A Hostel, the Tube, and a Date with Ewen

With so many things to see and do here, it now comes as no surprise that we have only a little over a week left in Dublin. Our summer away is now almost over. Several people who read our posts have commented on the length and breadth of the detail with which I describe our many adventures. It is not the first time in my life that I have been told that I am a little, shall we say, "verbose". (That’s right Cornwell, I’m talking to you!). I choose to explain myself in many words for several reasons. First, as some of you are aware, the stories I tell in real life are no less brief than the ones I post here. I suppose there is the possibility, however slight, that I have a difficult time choosing which parts and pieces could be left out without ruining the effect of the story and so I choose to leave all of them in there just in case. And, as I reflect here (adding even MORE words to what will already be a lengthy post, I sit back and enjoy the fact that I am writing even more for you all to read! Ha.)….you get the point. I like the details, and so you will get them too. Now on with the story.

Amy’s parents made it back safe and sound to Dallas. The next three days were errand days. I had to do laundry and clean up the apartment before we left for the weekend. I have also been working on a fictional book I started during the last part of my graduate program and so spent some time Thursday and Friday to do some writing.

Friday afternoon I packed and had dinner ready when Amy got home from work. She packed and ate dinner and we headed to the airport that evening to catch our late flight to London. For those of you who have ever flown into London, you know that this city has several major airports. Unfortunately, ours was not one of them. We opted for the cheaper airfare, and consequently had to fly into Stansted Airport which is an hour trainride outside of London. Our flight was over an hour delayed and so when landed in London at approximately midnight instead of the supposed 10:45. We had gotten lucky and the attendant who checked us into our flight in Dublin let us carry on our big backpacks, so we didn’t have to wait for our luggage in the baggage claim. We scooted our butts down to the train area as fast as possible. If I haven’t made this abundantly clear already in other posts I will do so here – Amy is the best navigator ever. EVER. Even though she’s never been to this airport her internal radar was beeping anytime we started to make a wrong turn, and in no time flat, we found ourselves sitting on the last train of the evening to go into London from the airport about 10 minutes before departure.

We rode the approximately 45 minute train into Liverpool Station in London and we perplexed to find that the Tube (their name for the subway) had already closed. I mean come on! It was ONLY 1:30am Saturday morning. So we did the next best thing. We started walking. We knew the general vicinity in which our hostel was located and went in that direction. Amy had several maps out and was on the hunt again. We walked about a half mile or so carrying our huge camping backpacks, and then flagged down a taxi. We were both very tired (particularly Amy who does not have the luxury I do of sleeping in until 8:30 [edit by Amy: Come on folks. Does anyone believe he gets up at 8:30? I didn’t think so.] during the week. I really do feel bad about this, but not bad enough to deprive myself of sleep just so I will be tired too.) We arrived a few minutes later and checked in. This hostel was not what I had pictured. I thought it was going to be a sort-of dumpy looking place with a bunch of pent-up raggedy teenagers running around. It was more of a run down motel/bar/club. The house music was pumping. People were dancing and drinking and having a good ole’ time. We purchased earplugs from the "concierge" and made our way upstairs. By this time it is around 2:30am. We found our room, and to our surprise, the other six people with whom we were sharing this room were already in bed asleep. We crawled into our respective bunk beds (this is the first time I’ve slept in the same room as my wife but not been in bed with my wife) and hastily passed out. We got up the next morning, had some of the free toast and cereal and made our way out into London.

Not to let her directional prowess go unused we found the nearest Underground Tube Station and headed in the direction of Buckingham Palace. We walked slowly through the park next door to the palace thick with huge, old trees. Then we walked out from under the canopy of leaves, and BAM, there was the palace. It is huge. We didn’t take the tour or anything, but this place is not a shack. We stood in a large courtyard next to the palace to wait until 11:27am for the "Changing of the Guard". There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people in this area, and many police to keep us all in line, some of whom were on horseback. Right on time, the ceremony occurred; complete with two smallish marching bands and their own police escorts. (Why the Palace Guards would need guarding I don’t know, but they were.) Before the ceremony was completely over, we headed out back across the park, and to the Tube station.
As an addendum, if I had been alone and had been forced to navigate the subway by myself for the weekend (particularly when you consider the fact that several service lines aren’t running right now because of the bombing early in July) I would still be wandering those dark corridors even now. Thankfully that isn’t the case and the story can continue.

We made it to the Central London Theater District and found some lunch. We walked around for awhile afterwards looking for cheap tickets to another show, and not finding any that we wanted, and then walked a few more blocks to Trafalgar Square. That was a cool place. We got some really good pictures there. We then headed to Picadilly Theater a few more blocks away to see Guys and Dolls starring Amy’s boyfriend/heart throb, Ewan McGregor. She told me at one point right after the show that she wanted to get up on stage with him and do a duet of one of the songs from Moulin Rouge. To this I replied that if that ever happened I would end up wifeless. She assured me with a wink that my assumption was unfounded. Guys and Dolls was really terrific. The music was great. The acting was great. The girls were great. And even Ewan McGregor (now my arch-nemesis) was great too.

