London!
This past week we had our first houseguest and we went on our first trip outside of Ireland. Hopefully the first of many on both counts!
Our dear friend Lauren, currently traveling the world, came to hang out with us for a week, and it was awesome to see someone from home, even if she hasn’t been ‘home’ in four months. The three of us went to Blarney Castle and took advantage of fantastic weather to explore the castle and grounds, climb some trees, and of course kiss the Blarney Stone.
Lauren needed to be in London eventually to catch her flight to Egypt, so we decided to accompany her in that direction and the three of us got to experience London together for a few days.
Since we had plenty of time, we chose to take a train/ferry combination on the way there. It all worked out rather well, but was an adventure. We called the ferry place a few days ahead, but were told we could only buy the ferry and train combo ticket (from Dublin to London) at the ferry terminal. We just had to show up an hour before the ferry was scheduled to leave. The actual journey consisted of:
- driving from our house to the train station in Cork
- finding a place we could park our car for four days
- going to pay for the aforementioned four days’ worth of parking and discovering I’d left my wallet at the house
- driving back to the house, in rather a hurry, finding the wallet, and making it back to the train station in time to catch our train to Dublin
- an uneventful three hours on the train from Cork to Dublin, arriving at 1:20 pm
- a taxi from the Dublin train station to the ferry port, slightly worried because the ferry was going to leave at 2:30 and we certainly were not going to be there an hour ahead
- arriving at the ferry terminal, and getting our tickets with no problems at all. Hurray!
- two hours on the ferry, arriving at Holyhead in Wales.
- our schedule said we would have about 45 minutes at the ferry terminal to wait for our train, but when we asked the staff there, we were told the train was leaving in six minutes. So we hopped on that one, which was quite full and we ended up beside a rather boisterous couple and their two small children.
- …except this train wasn’t taking us all the way to London. We had to switch, and then take the second train to the next stop, and then switch again. So three trains later, we finally arrived in London! We actually ended up there half an hour earlier than the train that we had expected to take, and probably with more stories to tell, too!
- found our hostel quite easily, got some dinner, watched The Lion King in the hostel common room, and went to bed!
Unfortunately I have yet to be convinced of the merits of hostels, ‘cause this one wasn’t great. It was rather smelly, and when there are twelve people sleeping in the same room (especially when most of those people are male), it’s a little noisy. Neither Lauren nor I slept much the first night, but the second was better. And Lauren in her wonderfulness booked us a night at the Sheraton by Heathrow airport for night #3, since she had to catch a 9 am flight. Those big comfy beds were sure appreciated!
On our first day in London we took a NewEurope walking tour, which was awesome. Lauren and I did one in Berlin four years ago, and we highly recommend them. We thought about going to a show, but didn’t end up finding the tickets we wanted (that is, really cheap ones). Instead, we met up with one of Lauren’s friends after she finished work. After that, we accidentally found The Maple Leaf pub, a supposedly Canadian bar that we had heard about but not bothered to find out exactly where it was. As a place to hang out, have a drink and some food, and chat, it’s a great place. As a representation of Canada, it was rather disappointing. There was hockey on TV, but it was a Pittsburgh-Philly game. The wine list consisted of wines from Italy, France, South America, South Africa and Australia, but nothing from the Okanagan or Niagara. And our nachos were typical UK nachos, which are Doritos with cheese sauce instead of tortilla chips with real cheese. But we suffered through our disappointment, shared some Italian wine and stayed quite late having deep philosophical discussions.
The next day we got started a bit later, checked out of the hostel and moved our stuff to the hotel at the airport. This took rather longer than we expected, since it’s an hour on the Underground from the center of London out to Heathrow. We’d kind of skipped breakfast, and it was pretty much lunch time by the time we got back into town. Lauren took us to Camden Market, a labyrinth of little stalls and shops and food (hurray!) from all over the world. We had some fantastic Indian food, and wandered through the market for a couple of hours. It started raining as we left, so we took the Tube to Knightsbridge and, like all poor travelers must, explored the riches of Harrods. I expected to feel out of place but the store is really more of a tourist attraction than a place where people actually buy things. I’m sure most of the people who walk through the doors don’t buy anything. Plus, judging by the cars parked outside of the Private Entrance, I’m sure the people who actually do shop there more than make up for those of us who simply wander through.
We were supposed to meet another of Lauren’s friends that night, so we went out to an area called Acton that we wouldn’t have thought about going to otherwise. We didn’t actually manage to meet her friends, since we left before they arrived, but we did discover another neat pub and had some good food and drinks.
Lauren left early the next morning, and Chris and I unfortunately ended up spending the rest of our last day in London trying to find somewhere to print our boarding passes for our flight. RyanAir requires that you check in online, including submitting passport numbers, which are then printed out on your boarding pass. I had done this at the hotel the night before, but I had made a mistake on my passport number. Since I didn’t want to be pulled into the security office for trying to fly with a fake passport or something, I wanted to fix my error. Unfortunately you can’t just fix it online, you have to call their call center, and then re-print your pass. We called when we got back into London the morning of our flight, but we were apparently not in a part of town that had a lot of internet cafes, so it took us a while to find somewhere to re-print. Anyway, there are still lots of things that we want to see and do in London that we didn’t get to on this trip. We’ll just have to go back!
