juliette lynch: what the hell was i thinking

was more or less my train of thought after looking at the calender for the next few months.

scotland three weekends ago... ireland last weekend... france tomorrow, after which we travel to portugal (andrew accidently booked us on a flight to lisbon...he thought he was booking one to poland) on the following weekend.
then i leave for milan to begin a trek through italy, austria, hungary, romania, and then bulgaria for 10 days.

sounds good, right? that would be enough for any sane person in 4 months of living abroad.

but apparently not for me.

i follow my eastern europe trip up the following weekend with a trip to slovakia, then poland, and lets not forget the trip to istanbul, turkey. the next weekend i go north to mold, wales, where i will stay with a retired nurse as part of our host stay. i hope she has spunk.

and then skip one weekend at the end of november, and ill be hoping a plane south to moracco for two weeks before flying home right before christmas. (and a note for all of you who fear the cost of such insanity, flights come extremely cheap on two airlines out of london...such as the equivalent of $10)

unheard of craziness. but its a pattern ive come to adopt over the last few years.

in fact, i haven't lived in the same state or city for more than a year since high school.

transitory should be my middle name.
in the span of four years, i've attended 3 universities, lived in 5 states, switched majors 5 times, and visited 8 countries (not including any visited this fall).

i love it, and its thrilling, and never the same, but i never make life easy.

even when it comes to catching a train...i apparently don't believe in giving myself enough "cushion" room so as to not have to run everywhere.

which is precisely what happened this weekend in ireland. it was a mircocism of my life. 4 cities, spread across the whole country, in only 5 days. filled with lots of running to catch trains, sprinting between oncoming cars while hitch-hiking, and riding bikes in the pouring rain. not to mention the many good pints of guinness and shots of jameson consumed. we had to be irish. i am irish.

so these are the details, in photos and words, of living life in the fast lane in ireland.

this is andrew being very excited about the cliffs of achill island on the west coast

we flew into dublin at around 1am on friday morning, to then tromp around the city for a good two hours looking for a hostel (which are all outrageously expensive!), to only awake in the morning to extreme tourism and way too many american students exercising their loud american voices. so we left. barely. on a train out east to galway, the home of my family, and very good live music, festivals and markets.

a girl was dancing in the streets of galway with flaming batons and ropes.

then it was onto westport, where stefanie unfortunately had to leave us and andrew and i continued on. we arrived after our first hitch-hiking experience just in time to drop our bags at a hostel and head to two well-known pubs in the area, famous for their live music. the night confirmed that the irish know how to have a good time. and their drinking ability is second to none as they were back in the pubs by 11 am the next morning.

dancing to the fiddle. it was great to be one of the youngest in the crowd.

before heading out to achill island, andrew and i went out to the coast to see the marsh and ocean and ireland's most holy mountain, croagh patrick.

some fish just aren't attractive and were left behind

im not sure what i think of this photo, so any thoughts are great!

silly irish. who would want to bath here? clearly andrew was contemplating it.

our hitch-hiking experience getting to achill island was wonderful (see a previous post), but staying on the island itself was unbeatable. finally we had escaped the tourists and had found a quiet place where the pace of life was slow and the people more or less unchanged with time. andrew and i spent our time visiting a deserted village, climbing the cliffs along the bay, and being followed by a delightful dog called abby (athough we called her murphy for the first half cause we didn't know her name). she went everywhere with us. good fun all around.