Brendan Doms

Of course, Galway wasn’t picturesque all the time. There were also some nice rain clouds brewing off Ireland’s west coast.

I consider this the quintessential Galway picture: there are little children splashing in a fountain while teenagers lounge on a lawn and fluffy white clouds tumble across the sky.

Looking out over the river Liffey in Dublin before heading out (for the first time).

Sean and our free taste of Guinness “Foreign Extra Stout” which neither of us had ever had before, or even seen stateside.

Going back to the last time I put pictures up, and realized there weren’t any from Dublin onward.

This is the last night we were all together…

Coming home has been just as much an experience as leaving for the first time. I’m not jet lagged by being off schedule with everyone else. Rather, I am simply unable to sleep that much. Every night I am exhausted, but then I can’t sleep more than 6 hours. This was typically the case during my travels, but I had attributed it to walking around so much and having to wake up to catch the free breakfast. I guess the habit followed me back.

The biggest culture shock was actually when I bought something for the first time after being back. It happened to be a Chipotle burrito (Mexican food is abysmally absent from much of Europe). The menu said $5.95, so I got out $6. I had to scramble for another one dollar bill when the register displayed that the total was in fact $6.37. Where did that extra money come from? Oh, sales tax! Silly Americans adding it right at the cashier! In Europe, any tax is included in the menu price. This has a couple really nice consequences. First, you know exactly how much you are supposed to pay ahead of time. This makes lines move a little faster, as there’s a lot less fumbling by the time people actually get to the part where they have to pay. Second, there are basically no pennies. All the businesses round the numbers out to the nearest 5 or 10 cents (or pence), so those little waste-of-copper travesties don’t take up space in your pocket.

There was some moment around a month in to the trip when I figured that any home sickness had passed and I could keep going indefinitely. But that’s not really true; I try to imagine more than 6 or 7 months of living in hostels, and it feels like something would have to break. Having a room to myself, a bathroom, are such grand luxuries that I couldn’t comprehend them a week ago.

Minnesota always seems more…saturated than the places I visit. The horizon is a place where fairy tale blue confronts forests and rolling hills of wreath green. And the storms! Rain in Europe feels like a pathetic, weak thing without the tell-tale accompaniment of that brief flash of light and the boom that follows.

In the time that follows, I’m going to try to include some more meta information about the trip, like distributions of money in each country, and the actual route I traveled. Hopefully I can help somebody else with planning a similar trip.

Well, that was an adventure of epic proportions. But at the end of the day, it’s good to be home.

The great city didn’t even exist until the Roman’s decided they needed a trading center at the Northern end of their empire. And, as the Scottish will remind you by pointing at Hadrian’s Wall, they never quite got conquered. So, the little fort grew and grew and here we are today.

On Sunday, I woke up late and then headed into town. I went around London Bridge, where I ate lunch at a pizza shop that gave me my best meal in London: a soft crusted pizza with toasted goat cheese, carmalized onions, spinache, and figs. They also threw in a twist for the coffee I ordered: brown sugar instead of white, and steamed milk instead of cream. I came away from there quite satisfied.

Then I moved on to the Tower of London, which is the city’s closest thing to a castle, though with a much darker history than most.

I was supposed to meet up with the Americans I had met in Dublin, but they cancelled at the last minute, so I hung out at the hostel. I talked endlessly with Sven, a cool Guinnes-drinking Norweigen guy who goes to the University of North Dakota. Funny how accents from both those places are nearly identical.

Monday was my final day abroad. I was really tired of being a tourist at that point, but I wrapped things up quite nicely. I went to the Museum of London, saw St. Paul’s Cathedral, and then walked over to Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. The English nerd in me came out for a bit. It was really neat to see how the theater has been reconstructed to be just like it was 400 years ago. I bought some mead, which I guess was the prefered drink in Shakespeare’s time - though I haven’t had the chance to try it yet.

Then, I had a traditional meal of authentic fish and chips. It was incredibly bland. I like the more Americanized version a lot better, mostly because there is flavor, and condiments beyond vinegar and salt.

