Berlin, Berlin, Berlin

I do love Berlin. I maybe wouldn’t love it quite as much if it weren’t home of Andrea The Fabulous, who speaks German and enthusiastically takes us to all the best bits, but still.

(The two circles under the bridge have flourescent lights in them, in the shape of Rock Paper Scissors hands. The bridge seperates East and West Berlin, and when it gets dark the two sides Rock Paper Scissors all night long).

I’m big on walking tours in Europe, but Jenny and I had successfully missed most of the ones we wanted to take, including one in Dublin because I led us in exactly the wrong direction. Jenny kept missing the Edinburgh one as well, I think because of sleep.

In Berlin we managed to get to the starting place for the Red Berlin tour in time, and were shown Cold War era bits of the city, like former Stasi interrogation centres that are now government offices…

and a section of the “Death Strip” that’s been preserved:

The Death Strip was a open section between the two bits of The Wall – if you managed to get over the wall you had to contend with armed guards and land mines and barbed wire before you got to the other side.

The East Side Gallery, a section of the wall that was perserved and covered in art, is being redone by the original artists for the 20th anniversary of the wall falling. I got to see it a year ago on my first trip, but much of it was white washed over when we got there this time.

We spent much time taking pictures of Guinness in Ireland (it’s pretty, admit it), but felt German beer deserved the same treatment. We sat at a floating pub on a river, watching an amusing duck for at least part of one sunny afternoon.

I do love that city.

Inis Mor

I left a big chunk out of my Ireland update. That’s because the Aran Island of Inis Mor was the one place on the trip that was new for me, and it rocked, and hence needed its own entry.

We arrived at Inis Mor by ferry, from near Galway. We’d booked a hostel, online, based on a poster we saw at our Galway hostel – it was called ‘The Artist’s Lodge’, and the poster was pretty.

When we arrived at the hostel (depsite crappy directions and signage), it turned out to be what I can only describe as an old farm house. There was no art to be found in the place. Its ‘extensive Irish literature library’ (as advertised on the pretty poster) consisted of a shelf holding a few books about the Beckhams.

There was no one there.

We went up the road to a pub for some lunch, and wandered back down later, hoping to check in. The landlady was there this time, smoking and packing. She didn’t have our reservation.

‘We booked online, yesterday,’ I said.

‘Do you have a receipt?’

‘Um, no, but I have the confirmation email. I didn’t print it but I can bring it up on the computer for you.’

‘We don’t do email.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you see your name in this book?’ She handed me a notebook with people’s names and room numbers scrawled in pencil.

‘No.’

‘And no receipt at all then?’

‘No.’

‘Well, write your name down here, and you can have beds 4 and 5. Then write down a phone number – not yours, someone else’s.’

‘Um.’

‘I’m going to Galway, will be back in a few days.’

‘Right’.

For the rest of the day other people showed up, wandered around the house wondering if they had a room to stay in or not. When Jenny turned on the hostel computer, a webpage popped up with all of our online reservations noted, our names on a list. The man who was supposed to be running the place for the weekend, we discovered later, was in the pub down the road the entire time.

***

The bleak hostel was easily forgiveable, because Inis Mor looks like this.

We spent the whole of the next day riding around the island on bikes, apparently missing the one big thing everyone goes to Inis Mor to see. We decided (much like when we just narrowly missed the lava tubes of Queensland in 2000) to pretend it didn’t exist.

No matter. We saw a great deal of countryside, cloaked in a grid of stone fences (Who built these things? How long did it take?), and a lot of sea, random farm animals, and cliffs. Beautiful plunging cliffs.

We’d bought beer to drink in exactly that location.

And because the Aran Islands are the home of Aran sweaters, I had to knit a row or two. It seemed only right.

***

Oh yes, and this:

The night we arrived, we walked for ages to find a restaurant that was still open for dinner, and found a place on a hill. The service was crap, and they were out of half of what was on the menu. But just as we were finishing our meal people started filing in holding instrument cases; mostly violin cases, but banjos and accordians too. And then this happened.

Ireland: a compressed update

Dublin:

I have a question for Dublin: Why is your Guinness so expensive? At a pub down the street from the Guinness brewery a pint of the beautiful black stuff will cost €5.50 – it’s only £3.35 at my pub in Edinburgh. What’s going on? On our first day in Dublin we hopped pubs for the afternoon and into the evening, and when we found a place with 3.75 Guinness we settled in for the long haul. Jonathan, the regular at the bar, gave us his ‘favorite bits of Ireland’ tips. The cute Polish bartender let us play Jenny’s ipod until the band with a cello showed up. Jenny was impressed that I was able to navigate us back to the hostel, but luckily it was the same one I’d stumbled back to several times last June with the boys, so I’d had some practice.

Dublin also tends to like to rain on me, it seems.

So as cool as Dublin can be, the two times I’ve been there I’ve always been pleased to get out and into the rest of Ireland. The rest of Ireland is where it’s at.

Galway:

I was impressed with Galway the second time round. From my last trip I remember mostly lying in the grass, then going out to the pubs, falling down on the dance floor at the King’s Head and stealing most of a pizza from a guy called Eamon.

I forgot that Galway has cute twisty streets full of shops, and hadn’t even made it last time to the wee harbour, the cathedral. Jenny and I had a walk around town, appreciating laid-back Galway after taking the bus straight across from Dublin.

Then, of course, we went to the pubs.

At the first pub we ended up in conversation with an old man who wanted to tell us about all the ‘naughtiest’ places he’d ever been in the world. We were glad when he left.

At the second an entire stag-do took a shining to us. We drank many Guinness.

Belfast:

In Belfast we took a black cab tour; this time, though, from a man who didn’t sound as though his mouth were full of marbles. He was also upfront from the start that he was a Republican, and would be giving us information from a Republican point of view.

It was grand. Jenny has the pictures.

We created our own pub tour of Belfast, because we had to fly out of Dublin the next morning and were catching the midnight bus. To occupy ourselves we drank Guinness in various places. The first place was full of men watching horse races, until a man carrying a pile of plastic bags came in and started demanding to watch Coronation Street. Jenny said she saw him combing his eyebrows. We moved to the other side of the pub for a bit, and when we left, all the other patrons gave us a big wave goodbye.

The next pub played nothing but Garth Brooks, and smelled like a barn.

A few more pubs and even a pitcher of cocktails later, we made our way to the bus. It dropped us at Dublin airport at 3 am, and we made an unsuccessful attempt to sleep on the floor until our plane left. (Our plane to Berlin. Germany.)