A Nurse and A Nerd

Last weekend we attended the summer solstice celebration/all night party at Stonehenge. No, Stonehenge is not the name of some hip new club. We mean Stonehenge, as in the giant stones planted in a circle in the ground by druids 4000 years ago. We got to touch it and everything!! But, we are getting ahead of ourselves. The evening went as follows:

• Met up with our new Canadian friends Ancilla and Erica at the bus stop in downtown Bournemouth around 1030 PM.We were heading to Salisbury, the town closest to Stonehenge and the pick up point  for the solstice bus.
  

  Check out our sweet ride.

  The bus was entertaining.  The moment we were aboard, a group of drunken university students started downing their drinks chanting “chug! chug! chug!” and screaming “SOLSTICE!” while cheering there little heads off.  They sang  a rousing rendition of The Wheels on the Bus (At David’s psychic suggestion) and started the wave, which they called the Mexican Wave.  One girl came up to Dave and I and said hello. When we replied “hi” she squealed with delight and said “Oh you have accents!! Please just talk to me for a bit, I just loooove people from different places!” and then stumbled back to the rear of the bus to rejoin her friends. About 30 minutes in, a bunch of girls demanded a pee break in the middle of nowhere…the bus driver complied.  Guess he didn’t want to have to clean up any messes.

• From where the solstice bus dropped us off, we walked about a mile and a half in the dark, though fields to reach Stonehenge….then we passed Stonehenge and finally got though the gates a few minutes down the road on the far side of the complex.  As we got closer we could hear cheers. At this point, we stopped at the port-o-potties and established that the meeting place would be at the vegan food cart just in case we lost each other.  We were eager to get up close and personal with the ancient stones so, we decided to go walk though the center of Stonehenge….Only we didn’t really walk.  We squeezed/muscled our way into the center. There was barely any room to breathe let alone move.  We navigated the center though osmosis more the anything else and were birthed out the other side a few minutes later. We got separated from Ancilla and Erica during the birthing process and utilized the aforementioned vegan food cart meeting point.

• So began the waiting.  By this time it was about 2 hours until sunrise so we found a small piece of ground to lay out our blanket and
  

  Erica, Ancilla, Courtney, David & Stonehenge

  began taking in the scenery.  It was filled with people!  People doing drugs, people dancing, drunk people, and ad hoc musical groups playing drums and flutes. One very special person sat next to us and became David’s friend. His name was Stephen and he was covered in sparkles, so from this point I shall refer to him as Sparkle Stephen.  He was 42 years old and lived down the road, but he had never been to Stonehenge in his entire life.  He introduced himself by asking for rizlers, to which we responded with confused looks. Rizzlers it turns out are rolling papers for hand rolled cigarettes. He was run out.  He told us that he had lost his sister and her friend at some point (too bad they didn’t think to meet up at the vegan food cart) and kindly informed us that he was 42 and this was his first time at Stonehenge and he lives just up the road but had never been here before. After an excruciating hour of conversation, he finally found his sister and then promptly lost her again…did we mention that he is 42, lives really close to Stonehenge and this was his first time visiting the site?

• Sunrise! Sorta. We saw the gradual progression from light to dark, but didn’t really see the sun, it was too cloudy.
  

  Hey look! I think I see some Sun!

  We did however get to walk around the center of Stonehenge again, this time in relative comfort because it had emptied out some what. We got some spiffy pictures of the stones and listened to several groups of musicians. We then walked across the liter covered grounds (the amount of garbage left behind at this historical site really was appalling) and began our trek back to the buses.

So that was it!  Pretty neat experience all in all. We even got to capture some supernatural light trails on camera.  Trick of the light, David’s psychic energy, or the spirits of the druids returning to sacred grounds to celebrate the start of summer? You decide.

