So Long United

I win! United can go fuck off:

http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/canada/saskatoon/united-airlines-saskatchewan-departure-shocks-travel-agent-passengers-1.2926619

Get the F*#k out!

Looks like United has finally given up on Saskatoon:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/united-airlines-ending-direct-flights-between-chicago-and-saskatchewan-1.2747789?cmp=rss

This is a great victory for this blog, but probably not much of a victory for my wallet.

-RF

I hit my head, I'll balance it out by hitting my liver

...continued, sort of.

Our first day with Yang really seemed like 2 full days. After the zoo we drove back to the hotel to ditch the car. And I use the term "drive" pretty liberally here. I'm fairly confident we could have walked faster, and have evidence to back that up as a literal claim.

The route the that GPS suggested to get back to the hotel was basically putting us right through the middle of Dublin. This, being a Saturday we thought we'd be ok and miss any sort of rush hour. What we got instead was far worse to navigate...Dublin's gay pride parade. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem at all with gay pride or the festivities, but when I'm trying to drive through it, on the wrong side of the road, it was about the last thing I needed. Add to that the fact that Dubliners don't feel the need to mark their roads and when they do mark them they don't agree with the published maps, AND the totally terrible luck we kept having with one way streets and I was a bit of a wreck by the time I parked the car at the hotel. That poor can of (warm) beer in the room stood no chance!

And that was just the start of what seemed like a 2nd full day!

Our PLAN was to then go to tour the Guinness Storehouse. The app on my phone said it was a 30 minute walk, and we had 35 minutes until the last ticket was sold. My app was wrong. The Guinness Storehouse turned out to be just south of the zoo and took about 45 minutes of gay pride dodging power walking. Luckily my app was wrong again about the closing time, so we got in after our long walk. It was a good tour and ended with an outstanding view of the whole city of Dublin.

Getting there and getting in satisfied our primary goal, but the restaurants closed before we could accomplish our next goal of eating Irish stew, however, the restaurant staff pointed us in the direction of the place THEY'D go to eat some Irish stew and have great craic (that is spelled right, pronounced crack, means good times). So we went to Arthur's bar, and picked up a new friend along the way in a 14 year veteran F-16 pilot.

Arthur's was only the first stop, and set the tone with drop shots of Irish whiskey in Guinness. We next hit the International Bar for more beer. Then Dublin's major shopping street for drunken, impromptu frisbee throwing. Then Neary's bar. Then finally a bar I can't remember the name of in which we met a couple of great Irishmen who taught us about Gaelic football and told us about the upcoming playoff games the very next morning. I'm lucky to have escaped that last bar without serious liver damage. Turns out if you convince a waitress that you want to buy a beer for the 2 regulars you just met and totally hijacked 2 hours of their night to discuss Gaelic sports and language you become some sort of hero deserving of far more drinks than you need.

We made it back to the hotel late, but planned a long walk the next morning to go watch live Gaelic football. A great day, albeit fairly long.

Ryan

Meerkats make it better

Today we picked up one kind of animal then went to visit all kinds of other animals.

The first animal I'm taking about is @yangvonpang. The other animals were those we saw in the Dublin zoo. Both kinds were entertaining, but I couldn't go out drinking with the zoo animals later so I guess Yang wins the day as the best kind of animal to find in Dublin.

The Dublin zoo itself was a pretty good zoo, then again, I don't think I've ever been to a zoo I don't like. We got to start our day with the classic full Irish breakfast at the Meerkat restaurant. Named so because it was the only place where you could watch the meerkats. This pleased me greatly and I'm sure I could have stayed through lunch and beyond. But other animals needed viewing too so we went out into the rainy Irish weather to enjoy the zoo.

It was in the zoo that Mel and I started discussing a trend we'd noticed in Dublin, fathers out with infant children. This seemed a bit of a role reversal from what is expected at home. To be clear, I'm talking about dad out alone with the kids, not with mom as well. It just so happened that while discussing this trend, and pointing it out at the zoo that I noticed another trend. Only women carried umbrellas. Only women...and me. Moments after this realization I noticed a little tag dangling from my newly purchased umbrella that read, "Ladies hand umbrella" Combine that with the nice pastel colors and I felt a bit awkward in the rain for the rest of the day.

I didn't help my own cause at all by trying to lean into an enclosure that was glassed in. I hit my head pretty hard and managed to make a lot of noise. It wasn't even particularly clean glass I bashed my head on so I had no excuse other than being a bit emasculated and distracted by the animals.

Ryan

...ps, to be continued

You know you're Irish when...

...you never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

That was one of our Dublin tour guide's favorite sayings, which meant to me that the better the story was that he was telling us the less likely it was to be true, but still good and worth listening to.

Unlike the Munich and Paris walking tours that pointed out a lot of monuments and listed things to do after the tour, the Dublin walking tour was more of a mobile history lesson. Not that I'm complaining, it was still a great tour and the only one we've been on that included a beer stop!

The Irish claim to be the second largest beer consumer per capita (after the Czechs), and the world's largest tea customers per capita, even ahead of the Brits. What he didn't mention, which the news had been saying for a few days was that young Irish people are also Europe's highest group of people as they smoke more weed than any other country on the continent.

So they get drunk, get lifted, then apparently drink a bunch of tea the next morning with their full Irish breakfast to restart their systems. Maybe their leprechaun accents magically help cure hangovers too. So if you see me drinking tea on a Sunday morning one day and talking in a terrible Irish accent rest assured it isn't because I've had a stroke, I'm just trying out a new theory.

Ryan

No Aliens Here

We made a stop on our drive from Belfast to Dublin at Bru Na Boinne burial sites. This was another UNESCO site. It is actually a collection of many burial mounds in eastern Ireland. Some if these mounds are structures 40 meters across and 8 meters high. They date from 5000 years ago which makes them about 1000 years older than the Egyptian pyramids and 500 years older than Stone Henge.

This was another very impressive site that archeologists are still learning a lot about (ie, the tour guides left a lot of stuff up to our own interpretation). Easily the most impressive feature was a light box in one of the big mounds that only let light in for about 14 minutes each year. Only at sun rise of the winter solstice would light ever get into the inside of the mound. The whole mound was built so precisely that after a few minutes in the morning on one day of the year no more sunlight would get in until a year later. And this was no accident. There is a sister site some miles away that only lets light in on the same day, but at dusk.

This precision has lead some...weirdos...to speculate that aliens were involved in the construction of the mounds. Why aliens would come here and build big mounds of dirt and rock is beyond my reckoning. Then again, humans spending upwards of 3 generations building big mounds of dirt and rock is also a bit perplexing. All I know is that I now have a plan for what I'm doing as next year's spring landscaping project.

Ryan

The Titanic Experience...Without the Drowning

The Titanic was mostly constructed in Belfast, so naturally they have a big museum there dedicated to it. We decided to spend a day going through the museum. It was interesting more from the perspective of seeing how the actual life was at the time than it was from the design and ultimate flaws in the ship. And a bit disappointing was the fact that they really didn't focus much on the reasons for the sinking or what could have been done to avoid it. But they totally made up for that by having a ride in the museum. Possibly the weirdest thing to put right in the middle of a museum, but a nice touch.

What we really wanted to see though was the Iron Throne from the Game of Thrones set. A lot of the sound stage work is done just down the road from the Titanic museum at the Titanic Studios. The day before we were there the queen herself (the real one...like "of England" real) visited the studio and got to see the throne, so naturally I assumed we would be able to get in. Apparently I was wrong on this account. Don't they know who the hell I am?! No? Oh, ok then. I'll settle for watching the rest of the series on tv.

Ryan