Pictures!

I've posted some of my best pics on my fotopic page. http://soserene.fotopic.net
I didn't resize the pictures yet, so you can only really look at the thumbnails, but I hope to get around to that soon. I have posted some of the pics below in my blog as well. Let me know what you think. Obviously with 1500+ pictures I can't share them all, but I'll try ;-)

Land's End, the westernmost point in England. 

Big Ben from the Big Bus. Cool clouds. 

The view up the Eiffel Tower from the first observation deck. 

The view across the river in Florence at night. 

The 'Wien Riesenrad' (Vienna's Giant Ferris Wheel) at the Prater at night. 

The 'back garden' at Sch�nbrunn Palace in Vienna. 

"Sound of Music" country. The film was made near here. 

Amsterdam -- My favourite houseboat on the canals. It's moored a few metres from Anne Frank's Huis. 

The Trippers Return

Hi All! I'm home! Finally! That last flight was hell. Not a bad flight in and of itself actually, but I wanted it to end after only 2 hours in as I was just sick of sitting and waiting to get here. I did buy a new book just before the flight though, so it wasn't sooo bad... and yes, Jasper Fforde's other series rocks too... go Jack Spratt! :-) We arrived in Calgary 35 minutes early, but YVR wasn't ready for us, so we had to sit there for about another 45 minutes... annoying! Anyway, we arrived in Vancouver ahead of schedule (yay!) and had no trouble getting through customs and getting our luggage. That was a relief. I kinda shopped my way around Europe, so I wasn't sure that would happen;-)
So far I've managed to have a relatively normal sleep schedule... well, normal for regular people. Today I woke up at 4am, then went back to sleep about 5 so I could sleep in... until 10. I was not impressed. Apparently my skill for record naps has disappeared. Oh well. I was really productive yesterday though. I got up at 6am and did 6 loads of laundry. No, it wasn't all from my suitcase, but I had other stuff in my room that needed divested of the dust from the floor finishing. Glad I missed that actually.
The night I arrived, we had a family dinner here and I managed to stay up until 10:30 or so. Not counting my half-hour nap on the plane, that was 24 1/2 hours awake since my 6am UK time alarm. So I guess I'm not doing too badly really. That night, I also downloaded all my pictures onto my computer. All 1500+ of them. Needless to say I have some organising to do. I don't even really have any to delete as I erased the crappy pictures as soon as I had taken them, but I have lots that will make no sense until I label them. Unfortunately, my computer hasn't been working right since I got home. I still can't download or send email from my normal programme (still doing webmail is annoying), but I have fixed some bits. I'm not in exactly the best thinking mode though, so I'm sure it's taking me longer than normal. It would be nice to think clearer soon as I still need to get organised for school this year, but I'm still unpacking so that will have to wait anyhow.

Leaving Ireland :-(

Well, our plane leaves for Gatwick in 6 hours. I'm just killing time waiting for Steph and Laura to get back to the hostel. We've left our stuff in the luggage room, and it's only open on the hour, so we're going to retrieve it at 2pm... 10 minutes to be precise. We're going to taxi to the airport as we have too many bags to really take the bus comfortably. We'll have lots of time at the airport, but we'd really rather be early than late. We packed last night so we could avoid it today, ate breakfast, then went to take the guided tour of Dublin Castle. It was neat, but I think the best part was the view of the garden from the castle. Celtic knots in grass:-) Then we split up as Laura wanted to go look at a skirt she'd been eyeing, and I wanted to go see Oscar Wilde's statue. It took me a while to find as I first went to St. Stephen's Green (only Joyce and Yeats are there, and I could really care less if I saw their statues). Wilde is up in Merrion Square, across from his childhood home. He is the only coloured statue in Dublin. All the rest are just bronze. My time's running out. See you all soon.

Ireland 2

Hi again. I've decided to procrastinate from packing by posting again. What a shock, eh? :-) Our first night in Dublin, I met up with some of the folks from the tour at the Arlington hotel for the free Irish dance and music show. It was awesome. The dancers performed (adapted) numbers from Riverdance and the band was great. I bought their CDs and they signed them. [Take that 'Cow-Tippers' ;-) ] We had a good night, except for the girl who had been pickpocketed on the way to the show. But we got her all sorted and she ended up having a good time in the end too.

Yesterday, we slept in, but did still manage to make it down to breakfast. The really hard part was moving after we had returned to our room. Actually after breakfast I walked down the street to the pharmacy because my knee was really bugging me and I foolishly didn't pack my knee brace;-) After I returned we were still really not energetic at all. So we went shopping:-) We ventured down to Temple Bar and then Grafton Street. Steph managed to find U2's hotel too, so she was happy:-) We had dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe (thanks Joe!), then wandered home.

Today we got up earlier, ate breakfast, then walked to St. Patrick's Cathedral to 'hop-on' the City Tour. Steph and Laura rode about 2 stops before getting off to tour the Guinness Storehouse. I stayed on and toured until we arrived at the Dublin Writers' Museum. It was really quite neat, but not the best laid out museum I've ever seen. Admission included an audioguide, but there was so much information posted on the walls that it took forever just to get through the three rooms of the museum (small but wordy:-) ). I shopped a bit in the gift store, then caught the bus over to Trinity College.