Finally, I met up with one of the girls I had met in Madrid, and we exchanged travel stories. She was not surprised to hear about the pick-pocket in Barcelona. I guess it has a reputation.

I finished the night by having a final Guinness with Sven and then drifted off to what sleep I could manage before the trip home.

Every new city gives me a fresh burst of energy. A completely different vista in a unique palette creates this sense of awe in me, that our great cities can be so close to each other, and yet so starkly diverse.

Arriving in London did it for me again. And I think, if money weren’t a factor, I could continue traveling forever, provided that I saw something new each day.

Thursday night I tucked in early, but not before meeting my roommates: 3 Irish girls, 2 Israeli guys, and 1 Polish guy. The way that hostels bring people together still amazes me. The Polish guy, Mikho, is actually financing his trip by busking with a drum: he uses the money he made from the previous day to pay for a hostel and food. If you think about it, this would only take about 40-50 dollars daily, which is totally reasonable for a few hours of playing music in a decently crowded area. The girls went out clubbing at nearly midnight, asking the guys in the room to come with them. I offered to join in another night, and a good thing too: two of them stayed out dancing until the sun was up and then slept the whole next day. I would have fallen asleep standing on the dance floor.

Friday, Mikho left us in search of a cheaper hostel, since the rates went up for the weekend. I went to do the touristy stuff with the one girl - Mary - who had managed to get a little sleep the night before. We saw Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, and Buckingham Palace. I was wiped out again when it was over, so I opted out of the clubbing for a second time.

But as you know, no trip is complete without New Age Canadians!

Two women in their 50’s joined our room. One was obviously used to the hostel environment, and slid comfortably into a bed. The other looked around, a little dazed, and left for the hostel’s bar. I was headed there around that time anyway, so I just followed her down.

I ended up getting this woman’s life story several times, and never got a word in edge-wise, as she seemed to both not hear anything I said and not remember what she had told me. A most excellent combination.

So, she was independent at age 16, working on a dairy farm she eventually inherited in Ontario. Got married young, had three kids. Fast-forward to 2002. Her husband in the air force has found another woman remotely, and abandons her and the kids. They all get through college and turn out well despite this. Sounds almost typical, right?

Well, then she makes a friend who convinces her that she is psychic. That she needs to go on an inward journey, manifested by a physical journey. She puts it off a bit, but starts meditating and prophesizing and researching horoscopes and lines of power on the earth. All those things I give absolutely no credence to. I zoned out a little bit, and then was startled when she gets to the part about dating a guy 20 years younger. They break up, and he promptly gets a sex change. This woman is not a lesbian, but she did use the phrase ex-girlfriend several times. Talk about confusing!

Eventually she gives in and goes on the trip. And it is clear to me at this point in the story, that despite whatever else this woman has been through, she is terrified. Turns out that she had never left her small community of a couple thousand before. The idea of roads she doesn’t know, languages she can’t speak, and strangers - just people she hasn’t known her whole life - scares her more than anything else. She is down at the bar, deliberately trying to down as many drinks as possible simply because she can’t stand the thought of sleeping in a room with strangers.

The whole point of telling you this is just that despite the fact that I have tried to put myself outside of my comfort zone and experience new things during this trip, I have never been shaking at the thought of what I’m about to do next, trying to drink myself into a stupor so I won’t have to really face it. I hope I never am.

Back to the recap.

Saturday I was off by myself. I meandered through the West End, where I wanted to experience London theater and saw Les Miserables for the first time. The technical aspects of the show were top-notch: excellent lighting, sound, set, and costume design. However, for such a popular musical I was disappointed by the show itself: weak story, blase ending, and a repetitive score mixed with simple lyrics.

I happened through Soho, which felt more lived in than a lot of other parts of the city, and reminded me a lot of New York, and then Chinatown, which felt like a poor immitation of what a Chinatown should be, after seeing the ones in NYC and SF.

