Easter Travels or How I Distracted Myself From Not Being Able to Eat Chocolate for Fourty Days

I just (as in two days ago) got back from a 10-day trip to Ireland, Paris and London, that involved a little bit of everything and was therefore both extremely fun and extremely tricky to pack for. I think it finally got through to me exactly how valuable light packing really is. For my travels this summer, it's going to be two tank tops and a pair of shorts, I swear. And no underwear. Underwear is for losers.

Okay, all slightly disgusting kidding aside, it really was an amazing trip. I started off doing to Downhill Hostel with Anna, one of the other exchange students from Carleton. We spent a couple of days hiking around in the beautiful spring weather, getting our shoes very muddy, cooing at the fluffy frolicking little lambs, and taking an excess of pictures of the gorgeous countryside. We spent the evenings at the hostel, chatting with the owners William and McCall, playing Scrabble, drinking the local whiskey, and having a vaguely wholesome good time. The hostel was incredible: hardwood floors, stained glass windows, a view of the ocean from our dorm room... definitely the most beautiful hostel I've ever been to. It should be an expensive hotel, but the owners used to be backpackers themselves, and they love the backpacking culture. The result? £10 a night lets you stay in one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.


Friday evening we took the bus down to Dublin, since both Anna and I have friends there, and managed to cram an amazing pub/club/bar crawl into our six hours in town. The best part was the incredible bar Anna insisted we go to, that had a tiny dance floor with a great DJ, and the best cocktails I've ever had in my life. They make a mojito to die for, seriously.


For the rest of the pictures of our Ireland adventures go here and here.

The next stop was Paris, where I arrived on very little... okay... NO sleep, around 10 in the morning. I was spending four days with my friend Luc (also from Carleton) who's on exchange to the Sciences Po university there, basically sleeping on his floor for free because I'm a professional moocher, and seeing a little more of gay Paris. The weather was exquisite the whole time I was there, so it was sort of a toss-up between basking in the sun and going into museums, but we struck a pretty good balance I think. I got to see some of the stuff I really wanted to but hadn't gotten around to on previous trips: the Sainte-Chapelle, the Rodin museum, and the inside of St. Sulpice, to name a few. In the evenings we cooked elaborate meals in his tiny flat, drank a lot of really good red wine (like the bottle of Chateau Neuf des Papes that we got for 11 euro at the grocery store!) and had long conversations about everything we'd seen during the day. Luc is the only person I could have a 45 minute conversation with about the socio-linguistic implications of the use of the word "actually." It was awesome.


The rest of the pictures are here. I really hope you like statuary.

On Tuesday night (that's April 3rd, I think) I took an overnight bus to London. It seemed like a really good idea at the time. Only cost 35 euro, and I would save the cost of a night of accommodation as well. Turns out I was terribly, terribly wrong. Okay, it wasn't actually that bad, it just resulted in another sleepless night and another period of 40-hours-awake, which definitely take their toll. The problem with the bus was 1) I was sitting in front of the chattiest old British couple in the universe, who just never shut up, and 2) they made us get off and on various times, for customs, to get on the ferry (which was inexplicably FULL of teenagers at 3 in the morning), etc. By the time I arrived in London (and hour and a half late) I was dead to the world. When a creepy guy followed me out of bus station and told me that I was beautiful (I was actually dirty, tired, rumpled, make-up-less and very grumpy) I thought I'd hit my breaking point. Fortunately a lovely vegan breakfast at this great diner called Eat and Two Veg, and the presence of Jessie's parents, managed to pull me out of my fug and put me in the mood for some sight-seeing. On Wednesday and Thursday we visited (and climbed) St. Paul's, saw the changing of the guard and the Rubens ceiling at Whitehall, went shopping in Harrods, on Old Bond Street and on Oxford Street, and enjoyed some of the loveliest, sunniest weather. They left Thursday evening to go join Jessie in Tanzania, but slightly later that day Helen arrived for phase two of my London trip. We visited the National Gallery and the Tate Modern, shopped in a few too many bookstores (Helen is one of the few people I know who will tolerate and even match my obsession with bookstores), and experienced the London nightlife in all its sweaty, crowded glory. We got an average of no sleep per night, though our hostel was quite central and full of very friendly people, and by the time we got on our evening train back to Edinburgh, we were pretty much dead to the world.


The rest of the pictures of London are here.

Well, that was pretty much it for Easter, except for the incredible Easter Feaster we had on Sunday (we meaning me, Darcy, Helen, and a group of Canadians who dominated the conversation entirely with Canadian-type stuff like canoes and Stan Rogers and Quebec). Edinburgh is in the throes of a gorgeous spring, and I am either still exhausted from my trip or coming down with something, because I cannot seem to make myself wake up before noon to enjoy all this amazing weather! It's actually time to start revising - well, it was time to start yesterday, or this morning. But it's really REALLY time now. So I'm going to go read some Nietzsche and dream of travels to come.