Christmas Party

Our Xmas party was at a hotel kinda near my house...it was nice! We had minced pies and mulled wine (amazing!) as appetizers and a three course meal followed by a horrible BeeGee tribute band and dancing. My supervisor Linda bought me a Guiness too...turns out it is a horrible idea to mix Guiness and wine. Ask Lizard and Stacey about my hangover the next morning :( Here are some pics:


Me, Kay, Aileen, Mary, Louise, and Rebeccah. As you can see the good times crowd (not!)


Me and the lead singer of the "BeeGees...." The funny thing was that before the dinner this guy was roaming around the lobby being all creepy, hitting on ladies and whatnot. Our manager actually complained about him to security...but turns out he was in the band! Woops!

Linda, Aileen, me and Rebeccah by the tree.

Me and my supervisor Linda.

All the OT's and OTAs at Connolly Hospital waiting for the festivities to begin.

Belfast

So I've been busy and haven't updated lately...these pics are from a couple weeks ago already!







These were both taken at Belfast Castle. Its really nice...up on a hill so you can have a nice view of the city!

Foolin around outside the castle front...turns out there was a wedding going on so the poor unsuspecting guests in the background loved us I'm sure :)

Who brought this kid? For some reason the mother of the duke who designed the castle was in love with cats, so there are something like 16 around the castle grounds.

Queen's College in Belfast. It is famous for its Gothic architecture. Very impressive!

There are murals painted all over Belfast...mostly political in nature. We drove around for about an hour looking at and finding them. Very interesting and well done.

Here's one for ya "America's Greatest Failure." I agree!

We went to this cute international festival in front of the capital building.

I think this called the eye of Belfast...anyway we rode it and saw the city from the air! Twas fun. Also, as a side note, while we were standing in line Lizard said "guess which number car we're going to be on" (1-41) I guessed 12 and was totally right! pretty much the coolest thing ever.

Giant's Causeway (northern Ireland)

So my friend Elizabeth (Lizard) came to visit me! So awesome because we were talking on my birthday last week and figured out she should just come here already...so she did! Two days later nonetheless! I'm so excited because she also talked my other friend Stacey into coming next week for a while then Kurt will be here! I'm basically going to have visitors the whole time now which I love! This weekend me and Lizard took off to Northern Ireland to do some sightseeing. It was really amazing as usual for this place! Northern Ireland is home to Giant's Causeway, which is one of the natural wonders of the world apparently! We needed to check it out. We also went to Belfast, but I'll update about that later...so heres a little from our trip on Saturday:

This is Castle Bellingham!!! We saw it on a map and had to check it out. It is now a hotel, but it was really nice. We had lunch in the village ( D lish!)

We had planned on going to Giant's Causeway on Saturday afternoon but got distracted? Ok, the sun went down earlier than expected so we spent the night in Port Rush in Northern Ireland...and found ourselves some amazing arcades to keep us busy! Check out this HUGE crane game!

We literally watched the sun rise on our way to Dunlace Castle in the morning. You can see the castle there in the middle of the pic....it was Amazing!

Dunlace Castle



When we got to Giant's Causeway the visitors center was closed...which wouldn't have been a big deal except we had to trek down the trail sans trolley...and it was frosty and cold and far to walk! But it woke us up for sure! This pic is on the way there from the visitor's center. These rocks are all black and lava'ey? (is that a word?) Lizard told me they must be the giants' charcoal for bbqs :)
Here we are at Giant's Causeway! Apparently the legend is they are a stairway from N. Ireland to Scotland for when the giants from each land would meet in the middle to fight? Well thats what I hear anyway...(or they're some kind of volcanic formation nobody can figure out...take your pick!)

This is from my artsy photo collection ;)

This "castle" was reason enough for a drive all along the coast of N. Ireland! It was a beautiful drive back to Belfast for the afternoon.

Anna's visit!!

My lovely friend Anna came to visit over the past weekend! It was soooo nice to have a friend from home come and give me hugs! I think it was perfect timing because I was beginning to feel a little homesick so having her here re-energized me for a few weeks until Kurt gets here!
We had a lot of fun (more pics to come once Anna sends them to me!) She came in on Saturday evening and we went into Temple Bar that evening. There must have been about 5 bachelorette parties we saw out on the town...and they really do it up! Costumes and all (note to self: this is the place to come for that!)

We went into downtown for about 12 hours on Sunday! We took the train to Bray, which is south of Dublin. It was a beautiful sunny but freezing day so we we walked around a little and went to lunch there. It is a cute little village I will definately return to. Then we went back into Dublin and visited the Chester Beatty Library, which is actually more of a museum. It was really interesting...lots of focus on rare books and different religion histories. After the museum we went to Guinness for the world famous tour and free pint o Guinness! I don't know who's heard it tastes better here, but that is true in my opinion! To finish the day off we had an Irish dinner at a pub, complete with traditional Irish music and dancing Riverdance style! Loved the entertainment but the food was so-so. I had stew, which turned out to be fatty lamb meat in a watery stock (aka barfy). Still, it was a great day all together! I'm so glad Anna could come visit!

These are my only pics I have on my camera :( I left mine at home on Sunday so here is a couple from Sat night:

You can see some of the crazy bachelorette girls here... there was a band playing so this guy grabbed one for a quick dance. Its so entertaining to just walk around downtown any given night!

Anna rehydrating after flying in, but in the other hand is a drinky! What do ya do?!

One of the pubs in Temple Bar. We didn't go to this one...but you can imagine if we did?

Some good times...

So here's how I've spent my past couple of weekends when I wasn't being a tourist:

Me and two of my roomies Stacey and Sam on Halloween. I made my costume! I basically decided too late that I was actually going to do something so everything was sold out in the stores. Halloween here is absolutely crazy (just like home!) But they put off fireworks and have bonfires all over the place...like in culdesacs by my house. Normal?

