trip to the UK part 1

ok, ok. I'll get started on telling you all about the trip to Ireland and London with the fam-in-law.

we left Philly on x-mas day, on an evening flight. We were flying to London on British Air and then to Dublin on a connection Aer Lingus flight.
The flight was almost totally full, though we lucked out with the person next to us changing seats, so we had a row to ourselves. sweet.

Got to London at like 6am, next flight at like 9am, got to Dublin around 11am.
Met up with Lisa in the airport, then found the guy with the Tauber sign who was waiting for us. sweet.

the drive through Dublin was cool, driving on the wrong side of the street was a first for me, and a little disconcerting.
luckily, they don't have a brake pedal on the passenger side.

got to the Fitzwilliam Hotel, overlooking St. Stephan's Green, right in the center of 'downtown'-ish Dublin. It's a very modern hotel, a chic sort of place, if you will.
A room for Mikey and I, and a room for J and Lisa.
Free wired internet in the room was a pleasant surprise.

So let me see...this was Monday. I think we just ended up walking around the area a while.
Right outside the hotel is where Grafton St starts. Pretty much a pedestrian area with stores and the like.
Ben Yehuda-style.
People are really nice in Dublin, but the accent almost makes everyone sound depressed. The sentences all kind of turn down at the end. Of course, the weather does suck most of the time, so it's not surprising.
Went for pints of Guinness (the national pastime) with M, L, R, and J. It does taste different (better) over there, by the way.
Something to do with the soft water or something.

Had dinner with everyone in the hotel dining room.
The food was very good.
What sucked was the wedding planning talk that was so insane, it became pretty much impossible for me to keep any sense of decorum (Europe voices everyone!) and I had to take a little break in my room.
Yes, I walked out of dinner, but it was for the best. When I came back, there was a much nicer tone of compromise in the air.
It was actually at this point that the food was very good.

rough.

After dinner later, we went for a longish walk over to Temple Bar, which is the popular pub and hanging out area. What with it being St. Stephan's day or Boxing Day or whatever they call it, there were almost no pubs open.
But the walk was nice, even with the brief foray into sketchy Chinatown area.

What I really like about the whole trip was the awesome history that is all around.
It also was really clear (to me at least) that the Irish really were fucked by the British for hundreds of years and that it was really terribly brutal at times. The English just seem to have had this sense that they were the absolute pinnacle of human development and anyone else was just terribly uncivilized.

prigs.