New Grange, Tara, Old Mellifont Abbey.

We took our first Saint Mary's trip on Saturday, which is one of a series that will be taking as a school while we are here. Roberta, the Saint Mary's representative living here, is fantastic for having arranged them all. I love that the buses look like caterpillars! :)


Thanks to Miss Meagan Drone for the majority of these pictures, especially the artsier ones, because my camera ran out of batteries so I stole these from her facebook.

First we went to New Grange, which is one the most famous prehistoric monuments in the world, and is the most famous in Ireland. It is a large mound built of stone in around 3100 B.C., and was used as a tomb. It was built so that the sunrise during the winter solstice would illuminate the chamber through the narrow entrance. We all went inside the small tomb, and our guide Carlos simulated the how the sunrise would look with different lights. He did say, however, that the actual sunrise would be much more magnificent than a 40 watt bulb.
There were ceremonial carvings along the walls, the most famous being a series of swirls as you'll see in my pictures.

First, Megan R. and I decided that while everyone was taking pictures of famous monuments and scenery, we would take pictures with the mundane, everyday things around us. We thought our mothers would appreciate our senses of humor while we were traveling. Really this brilliant plan only lasted about two pictures, beginning with me and a mop.

Unfortunately, this is about the best picture of New Grange as a whole that we have, and it includes the office at New Grange in it. It's an enormous mound.

The Entrance into the tomb. You can see the swirls on the rocks that I was talking about. Because these rocks are about as tall as we are, and they block the entire entrance, they built stairs going around the rocks. The tomb was a narrow passage, and we had to duck and walk sideways at one point to get into the heart of New Grange, but it was worth it. No pictures were allowed inside, sorry.

View from New Grange.
Megan R., Me, Meagan D.

We also went to Tara, which is basically an enormous area full of little muddy hills, and a few very large ones. We spent about an hour running all of our energy out up and down all these hills. Unfortunately, we don't really have any pictures capturing the hills. However, I do know that some girls have videos of all of us running up and down them, so I'm in the process of tracking those down now.

Here is Megan R. and I at Tara, you can see a bit of hillyness, but not nearly as much as there was. The view from Tara was fantastic! We could see so far, and it truly is a shame that that type of magnificence can never be captured in a photograph, because all I thought at the time was how much I wanted to share it with my friends and family at home.

I don't honestly know how this picture came to be, and I don't think Megan does either, but both of us think it's hilarious.

Old Mellifont Abbey was my favorite stop of the trip. There were a ton of ruins from the Abbey all around, and every single part was a photograph waiting to happen. As you will see, we climbed all over them.



When we first got to the Abbey, this is what we saw.

So we were jumping in it and having a grand ol' time, when Roberta comes up to us and says "Girls, you know this isn't the Mellifont Abbey, right?" She leads us to the edge of a hill on the other side of where the bus was, and there were ruins EVERYWHERE. We all had a good laugh about that! Here are the rest of the pictures:


Awesome picture of Meagan D.

Me feeling liberated.


The entire SMC group.




This was one of our favorite pictures of the day.

Modeling as I'm sure the monks would have.


We also went to a cemetery down the road so that we could see the enormous crosses. After all the jumping and running, coming here was pretty sobering pretty fast. There were a lot of stones for infants who had died. An interesting difference here is that marker stones are used to write about the whole family. Entire families were buried in the same plot, and one headstone was used with a list of names. If someone new passed away, they would add the name and some information about them, leaving space below the names for other relatives to be written about when their time came.

Here is one of the crosses. It stood probably 30 ft or so tall, and was wider than it looks in this photo.

Here is a cool image of the cemetery and evening sky at the time.
Being here made me very homesick. A lot of the graves had messages from living family members written to their loved ones that we could read, and it made me miss my family a lot.
Two particular ones hit me harder than the rest:

One was from a daughter to her father. She wrote about how his hard-working hands kept the family together, how he taught her to ride a bicycle, and eventually how she was holding his hands as he "slowly slipped away." It made me emotional, and reminded me of how much I really miss my Daddy.

The other one was from a girl named Geraldine to her mother. It was a small poem saying:

'If ever I lost a friend,
I could always find another.
But I lost my very best friend
The day I lost you, mother.
Love, Your Geraldine'

I felt like I would have been saying the same things, had I been Geraldine, and while we were driving to the next site I couldn't help but reflect on my childhood the entire time, and think of how loving my mother has been to me.

I miss you, Mom and Dad, more than I can say.

Sláinte.

Viking Museum.

We all decided to go to a Viking Museum for the afternoon in Dublin. Although we had a pretty good time together, I think it's fair to say that none of us are putting this on the list of 'Dublin's Must See Attractions.'


Here is Me, Meagan D., Brendan, and Megan R. at the stairway that connected the Museum to a church.


Meagan and I in the stocks.


They had a lot of crayon etching stations for children that we took full advantage of.


Me buying a slave for 5 euro. Apparently she was an Irish princess, so I think I got a pretty good bargain.

Katt and I pondering different Viking Trivia Questions.


Me mourning the dead.

Enjoying a Viking bed that was more comfortable than the bed in my apartment.

Self-Explanatory.