By this time it was late in the afternoon on Saturday and we stopped in a couple of clothing stores on our way back to a Tube station. I made the mistake of looking in the front window of a men’s suit boutique called Ciro Cinatarrio boasting that they were having the best sale in the history of the world. I went downstairs and was dumbfounded to find that they actually had great suits for good prices, and to make matters worse, they actually had my size in a couple of them. I tried two on, debated on it for a few minutes, then let Amy talk me into the purchase. I got a great black pinstripe suit for 79Pound, or about $140 US. I can’t usually even find the low end plain-blue suit at JCPenney’s for less than $225, so I was very happy. We went back to the hostel to shower and remembered that we hadn’t brought towels. After a few seconds we decided it was better to shower and use t-shirts to dry off with than remain smelly and sweaty. Damp, but now clean, we headed out to Covent Gardens for the evening. This is an area of shops, pubs, clubs, and restaurants. We had purchased one all-day ticket on the Tube and had definitely gotten our money’s- worth out of them. We had dinner in an outdoor restaurant on a huge courtyard that was host to some event for the Rescue Boat Association, which appeared to be some sort of combination of something like the US Coast Guard and AAA, rescuing people from sinking boats or accidents. A young rock band called Even9 was singing and playing their hearts out at an elevated volume. After food and drink, our previous night’s lack of sleep was catching up with us and we headed back to the hostel for an early night.

The next morning we got up, packed our things, and headed for the Imperial War Museum. We were lugging our heavy bags again (not for sympathy, but for the record, Amy’s bag was at least a good 30 pounds, and mine was probably close to 60) and I was sweaty again by the time we arrived, but was past caring. We wandered around in the huge museum for about 2 hours, and left feeling a little bit depressed. The museum has excellent exhibits of all the major wars that England has been involved in, and additional exhibits of the Holocaust and a tribute to how children were effected and treated during the wars. Tragic. We were both felt sad and heavy as we left the museum.

We then took the Tube across town to check into our hotel. We had gotten the night in the hotel as a package deal with the Guys and Dolls tickets. It had been a long walk to the War museum and back and was then also quite a walk from the closest Tube station to the hotel and we were dragging a little bit as we checked in, and it was only noon. We dropped off our things, changed into clean shirts, and headed out for Westminster Abbey, the English Parliament building and Big Ben. It was very crowded and the tours were quite pricey and neither of us felt like wasting a lot of time standing in lines, so we walked around taking pictures. At one point, we were crossing Westminster Bridge and asked a guy to take our picture. He happened to be an Asian fellow. He gladly took our picture, but his friend gestured that he wanted to have a picture taken of himself and Amy. Amy was a little weirded out by his request, but she smiled uncomfortably anyway and the picture was complete, and we went to find lunch. We had some great Japanese noodles and then strolled over to the London Eye, which just happens to be the biggest wheel anywhere in the world. It is a huge Ferris Wheel, which at it’s apex, measures 457 feet above the ground. This time we paid the exorbitant fee of 12Pound apiece and got in line. It was worth it. We got a phenomenal view of the city and captured some more great photos, and it was pretty fun ride to be up so high.

It was approaching 4pm and we got to London Tower as fast as we were able only to find out that we had already missed the last tour of the day and were just simply running out of time to be able to come back the next day. London Tower is a large castle built around 1000A.D. From here we also had a great view of the Tower Bridge (see picture). So we walked back to the Tube and went back to the hotel. We ate dinner at a great Italian restaurant around the corner from the hotel and took another long walk through Kensington Gardens which is a HUGE park area in the middle of the city, not unlike Central Park in NYC. Even after dinner there were still many people walking, running, biking, playing soccer, laying in the grass, feeding swans, and making out in the grass.

We slept well that evening, got up, packed our crap, had a big free breakfast, and went back across London to the Tate Modern. This is a large London gallery of modern art. There was some good stuff there and while Amy and I appreciate the effort with which these pieces were crafted, we don’t always have the highest tolerance for what appears to be random splashes of paint, twists of metal, or piles of what appear to be trash. I don’t say this to diss on the artists out there, just to inform you of our limited palate for modern art. We left our enormous backpacks at the museum coat closet and snuck out to go see Anchor Pub which was just down the street a half-mile or so. Anchor Pub is the bar where Tom Cruise sits for a drink at the end of Mission Impossible 2. We heard that it was close and thought it would be worth a brief visit. We then walked back to the Tate, picked up our backpacks and walked about another half-mile across the Millenium Bridge which is a pedestrian footbridge across the River Thames to reach St. Paul’s Cathedral. I guess I have sort of a problem with paying the US equivalent of $30 to see the inside of a church. We walked in, discovered the price, and promptly walked back out satisfied to get a picture of the outside and say we’d been there. We hopped in a cab and headed back to our original Tube stop – Liverpool Station. We boarded our train and headed for Stansted Airport. An hour later, we arrived, checked in for our flight, had a nice lunch, boarded our plane and came back to Dublin.

Amy and I discussed yesterday that we are very glad to have been able to visit all these amazing cities, but that neither of us really feel like we’ll ever have to come back to them again. Perhaps we’ll feel differently about Paris next week after we’ve been there, but it seems that Amy and I are Americans through and through (and proud of it!). We decided that we would much rather be lounging once again on a large cruise ship, somewhere that has more beach than subway, and more sun than cloud. We still have plans to someday come back and spend several weeks exploring Italy, and perhaps also return to see more of the northern European countries like Germany, Norway, Austria, and Switzerland as well. We are very excited about seeing Paris next weekend, Friday, August 5, 2005 being our 5th wedding anniversary. After that, we are also excited about returning to Dallas for 3 days for a friend’s wedding, and Seattle for a few weeks before what will Lord-willing be our last cross-country move back to Texas. It is going to be a blur, but we’ll try our best to stay "in the moment" these last few days in Ireland and France.

I hope I haven’t bored all of you with my minute-by-minute play of our trip. I hope that some of it was enjoyable to follow along with. I wrote it for those of you who wanted to read of our exploits, but in honesty, I also wrote it for Amy and for myself, as I know that I would quickly lose track of all the things, places, and people we’ve seen over the last few weeks. I never thought that I would have been able to make a trip here like I have. I thank God for it. I have seen parts of the world I never thought I would see outside of a textbook. It has been really cool. Next week will be my last post from Ireland. I bid you all a fond farewell until then.