Dublin and I Can be Friends

When I got on the public bus in Dublin, and the driver liberally sprinkled 'feckin' and 'shite' in his conversations with the patrons as they boarded, I knew I was among friends.

Up until a few days ago, I didn't know I'd be in Ireland at all.

But there is an absolutely killer deal that is kind of unknown in England. You can purchase a train-ferry ticket to Dublin from ANY train platform in England for £30.50 oneway and £61 return, and the journey takes up up the beautiful Welsh coast, and you sail into Dublin with the equally stunning Irish coastline to enjoy as it grows larger in your field of view. To put this in perspective, a return ticket from Portsmouth, where I had been staying in England, to London, which is about an hour and a half train ride, is £31. In short, there was absolutely no reason to not go to Dublin.

Today is also a big day for me personally as I am experiencing my very first night at a hostel. As a matter of fact, as I type this, a group of Americans are playing a game of waterfall with Guinness (what else?) in the lobby.

In the brief time I've had to wander Dublin's streets, I realize that this city has much in common with New Orleans (and yes, I reference New Orleans a lot, but then again, I am moving there). It even smells similarly. 

You may or may not have heard of Temple Bar, a very famous, very old Irish pub. And while Temple Bar does exist, the name "Temple Bar" has grown to stand for an entire section of the city of narrown winding streets meant to lure tourists into pub after pub, much like the French Quarter.

So yes, there is drink to be had in Dublin, but then again, what would you expect from the home of Guinness beer and Old Jameson whiskey?

After all, it's always entertaining to watch a guy stumble into an alley just after 8 p.m. on a Tuesday, pick a spot about 15 feet from the road and urinate.

But the real world punches through this debauchery.

A large moving protest passed my hostel this evening. The group was protesting against Israel for its takeover of a flotilla attempting to run aid to the Gaza Strip, which led to the deaths of some of the aid workers during the ensuing struggle between workers and Israeli soldiers aboard one of the ships. 

Soccer Mania Takes Hold in England

I am an unabashed sports fan.

I love football and hockey in particular, but the thrill of competition is enough to infect me with a number of sports, and I have been known to jump on the bandwagon for baseball, basketball and the Winter and Summer Olympics if given the chance.

With that being said, however, being in a country that actually cares about soccer (or football, I suppose) at the start of the World Cup is a little scary.

The British are known for the reservation, for keeping cool and some would call aloof, but they are also known for their soccer fanaticism. Add to that that this country of such proud soccer tradition is starved for a World Cup win, having not won the tournament since 1966, and all reservation goes out the window. In reality, it seems as though Brits take the, as they would gauge them, poor World Cup performances subsequent to that last win as a personal slap in each one of their faces.

So, when an unsuspecting American finds herself enjoying fish and chips (yes, that's right) in a pub on Sunday when the English team is down one-nothing in a pre-Cup friendly match with Japan, a team they should be mopping the pitch with, and midfielded Frank Lampard misses an easy penalty kick that would have tied the match, and the entire bar of mostly older gentlemen erupts in booing and jeering, the effect can be a little jarring.

This is because I, like almost all Americans, stubbornly refuse to accept soccer as something exciting to watch. It is very boring. I'll pay attention to the World Cup sure, much like I'll care about competitive swimming every four years when the Olympics comes around, but I am at a bit of a loss of words for how entirely World Cup-focused England is right now.#

However, I completely lost all composure when the New Orleans Saints won the last Super Bowl, so I understand the dizzying highs and horribly lows sports fandom can take a person. I follow the Saints because my dad follows the Saints along with much of my family. I imagine soccer is much the same here.

The passing along of traditions is something England seems to take an exceptional pride in, from the grandest traditions down to the smallest. Brighton, England is an entire seaside resort built on this concept.

Brighton is where Londoners visit for the weekend and where they will sit on a beach of rocks in 50 degree weather and be happy about it because it is a beach in the liberalest sense of the word. Brighton struck me as a mix of Coney Island, with its own turn-of-the-century pier, and South Beach, complete with a lively night club scene.

Apparently, Brighton has seen better days in terms of domestic tourism following the rise budget airlines such as Ryanair as Londoners take more exotic holidays and jet for beaches with sand that they can actually swim at rather than gaze upon from the shore. And yet, Brighton on Monday was still very busy with many parents taking their children to the Brighton pier to ride unsafe looking rides, eat cotton candy and play ripoff arcade games.

I can't help but think each one of those parents was taken there as a child as well, and even though destinations such as Malaga are a 50 British pound flight away, they want their children to share in that experience. And thus, a pier such as the one at Brighton survives.

As if I needed confirmation of England's dedication to tradition, I happened to get one while purusing a record store in Brighton. A young boy, probably around eight years old, walked up to the shelf next to me and grabbed a copy of The Beatles' White Album and started talking excitedly to his father about his first Beatles album.

His father, who I found out a bit later is named Nigel, grabbed a copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, handed to his son and said, "No, this here. This is the one you want for your first Beatles record."

Taking Pictures of People Taking Pictures

If you haven't figured it out about me yet, I really like doing touristy things when I'm on vacation.

So, no trip to England could ever be complete without a trip to Stonehenge. However, I'm also a people watcher. I went to high school in Steamboat Springs and learned there is no better place to people watch than in areas of high tourist traffic.

