I'll admit, it took a little getting used to the idea of being back in an English-speaking country. I almost felt guilty being able to order food or buy stuff using English. The food was different at times, but good. The pubs are as fun as they're made out to be. We even did a literary pub crawl in Dublin and had a great time with that too.

Full English breakfast, with baked beans and black sausage.

Now it's back to work. I can't believe that was the last major school break before my time here is over. There are only another 10 weeks before my time here is over! I'll write about that soon too.