Trinity is cool. I took the student-led tour. It's only 30 minutes or so and costs €10, but includes the Book of Kells entrance fee too. Plus it comes with a really cute tour guide, so it's all worth it;-)

The book of Kells exhibition was very good, but very busy (though less so than it often is so I'm told). They have displays explaining its contrution and significance before you reach the actual book, but you need to jostle around people. See the actual book is much the same. They only display 4 pages from Kells as well as 2 from each the Books of Armagh and Dimma(?). They're in a table/display with a crowd so you need to wait/push there too. The pages are awesome... I do not have the patience for that type of detailed work though. Also cool was the long room upstairs. Apparently all students there can access the library, but as the books are all catalogued by size, they're a bit hard to find;-)

Anyway, I shopped at that gift shop too, caught the rest of the tour back to St. Pat's and met Steph and Laura at the Hostel. We lazed for a while before going out to dinner, then coming back to pack... so I should go. Ta ta!

Ireland!

Failte!
We've been in Ireland for several days now. We finished our Cornwall tour (very cool), got our extra luggage from Victoria Station, and hopped on the Gatwick Express to the airport. When we arrived we checked-in and went to check our 'extra' luggage at the left luggage counter... but they were full. Aargh! They really could have a sign saying that. The guy was totally unhelpful. I had to ask if there was another counter? How far? etc. Apparently he was not capable of forming sentences without prompting. Stupid people really are everywhere. Anyway, we managed to check the big suitcase onto the flight, but it cost us. RyanAir is really cheap and only allows 15kg of luggage. I think they're like the car companies are really just make their money off the extra you have to pay afterwards;-) Anyway, the flight was fine and we caught a taxi to the hostel. We were in a 4-bed and managed to wake up the other girl when we arrived, but we managed to shuffle about in the dark and crash... it wasn't even really that late, about 11, but it turned out she was going on the other Shamrocker tour leaving the next morning so had crashed early.

We got up the next morning and went down to checkin for the tour. The girl doing check-in was our tour guide. Her name was Laura... and appropriately enough was fond of alt music and piercings:-) We had a great tour. We went all over Ireland and though we didn't really have enough time to see things very thoroughly, we knew that would happen anyway and now know where we need to come back to.

Last night we arrived back in Dublin and taxied with all our multiple bags to our new hostel. It's very nice. We finally have an ensuite again so we can do laundry! I never thought clean socks would be such a priority, but I even bought a pair of Guinness ones yesterday so I'd have a pair to wear, so I need to get scrubbing soon:-) We all have some new clothes that we've been almost saving for now, but it will make packing a bit more difficult. My third, 'extra' bag was in use a long time ago, but Laura says she'll have lots of extra room in her suitcase if she just carries on her sleeping bag, so I may have to rent that out;-) Last night I went out with some people from the tour. The Arlington Hotel near the river has free Irish music and dancing every night, so we all went down to see. It was fabulous! The dancers did numbers that were basically from Riverdance and the trio was amazing. It's so cool to see musicians just change instruments all the time. I swear they all played at least 3 each. They even played the drinking song that our tour guide had taught us all, so we could even join in the sing along. We were even all warmed up from the Karaoke we did on the bus back into Dublin:-) They have the shows every night, so I'll probably drag Steph and Laur there later this week. They were really tired so they stayed in and slept.

I have to admit, there's not a whole lot that I REALLY want to do in Dublin. Just see Trinity College and the Book of Kells, so it's really nice to not feel like I need to be rushing around doing things. That's not very Irish anyway from what I've seen. People here are very laid back... like at home... but they drink more;-) Anyway, I need to go plan I suppose, so I'll sign off. This may be my last post from 'across the pond', depending on timing, etc. so I guess I should say 'thanks for reading'. I'm planning to post more about the stuff I've skipped, but I may just need to overcome the jetlag first:-) See you all soon!

Tour number 2

Hiya,
We left London a few days ago and are on our Haggis tour of Cornwall. Tonight we're in Bath.
Our last couple of days in London were fairly productive. We went/saw Harrod's, Hard Rock Cafe (closed due to fire), London Eye, Big Ben, St. Paul's, Camden Market, and other things. I also spent and afternoon (and too much money) at the Globe. Great!

The new tour is great. It's a lot like a fast forward family road trip. Drive for an hour, see a site. Drive another hour; different site. We've seen tons for just a few days. Today we left Newquay and went to Tintagel to see the ruins. Our tour guide Cai and some of our tourmates reenacted King Arthur's legend on top of a cliff. It was great!!! We couldn't stop laughing and it made for some great pictures. Then we went to a Cider factory and drove up and down Cheddar Gorge. We arrived about 7 in Bath and went for dinner. We have tomorrow morning to look around town, so I'm planning to go to the Jane Austen Centre:-) I'm sure I'll get great stuff for teaching Pride and Prejudice next year;-)

Off to Dublin tomorrow night too, so I'll post from there... I think:-) TTFN