Becca came out to dinner with me and some of my colleagues one night. We went to a pub called The Roebuck in the Chiswick section of town for dinner. The food is more upscale than you would find at a typical pub, and the furnishings are probably a bit better, too. I had beef ribs (cote de boeuf, it was called), and it was quite good. I think Becca had some kind of roasted chicken. We also shared our first experience of sticky toffee pudding for dessert, and that was great as well. We would try it two more times after this while we were together in the isles.
The only thing other than share meals that we did together while Becca was in England was visit the London Eye. I had never been interested in this, but Becca wanted to do it, so we went. The weather was crappy and it wasn't dark enough to make the views of London the way I would have liked to see them, but the Eye closes at 8pm and the sun doesn't go down until after 10pm right now. Still, the views were OK and we got some decent pictures.
And a photo I took from the nearby footbridge:
Ultimately, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, and price is the major problem. Each ticket is $30, and I just don't think it's worth it.
I believe it was after experiencing the Eye that we went out for Indian food. Becca had been wanting to experience a bit of what my life is like when I travel, so I took to the Indian restaurant across the street from my hotel, which is the one I most frequent when I'm in London. We had a great meal and then called it a night. It really is great to have restaurants within walking distance of where you sleep. I somehow doubt I'll ever live in a place like that, though.
Becca came over to the area near my London office on our last night in town. I took her to the Lebanese restaurant that I often go to, again on the premise of seeing places I go when I'm in town. We each ordered a shawarma (meat roasted on a spit and sliced off in little pieces) platter, with Becca having lamb and me having chicken. I had never eaten there at dinner time and the food didn't seem as fresh as it is when I go for lunch, but Becca enjoyed it a lot and I'm glad.
Since we were flying to Ireland around mid-day, we took Saturday morning pretty slow. We flew out of Gatwick instead of the usual Heathrow, and hopefully that will be the last time I fly out of that airport. The airport itself is fine, but it's more than an hour outside of London, and the ride down there was very expensive.
Our flight to Ireland was very short--only an hour or so--and then we were in a different country, though not so different from the UK that you would feel out of place. We flew into a very small city called Knock, and its airport was the smallest I've been in anywhere in the world, with only a couple of gates. I chose this airport (and almost our entire Irish itinerary, for that matter) based on the recommendation of an Irish friend, and when we later hung out with her, I could tell that she found this part of her recommendations quite amusing. There is nothing in Knock.
We rented a car in Knock, and thus began the most harrowing driving experience of my life. For starters, the Irish driving format is the same as the British: you drive on the left side of the road, and the driver sits on the right side of the car. To save a significant amount of money, I opted for a manual transmission, and it didn't take me long to feel like this was a serious mistake, particularly when I first tried to put the car in reverse and found that I couldn't (we later figured out that a lever on the shifter had to be lifted up while attempting to put the car in reverse). The other thing about driving in Ireland that's scary is that the roads are extremely narrow. Unless you're near a major city (and there aren't many), the roads are rarely straight, rarely actually wide enough to fit two cars, have many sections where you have to drive slow so that you don't hit an oncoming car in the other "lane" that you can't actually see, and have posted speed limits that no one in their right mind and/or not driving a race car would ever sanely attempt to approach. Needless to say, the fear was put in me before we were even a few minutes out of the airport parking lot, and my adrenaline levels remained high the rest of the time that we were in Ireland.
Our first stop was Kylemore Abbey, which was about 1.5 hours from the airport. This drive would take us through the Connemara, a national park that many people say is the top landscape destination in Ireland. Unfortunately, we hadn't researched this before making our itinerary, and thus all we did was drive through a small part of it. What we saw was pretty, though. The same can be said for most of the Irish countryside. Ireland is a beautiful country, with tons of bright green, rolling hills. As long as we're talking about all the green, this is probably a good place to mention why it's so green. It rarely stops raining in Ireland. Sunny skies are rare, and cloudy days are non-existent. I doubt Irish Gaelic even has a word for "dry". This would be a recurring theme throughout our time in Ireland, and I ended up having to declare the Irish weather the worst I've ever dealt with for a vacation. Unfortunate, but at the same time, I'm still glad that we went there, and I would go again. I would also not discourage other people from going; I would just warn them to take an umbrella or two.
Anyway, back to Kylemore Abbey. We got there right before it closed, so they let us in for a reduced price, which was nice because entry fees were expensive, as tends to be the case for just about everything in Ireland. We hurried and walked over to the chapel on the far end of the estate to have a look around. It was small, but pretty.
The lake on the property. This is the view from the front of the residence.
The chapel:
We then went over to the main residence to look around briefly. Kylemore is not an abbey in the true sense of the word; it was originally the home of a few wealthy families, and was later purchased by an order of nuns. So, what you see inside is more like a residence with a couple of religious aspects than the usual abbeys one sees in Europe, which are mostly religious structures with a few elements of regular living thrown in.
My favorite part about Kylemore was the area. The home and chapel are right next to a decent-sized lake in a mountainous area. Great scenery, and Kylemore would be a cool place to live, if a bit remote.
Our next stop would be the hotel. We finished at Kylemore later than I thought we would, and the town I had originally planned for us to visit after turned out to not be anything impressive, so we just drove through. Our hotel was located in Galway, a decent-sized city on the west coast. We never saw much of the town, but it didn't look like much to write home about. Our hotel had been described as close to the city center, but after we discovered that it would take us 25 minutes to walk from there to the city center, we opted to have dinner in the hotel's restaurant. The meal was decent, but very overpriced. I had some Irish lamb, and Becca had a chicken dish. I believe we also had sticky toffee pudding again. That's great stuff--try it if you ever have the chance. It's not actually pudding as we thinking of it. It's a type of soft cake with a caramel-like sauce dumped on it, and it's frequently served with ice cream.
That was the end of our first day in Ireland.
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