Yes folks, that is a word. One single word, in fact... it's Welsh. On our train ride from Conwy to Holyhead, where we caught a ferry to Dublin, we passed through Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. This train station is very small but has a very long name... it means "The church of St Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St Tysilio's of the red cave." How's that for a name? I wonder what would happen if we gave places names like that in Minnesota...
(Matt, we didn't go to Cardiff... sorry!)
So we are now in Dublin, Ireland, and it is raining. I think it has rained in every country we've been in--and in a lot of countries, it's rained almost every day. We experienced Paris not as the City of Light, but as the City of Light Rain, until the last two days we were there, when the city turned into an inferno. However, as it turns out, we haven't had it bad at all--check out the news for info on flash flooding in Great Britain. Much of the flooding is happening in the Cotswolds, where we were before Wales. One of the couples we met in our B&B in Bath (they were from Boston, actually) are, as far as we know, staying in Stratford-upon-Avon, which is currently underwater. Who knows what happened to them. According to my latest check, the rain is headed to Scotland and Northern Ireland, where we are off to tomorrow--pray that we won't get stuck!
So we are in Dublin, and we just had an amazingly Irish experience, so I better tell y'all about it. We wandered around Dublin for the morning, seeing some sights, trying to do some shopping, etc., but this afternoon we decided to go to an evensong service at a cathedral just a few blocks from our hostel. (Neither of the cathedrals in Dublin have been Catholic for I don't know how many years, hundreds I think; but the big church that is Catholic is not allowed to become a cathedral.) So this is where it gets really Irish: We went to St Patrick's Cathedral, which is supposedly on or very near the site of the well where St Patrick baptized his new converts; we were sitting in the Guinness family pew (I kid you not, there was a plaque); and the organ interlude was the tune popularly known as "Danny Boy." I was pretty amazed, let's be honest.
Tomorrow we're heading to the Anterim Coast of Northern Ireland (back onto the pound... not exciting), where we are staying in a small town about two hours outside of Belfast. We'll see Belfast tomorrow, but we're mostly hoping to get some small-town Irish experiences, since we had the big-city Irish thing here in Dublin. Of course they are in two different countries, but we just aren't able to get out into the country here. Travel in Great Britain without a car is not that easy--the train system is actually kind of terrible. But, we were able to successfully flag down a train when we were leaving Conwy yesterday! It was pretty exciting--you have to stand at the station and hope the conductor sees you and stops. (Actually, the fact that the train stopped had nothing to do with us, after all; there were passengers getting off at Conwy--but we'll pretend it was our wave that did it!) We'll be training into Northern Ireland, then bumming around Belfast for a few hours and bussing our way to Port Stewart. May the luck o' the Irish be with us!
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