Galway Girl

Hello from Ireland! I decided to take a solo trip to Ireland in the dead weekend between final papers last week and final exams this week/next week. Although traveling solo can be lonely, especially at first, I’ve had an incredible time in Ireland and I would highly recommend traveling alone. I get to do what I want, see what I want, eat what I want, go anywhere I want, whenever I want.

I feel that many women in particular don’t want to travel alone (especially Americans), for valid safety concerns, but you just have to be smart about it. Stick in groups, avoid places or people that make you uncomfortable, make friends in your hostel, and have a solid plan of what to do, where to stay, and how to get from point A to point B. Most of the people I’ve met in my hostels this weekend have actually been solo female travelers (mostly Australians, who are always two steps ahead in the global citizen game, anyway), which forms an immediate bond and is refreshing to see women pursuing their passion for travel. I read lots of blogs from solo female travelers and have recently been into the podcast “Women Who Travel.” Check it out! And here’s what I was up to this weekend!

Dublin

I flew into Dublin on Friday morning, April 20th, and spent about six hours wandering around the west side of Dublin before I caught a train to Galway city across the country. I had a lovely Irish breakfast that morning at a hip café called Wuff, then wandered around to Christchurch Cathedral and Dublin Castle. Dublin Castle is not much of a castle anymore, since only one round tower still exists from the original medieval structure, but over the centuries it has been rebuilt to its current conglomeration of Medieval, Georgian, and Neo-Gothic architecture. I didn’t pay to go inside, because it’s pretty enough to just walk around and also pop inside the (free) neighboring Chester Beatty Library, which houses a collection of rare Islamic, East Asian, and early Christian books and prints.

The main event of the day was the Guinness Storehouse tour. The inside of the building is seven stories tall and shaped like a pint glass — “the largest pint glass in the world.” Although the tour is a little gimmicky, as you’d expect, it was definitely fun and I really enjoyed learning how Guinness is brewed differently than other beers and seeing all the Guinness advertising through the years, and, of course, the 360 degree bar at the top. Wish my dad could’ve been there, so we could’ve clinked our pint glasses and said “Sláinte!”

I’ll get to my day and a half in Galway down below, but I’ll finish up Dublin with what I did when I came back on Sunday, April 22nd. I visited the National Museum of Ireland, which houses natural history, archaeology, and history. I loved all the Viking history, especially the exhibit on two-thousand-year-old mummified Vikings as well as the “treasury” of old gold jewelry. I then walked over to St. Stephen’s Green, a beautiful small park. Most of the day was spent wandering the beautiful streets of Dublin, including walking over the two-hundred-year-old Ha’Penny pedestrian bridge. It’s such a walkable, friendly city.

I stayed in Isaac’s Hostel on Sunday night, a beautiful old converted stone building where I met some really cool Canadian girls in my room. We did a pub crawl that night in Dublin’s Temple Bar district. By the way, apparently everyone thinks that Temple Bar is an actual bar. It’s not, it’s the name of the neighborhood. The red “Temple Bar” pub everyone takes pictures of is actually just a regular bar that changed their name ten years ago to capitalize on the tourism and to piss off all the other pubs. There are much better pubs in the Temple Bar area than that one, such as Mezzo, Badbobs, and the Old Storehouse. I also met a dude on the pub crawl from OSU! Small world.

On Monday, I took a free walking tour with the hostel where our guide told us about the history of Christchurch Cathedral (oddly enough, Protestant), Dublin Castle, the Spire, Ha’Penny Bridge (it used to cost “half a penny” to cross it), Dublin’s struggles for independence, and what Brexit means for them. Will a referendum be held to unite the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland?? Who knows. Britain didn’t seem to think the border issue through before voting to Brexit.

My very favorite thing in Dublin, though, was the Long Room at Trinity College. This is one of the most famous libraries in the world, holding 200,000 rare books stacked bottom shelf to top shelf from largest to smallest. Oddly enough you might recognize it as the Jedi Archives from Star Wars Episode II. The exhibit in the library is for the Book of Kells, a Latin Christian text of the four Gospels, written by monks in Scotland in the 9th century. It’s written on sheets of leather “paper” with inks from all over the world, and saved from Viking raids by being safely kept in Kells, Ireland, before being transferred to the even safer site of Trinity College. The exhibit ends and then you walk up the stairs to the Long Room, where I just about cried. I’ll be melodramatic and say that literature is such an incredible example of human achievement. But it really is.  

Milton!

Swift!

Shakespeare!

Overall, I loved Dublin and I felt like I was in Once with all the cute guys playing guitar on the street corners. The best part of Ireland, however, was the picturesque countryside, small villages, and magnificent Cliffs of Moher. If Scotland is the Misty Mountains, Ireland is the Shire.

Galway and the Cliffs of Moher

So in between my bookended Dublin weekend, I spent Friday night and all of Saturday in Galway City. Usually, people typically book a day trip from Dublin to the Cliffs of Moher (with an hour stop in Galway), but that’s a 10-hour round trip and I wanted more time there than that. Plus, all my friends who’ve been here said they wish they could’ve spent longer in Galway. The train I took from Dublin to Galway passed some of the most pleasant and idyllic scenery I’ve ever seen. Rolling green hills full of sheep, cows, and horses sped by, along with miles and miles of low stone walls.

Galway is ADORABLE. It’s the fifth-largest city in Ireland, after Dublin, Belfast, Cork, and Limerick. But “fifth-largest” is only about 80,000 people, with 20% of that being students. It feels a bit like a sleepy fishing village during the day, but the student population turns it into a major party town at night. The main street has an incredible nighttime energy. I’d much rather come to Galway than Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day! There aren’t many daytime “activities” per say in Galway, so Friday evening I mostly wandered around the town and the harbor and had a really delicious Irish pot pie at The Pie Maker.

Saturday was the tour of the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren with my hostel via the Galway Tour Company. The guide was a very friendly, funny, heavily-accented Irishman who kept me entertained and stopped at every castle we passed (a lot), including a tiny leprechaun church, which was only six feet tall! We drove through more countryside, the landscape getting hillier through the burren as we drove past pristine white houses dotting the countryside. We also stopped by a Neolithic tomb called Poulnabrone Dolmen, a freestanding stone structure where over 30 5,000-year-old bodies have been found. Also, off the coast I could see the Aran Islands, but from my guide’s accent I thought he said the “Iron Islands” like in Game of Thrones — but I’ll take it, because they just as well could be. What is dead may never die!  

The Cliffs of Moher, of course, were indescribable. Jutting 500 feet out of the Atlantic Ocean, I stood on the cliffside thinking about how once this was thought to be the edge of the world. I spent an hour and a half there but you could easily spend half a day if you wanted to hike the 14 km path along the edge. Eventually we made our way back to Galway, where I watched the sunset over the harbor with a Guinness in my hand and Irish music playing from a pub in the background. Oh, how I wish I were a Galway girl!