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diff --git a/_drafts/mr-worldwide-pt-1-europe.md b/_drafts/mr-worldwide-pt-1-europe.md index a75122c..2ef584a 100644 --- a/_drafts/mr-worldwide-pt-1-europe.md +++ b/_drafts/mr-worldwide-pt-1-europe.md @@ -264,7 +264,7 @@ so. After Bruges I took a bus back to Brussels, where I hung out for a while waiting for my next bus which would take me across the pond. -## London, UK +## London, England Getting to London was honestly one of the most exciting parts of that trip. The Channel Tunnel, or "Chunnel", runs from France, underneath the English Channel, @@ -320,3 +320,39 @@ me. The museums were insanely crowded, with everyone pushing over themselves to fill out their selfie-with-famous-objects-bingo-cards; my hostel was weird (all of my hostels in the UK were weird, in fact; more on that in Ireland); and everything was quite expensive. I wasn't too sad to leave. + +## Dublin, Ireland + +My bus dropped me off at a small ferry terminal in Holyhead, a town in Wales. +From there I took the couple-hour ferry ride to Dublin. + +I spent only a couple of days in Dublin, but one of those days I struggled to be +a living human while fighting off the flu. I still managed to walk down to +Trinity College to see The Book of Kells and the college library's Long Room, +but the memory of it is fuzzy. I'm sure I looked as dead as the people who wrote +those books. + +That day I mostly hung out at the hostel. Hostels in the UK have a very +different atmosphere than everywhere else; there's a fairly bad housing crisis +occurring in most major cities (like the three I went to), and often it's +cheaper to live in a hostel than to rent an apartment. So the hostels I stayed +in were filled with people who'd been there for months, some of them working, +others trying to find work, others just lounging. But the dichotomy between +people who were just passing through and people who were there long term made it +a less than stellar experience. The long-term residents all knew each other and +formed cliques, and generally took up the common spaces, so if you weren't +already traveling with others (like me) it was pretty easy to feel excluded. + +On the second day I decided to go on a day trip out of Dublin. The city was +neat, but I wasn't finding all that much I wanted to do inside of it. I found a +bus company which did day trips to Glendalough, a valley which holds +the ruins of a 6th century monastary, a beautiful lake, many hiking trails, and +some sheep. I spent the day hiking, wandering around the ruins, and escaping an +incoming snow storm. By the end of it all my sickness from the previous day was +completely gone, and I slept the whole bus ride back. + +## Edinburgh, Scotland + +I left Dublin just as the Beast from the East made landfall. A giant cold wave +brought in tons of snow and unseasonably low temperatures, stretching all across +Europe. |