Then I stumbled across the British Museum. And what is on display on the first floor? The Rosetta Stone! How climactic! How fitting that in my final destination I should see the relic that allowed us to understand the country I started in! Totally unintended. Totally awesome.

Finally, as the Irish girls were leaving the next day, I went out with them. But instead of going straight to a club, we hit up a random pub first. And ended up staying there for hours.

It’s called B@1 (pronounced “be at one”) and it is the best cocktail bar I have found in all of Western Europe. The bartenders had incredible energy and skill, and San Francisco’s Bourban and Branch is the only place to rival their menu of drink choices. On top of that, the three bartenders are the three owners of the place, so they dictate everything about it, including the playlist. At one point, they muted the volume during “Living on a Prayer” and the entire bar crowd was shouting the lyrics. They finish every night by playing Journey and then “Closing Time.” If I ever work at a bar, I want it to be a clone of B@1.

After they closed, we spent a lot of disorienting time in a taxi and then getting to a club, where we stayed all of five minutes before deciding to call it a night. By the time we got back it was somewhere around 5 AM, and the sun was threatening the horizon.

I got to see a great discovery first hand, and then stumbled across one myself (admittedly, they were discoveries of vastly varied scopes). That is a good start to my time in London, my friends.

Imagine the KKK doing a march through Harlem. That is what the Orange march in Belfast feels like.

Angus, an Irish bartender.

City Hall, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the old Jameson Distillery - I missed a fair bit of the Dublin toursit sites the first time around. But as per usual, it was the new and interesting people I met that made the return memorable.

The first night I returned to Porterhouse (where Sean and I previously discovered amazing burgers) with a couple from my hostel: the guy was British, and the girl was from Northern Ireland. I discovered that Porterhouse had that fruity, barely carbonated, no yeast added beer Carli and I discovered in Belgium - lambics - on tap. And the couple were an interesting study in how diverse the UK can be. All three of us were pronouncing words strangely in different accents. We resolved to meet the next night at a literary pub crawl.

The next afternoon, I was walking through a park when I had a sneaking suspicion that I was being followed. Every time I paused to snap a picture or inspect a statue there was a blonde girl playing with her cell phone nearby. I was a little unnerved, but eventually stopped walking and sat down. She took the spot on the bench next to me. After confronting her and getting around some broken English, I discovered that her name was Maria, she was a student from Russia studying in Dublin, and she had no friends in the city. Her host family is two hours into the suburbs, and the other students in the program are very cliquish. She was following me just because she thought I looked nice and about her age, so she thought we might be friends. It’s really mundane, I know, but after travelling through areas when I’ve been alone and had no one speak my language, I could definitely sympathize. We talked for about an hour before she left for class, and at the end she said, “Speaking to you has made my mood go up.” I guess even though I couldn’t be a friend in Dublin, at least I made one part of her day a little better.

When I arrived at the literary pub crawl (where actors are tour guides taking you through pieces by famous writers in the city and then bringing you to the same pubs those writers drank at) the couple from the previous night was no where in sight.

I had been stood up.

It was the best thing to happen to me in Dublin.

I had already bought my ticket, so I was going on the crawl anyway, and I quickly befriended two boisterious and hilarious Scottish girls from Glasgow, Morven and Rachel. They reminded me a lot of Jim, so of course we got along swimmingly. For example, an early part of the conversation went like this:

Me: “Do you know Bunker? The bar in Glasgow?”

Morven: “Bunker? I live there!”

Me: “Umm…what? In the bar?”

Morven: “Yes! I’m the resident drunk!”

The crawl itself was very entertaining, and stirred in me the desire to get back into acting, after seeing the unique way these actors combined their talents with their love of literature.

Afterward, I suggested we head back to Mssrs Maguire, and we stayed there until closing. I learned a lot more about Scottish and Irish culture - including a silly children’s song about song woman named Molly selling live oysters, and the fact that Gaelic from the two countries is the same language, but the accent is so different they can’t understand each other!

I woke up this morning with a mild headache, and a jaw sore from laughing so much. And then I dragged myself to the airport so I could catch a plane to my final destination: London.