Meagan D. and I in a beautiful church.
Thanks to Jenny for this artsy shot.

The Train.

Me, Megan R., and Katt


Brendan and Meagan D.


The Train to Dublin is far more luxurious than I imagined it would be, especially with the ticket prices being as low as they are. The ride from Maynooth is about 25 minutes, and makes somewhere around 5 stops on the way to the city.

I usually bring some things to entertain myself during transit, but on our most recent trip I was fascinated by the interactions of a family next to us and watched them the whole time instead. They were speaking English, but with what sounded like Italian accents. A large man was sitting with his two sons, who were about 5 and 8 years old. The children were debating whether they were looking at the sun or the moon outside, and therefore whether it was night or day. (it was about noon, for the record). The younger of the two insisted that it must be nighttime because the moon was out. "It's not the sun, it doesn't have any of those sparkly things around it," he insisted. This was an interesting argument, as it was cloudy and all that could be seen was a ball of light, not as bright as the usual sun, brighter than the usual moon. I can understand his logic. The older said "The moon isn't out anymore, it's lunch time!" Touche.

They soon moved onto a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors that quickly turned into a game of Rock-Paper-Anything that beats Scissors.

"Rock, Paper, LAVA!" the older boy shouted triumphantly. "Nothing beats Lava!"
"Aw, you're right!" the younger agreed.

"Rock, Paper, SCISSORS!" the younger boy yelled, and was immediately reminded of the rules of the game and how scissors is never an acceptable answer anymore.

He tried again. "Rock, Paper, POOP!"
"Poop?"
"Yeah, Poop!"
"Poop doesn't beat scissors!"
"Yeah huh, it'd get all over everything!" he said in a disgusted voice.

This logic could not be beaten, obviously, so he was given the win that round by his brother, who seemed equally disgusted at the idea of poop everywhere.

During these debates, their father remained looking sternly forward. He was a large man - tall, broad shoulders, large arms and stomach, with huge hands that looked worn from labor. His seemingly-dangerous demeanor was handsome, with his very mysterious, dark features and rough exterior. His bushy black eyebrows cast a foreboding shadow over his eyes. However, every now and then, one of his sons would focus their attention on him for the moment, grabbing his arm and hugging him, and his entire body would relax. His eyes would crease deeply with his smile, and he would tap one of their noses, making them laugh briefly, and then they would return to their debate. Or he would momentarily pat his hand on the top of their heads, which he could easily palm, before going back to looking stone-faced. I thought the affection this brutish-looking man showed his children was incredibly masculine, and it captivated me. His outward tenderness toward them was fleeting, but always enough to give the boys what they needed before they went back to their discussions. It was clearly a minimal indicator of his obvious love for them.


On the ride back home, however, we didn't have cute families to watch, so for our own entertainment we practiced smiling like Brendan does when we take pictures of him:


Brendan argued that we smiled too much for our pictures, and this is his impression of our overly-enthusiastic smiles:


Therefore, that's the only way we smiled the rest of the trip:

Dublin.

The train station in Maynooth is small, and the trip we took to Dublin on Saturday took about 25 minutes.




Here we are waiting patiently at the station!


Meagan and I on the luxurious train.


There were these tall puppet men in the middle of the city doing skits, and the horse men gave me a balloon they had. They tied the balloon holder in a knot, handed it to me, and when I took it they shouted "She accepted!" I gave it to a little boy I saw later on in the city.


These puppet men were loud and hit each other with sticks a lot. They were trying to play stick ball.




The girls in front of a castle!
Another castle.

Me taking a picture of...

....this castle.

We thought that this sign was hilarious because it was
so graphic!

At a campus in Dublin.

More of the campus.

A beautiful church we explored.


I LOVE the doors in Ireland. They are all different bright colors consistently throughout the city. There are postcards and other memorabilia dedicated solely to the doors of Ireland.


To top off the night, this man gave us a ride in a horse carriage through Dublin for half price! His horse was named Lucy, and he told us about different music festivals in the city.

Here we are on our buggy ride: Me, Alayne, and Megan.

Maynooth.

Here is Maynooth! It's a small town, but it has everything you need within a 10 minute walk (except an apple store).


Taking a picture right outside of campus of St. Mary's Church.


This is the pub we went to on our first night in Maynooth. What we quickly discovered is that this pub is for old irish men cheering for their soccer teams. They all seemed pretty stunned to see five young people walk in, but we ended up cheering with them, and they welcomed us into their experience. It was exactly as you would have pictured: Old men yelling, laughing, drinking, cheering, clapping each other on the back, booing against the teams they didn't like. Everyone was friendly to us and each other. I'm so glad this was my first pub experience, because it was incredible.


This is The Roost. They have live music sometimes during the week, and it is a very fun place to meet lots of new people.

My Room.

Here is the bed I slept in the first day I was here. To get you up to speed, I used to have no internet, no heat, the worst mattress, and a room full of trash, but since then all the other problems have been taken care of. Brendan thinks I just don't have the luck of the Irish, and he may be right. Now I don't have internet until I visit the apple store in London, so my entries may be few and far between for a bit of time, but I'll do my best.





Gross, right?

Airport.

Patrick sent me some pictures from the airport :)







Me saying goodbye to my momma.