We pretty much spent our evening in downtown Dublin walking round because the pubs and clubs were soooo packed it was ridiculous. Still it was fun to see and meet interesting folks...like these peeps! Look at the creepy guy over my shoulder! yowza!

This is my landlady Debbie. She brought Sam and me out to see a U2 tribute band last weekend. It was the funniest thing I've ever seen. The band literally dressed up like U2 and everything. The funniest part though were the fans. You've never seen a more dedicated crowd of U2 followers...and I think its pretty much the norm here. I've heard people talking about how great U2 is on several occasions. It was pretty amusing.

Sam (on far left) pretending to be as hardcore of a fan as the rest of 'em!

"Bono" came and danced on the platform right behind our booth. I swooned ;) aka laughed my head off!

Naturally I had to join in with the band! You can't really tell in this picture but this place got absolutely PACKED with crazed fans! Good times for sure!

Only in Ireland!

So part of what I do at my internship is go on home visits when someone needs assessing as to whether or not they are safe at home, especially if they live alone. Anyway, one therapist was talking about a home visit she had been on recently where they literally assessed his home environment, and then felt the need to assess another vital part of his livelyhood...the pub! This man had dinner at the local pub every night, so the OT thought it was appropriate to determine whether he could manage his way around the pub, money management, communication in ordering...you can imagine justifying it! So they took him to the pub, decided he was fine there as well as at home, and left him there! They returned to the hospital, and had discharged thier patient to the pub! Ah, Ireland!

Bank Holiday Weekend

So turns out this was a long weekend! No work on Monday meant it was completely necessary for me to rent a car again to do some exploring! This time I went straight west across the country to Galway, with a stop along the way at the Rock Of Cashel, a ferry ride to one of the Aran Islands, and New Grange on the way back! I'll explain more about each place with the pics. Overall it was an amazing weekend. Galway is really nice. I would recommend it as a main travel site to anyone going to Ireland. It is really beautiful and is pretty close to a lot of the most popular tourist sites. One fallback was since it was a holiday weekend and Galway is a popular destination, EVERYWHERE I attempted to stay on Saturday night was booked! I ended up sleeping in my car at the end of a culdesac near downtown. Now, this would have been fine and dandy if I hadn't suffered a heart attack when some random guy leaned up against the car at about 3 in the morning and started shouting to one of his friends. I had visions of them choosing my car with me in it for vandelizing or stealing. Turns out he was just drunk and after *ahem* relieving himself....he took off! Ah, good times! So Sunday I wanted to make sure I did something really amazing to make my sleeping in the car worth the hassle. I ended up booking a ticket on a ferry to the Aran Island of Inishmore. It is the largest of the Aran Islands off the West coast of the country. The island is ten miles long, three miles across, and has over 10,000 miles worth of stone fences! I think from the air it must look like an intricate puzzle of grass surrounded by jagged fences. The best part was visiting a fort that is literally at the edge of a cliff. It was breathtaking and made the whole trip worthwhile to see these cliffs! I haven't seen the cliffs of Mohr yet, but think these might be hard to beat in the "wow" department! After riding the ferry back Sunday evening I decided not to risk it again in the car and drove back to Dublin for the night (its only 2.5 hours away). It was definitely nice to sleep in a bed! What? I'm a princess you know! Anyway, I took my flatmate Sam's advice on Monday and visited New Grange. It is a site which dates back to the stone ages, 500 years older than the pyramids and 1000 years older than Stonehenge! Anyway, it is basically a mound they built with ancient tunnels and tombs within. There is a light window above the entry way that lights up the central chamber for a little over 15 minutes at sunrise on the winter solstice. Pretty amazing! I couldn't take pictures inside, but it was really cool. This site was discovered in 1699 and has had visitors since then... and there are names and dates from back that far! But the monument itself is also decorated from when it was originally made, and the drawings make up 1/3 of all the artwork in the world from this time known as of now! Nobody knows what they represent. The whole place was very mysterious, with little answers given to anything....kinda interesting to let your mind wander!

This is New Grange...its literally a rock mound with tomb passages and whatnot within.

Check out the designs on the rocks. They completely surround all the structures and nobody knows what they represent.

This is a wood henge...it was assembled much later than the intricate tombs, but is thought to represent the earth, moon, and sun based on the shapes of square, crescent, and circle which the logs form.

This is actually Howth, which is another tomb like New Grange. They are all over the Boylan Valley north of Dublin. Some haven't even been explored yet even though they know they're there. Its crazy to me to hear that.

This little cottage is where I had some soup to warm up on Inishmore. Cute little thatched roof!

Amazing cliffs to my left....

Hey its me!

There's a person in this one...which should give a reference to how incredibly high the cliffs were!

Here is one of the rock walls that are literally everywhere on the island!

This is one of the "seven sisters" churches from the 1500s or so on Inishmore

On to some pics of Galway. I liked these colorful buildings

Church in Galway

The streets are empty b/c I was up so early after having spent the night in the car!

Pics of Rock of Cashel now...its actually an assembly of four different buildings in one area. The tower was the first, then the cathedral (directly to its left in the pic) then there was an additional church built on the other side of that, and finally a palace to the rear. It was a good location b/c it is on a hill and you can see far in all directions.

On the drive to the Rock of Cashel. You can see the castle in the distance. Amazing!

Inside part of the castle...there are little heads all around the doorway. Each has a different look to represent the different cultures around the world (37 total)

This is the side of the castle which is the palace. It collapsed a few years ago in a storm. You can see stairways in the walls for secret passageways!

the church (fourth building on the rock). It is apparently famous for its architecture...advanced for the time (early roman)

The Rock of Cashel