Ireland Day 1

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Another Christmas abroad, another reason to update Xanga! I'll be using it as a travel diary again as I did last year in Copenhagen. Em and I just arrived in Howth, a "suburb" of Dublin where Mom and Dad live in a nice cozy apartment overlooking the sea and two islands. Beach front property, you can actually hear the waves crashing. I suspect jetlag will soon catch up with me, we left Atlanta around 9:30p.m. flew for about 7 hours, and thanks to the magic of timezones, landed at about 9:30a.m. Ireland is 5 hours off the eastern coast. The actual flight was pretty smooth, no real troubles except for my inability to sleep on airplanes. The inflight movies were Stardust, which was awesome, and Mr. Bean's Holiday, which I tried to sleep through. I love Rowan Atkinson, but a full length Mr. Bean feature is just too much. The lighting in the apartment is super screwy. There are "zones" and every switch is located in the hallway. IF you are in the kitchen and it's dark, you have to go to the hallway, push the knob for kitchen, then flip the switch. Goofy. The shower has a temperature gauge though, that's pretty neat. That's it for now, more updates if the family does something today. I should probably nap... Update! I took a nice 4 hour nap around noon and was ready to walk around the harbor with Mom and Em. It is a pretty quaint town, their claim to fame is fish. Fish N Chips shops, fish mongers, fish markets, fish processing plants, fish whatever, they have it. At the end of one of the stone piers, and I got a huge kick out of this, were two footprints chiseled into the stone. Apparently it is King George the 4th's foot prints, but you would never know. No plaque, no ropes, no nuthin. Just random chiseled feet. (Mine are bigger!) After getting some awesome fish n chips we head back to the apartment and started watching TV. We found a program that showed the video of the best song of the Christmas season from 1977-2007...we couldn't get through all of it, just too terrible so we started watching Challenge, the game show network here. British Who Wants to be a Millionaire was hilarious, the host was much funnier than Regis or the girl and the contestants don't put up with the suspense crap. Since I'm on the subject of TV, I made an attempt to watch a Cricket match earlier in the day, and while intrigued, I had no idea what was going on. Crazy game. That just about sums up the first day in Ireland, who knows what tomorrow will bring, but I suspect a ton of walking, just like in Copenhagen.