We went to Dublin last weekend and got to see more then just the airport!  We departed from Bournemouth International Airport.  It doesn’t take much to be “International” around here given the close proximity to a multitude of different countries, so international here is a little different then back in the States.  For example, one does not need to have a large airport to be international.  The Bournemouth airport has 4 Gates….That’s it folks!  Four.  Made traveling a breeze!  Not to mention you don’t need to have a large tracking board for flights when it only takes about 1 minute and 20 yards to see all of the gates.  The flight was about and hour and 10 minutes (nor do international flights need to be long).

The first thing we did after taking the bus into the city was head to Grafton Street to meet up with one of Courtney’s friends, Mary Lou De Natale.  Mary Lou was Courtney’s student adviser/mentor back at USF.  She had been in Dublin for the previous 2 weeks with a group of nursing students from San Jose State.  They were learning about the health care system of Ireland at UC Dublin.  Sure, we wanted to see the city, but Mary Lou was the main reason that we decided to head to Dublin.  When you are in another part of the world, it is always nice to see a familiar face.  We meet up on Grafton street and had a nice visit over dinner.

After we parted ways with Mary Lou, we headed over to our hostel, Kinlay House.  Nice hostel, lots of character.  They got brownie points because they gave us a free upgrade!  We ended up in a 6 person room on the 3rd floor…which is really the 4th floor because what we would call the first floor in the states is the ground floor in Europe.  We shared the room with two girls the first night but didn’t see them much.

Dublin. A city comprised of the old and the new

When we finished settling into our room we decided to head out into town and have a look around.  The hostel was in the Viking/Medieval part of town, so we started off there.  We saw a  few churches, did some general strolling about, then walked around St Stephen’s Green and ended up in Temple Bar.  Temple Bar is an area of town dedicated to pubs and restaurants and street musicians.  If you want to have a pint and a good time, that is the place to be.  We started off our Temple Bar experience by listening to a street band called The Super Fantastic Adventures of Captain Magic in His Amazing Wonderland. Epic band name huh?  The band had 6 members: two guitars, one base, one violin, one drummer and one general percussion guy.  They were in fact, super fantastic.  Courtney bought their CD but was a little disappointed because they only recorded 6 songs and the sound quality isn’t great…but that is okay.  Happy to support great street bands.  After that we had a couple pints of Guinness, enjoyed the pub musicians and headed back to the hostel to catch some Zzzz’s.

The next day we got up early to catch the light breakfast served by Kinlay House and started our day of sight seeing.  We spent the morning wandering around the shopping district, visiting Trinity College, walking along the River Liffy, and touring St Patrick’s Cathedral.  For lunch we went to the Brazen Head, Dublin’s oldest pub (they had a certificate from the Guinness Book of Records framed on the wall).  We had a very Irish meal.  Courtney traditional lamb stew with a red lemonade and David had bangers and mash with a Guinness.  The combination of great food, great atmosphere, and great live traditional Irish music, left us feeling very satisfied.

Courtney really wanted a Guinness with a shamrock in it...However it wasn't meant to be.

After lunch, we made our way to the store house at the Guinness Brewery at St James Gate for a tour.  We are now educated in the ways of Guinness.  Here are some fun facts about Dublin’s favorite stout:

• The Guinness store house, is in the shape of a giant pint glass with a bar at the top that represents the white foamy head of a freshly poured pint.  If filled, this giant pint glass would hold 14.3 million pints of Guinness.  The Gravity Bar at the top has 360 degree panoramic views of the city.
• The idea for the Guinness book of World Records came after the director of Guinness, at the time, had an argument about the fastest game bird in Europe and was unable to verify the answer.  He guessed that questions such as this must come up at pubs all the time, and decided to create a book to provide answers for bar bets.  The fastest game bird in Europe is the Wood Pigeon.
• The lease for the St James Gate Brewery was signed by Arthur Guinness in 1759 for a term of 9,000 years.  The annual rent is 45 pounds.

We finished out the evening back in Temple Bar where we listened to a live band play traditional Irish songs and each drank a pint of Guinness for which we had a new found appreciation.