Of course, I include myself in this assessment. The exit gate at the first London Underground station I visited completely stumped me, much to the irritation of the experienced commuters behind me. So, understand that when I say there is no time when the lack of basic common sense is more aparent than when an otherwise right thinking and rational person is a tourist, I count myself among the herd and not as some self-ordained shepard, or if you are extremely unlucky, a meat packing plant.

However, my people-watching radar is overdeveloped, and I rarely miss the opportunity to enjoy someone making a fool out of his or herself. So, much like the late Crodile Hunter Steve Irwin, I zeroed in when I spotted a group of younger fellow American women at the large, mysteriously place rocks I too was visiting after catching the girls taking turns snapping pictures of themselves in compromising positions in relation to the stones.

I managed to capture this gem of own of the girl appearing to push over the stones of Stonehenge while is a bit of a strange standing position.

For those of you who might think I wasted the opportunity, I took my own pretty Stonehenge pictures too.

England is Not Drab Nor Boring at All as Long as You’re a History Buff Like Me

I am staying for two weeks with a good friend of mine and former co-worker at The Sentinel, Rich Lovie, who lives in Portsmouth, England.

Portsmouth is the seaside home to the Royal Navy. However, Rich, being a likeminded history nerd and good host, wasted no time getting me to London on my first full day in country for all the touristy sights and sounds.

We packed a lot into one day and were in and out of London via train to and from Waterloo station. The London Eye. Big Ben. The houses of Parliament. Westminster Abbey. Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard (complete with a rousing Star Trek theme medley from the guard band).

Here’s a little tip: the British Museum, home to the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon in Greece and generally considered to be one of the finest museums in the world, is free to everyone every day.

None of these iconic British landmarks disappointed, but even without the tourist traps, just being in London would not disappoint.

It is a rare U.S. city in which a person walking its streets can feel hundreds of years of history around every corner. This is norm for London and many European cities, I expect. Given that London’s street grid, or lack thereof, was designed with horse-drawn carriages in mind as well, its narrow, winding streets are ideally set up for little surprises around every corner.

Rich happened to know of one of these little gems and that it would strike a particular chord with me: St. Bride’s Church on Fleet Street. This church is also known as the printers’ and journalists’ church.

Many of the pews in St. Bride’s bear the names of large media institutions and UK publications such as Gannett and the Daily Record, respectively. Plaques also line several pews and are dedicated to the memories of past printers and journalists.

Perhaps the most touching dedication, however, sits just to the left of the altar. On a small table, the church keeps the names, pictures and places and times of death of every journalist killed while doing his or her job along with an ever-burning candle in their memories.

The latest addition to the table is Rupert Hamer, a British reporter for the Sunday Mirror who was killed in Afghanistan in January of this year.

A plaque on the wall next to the table, which describes the dangers of journalism as a profession, states that in 2007, 171 journalists were killed, and of those, 121 were targeted and murdered because of their profession.

Even though this church sits next to the headquarters for the news agency Reuters, it is set back away from Fleet Street, and I would not have known of its significance had I been wandering London on my own.

Farewell America!

The first time it hit home that I was leaving the country for two months was as I walked down the jetway to my flight bound for Stockholm, Sweden, and there were eight different newspapers in eight different languages available for the airline’s international clientele to read.

Being from a journalism background, I naturally wanted to take a copy of each with me for souvenirs, but seeing as I’ll be living out of a backpack that already weighs 40 pounds with precious little free space available, I fought back that urge.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Cassie Hewlings. I worked as a reporter for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel and as an editor for an online media website called Associated Content (which was just recently purchased by Yahoo!), and I am a few months away from leaving Colorado to attend law school at Tulane University in New Orleans.

In those intervening months, I am backpacking my way across Europe,  a journey that will end in Spain where I will be volunteering for a few weeks before coming home. This trip has been a dream of mine for a number of years, but up until that moment on the jetway, it had in my mind remained exactly that: a dream.

No matter how many plane tickets I booked (FYI: Denver to Chicago to Stockholm to London is more than 24 hours of flying and plane changing), hostels I reserved, and train, bus and ferry routes I explored (I have a goal for this trip to incorporate as many modes of travel as possible in between destinations), it didn’t seem real to me.

But back on the plane, an SAS flight to be exact, I am all smiles.

Granted, this is my first international flight, and I am easily impressed anyway, but I’d like to think individual touch screens with movies such as Avatar free to view, a pillow and blanket, and pretty decent dinner (beef stew, salad and cheesecake) and breakfast would impress any American accustomed to a domestic airline industry that long ago cut such amenities and charges extra for silly things such as extra legroom.

However, there is one bit of the Swedish flying experience at which I must scratch my head, and that is installing a camera in the nose of the plane to allow passengers to view takeoffs and landings.

On paper, this may sound like an interesting feature, but in practice, watching the plane you are on look like it will run off the tarmac at every turn because the behemoth jet can’t corner worth a damn or rear-end the plane in front of you because the ass end of the preceding jet gets bigger on the screen while yours doesn’t seem to be slowing down is a bit frightening.

In an ironic twist, however, this front view perspective is difficult to look away from, much like, as they say, a car crash or plane crash would be hard to tear your eyes away from.

So, if the plane goes down, would I be glued to watching my own plane crash on the jet’s closed-circuit TV?

This is what I decided to think about as the plane took off for its nine-hour trans-Atlantic flight.