Meeting Bono... ;)

I have had an eventful few days since I last wrote on my blog. As you can see by the pictures, we have traveled to places extremely beautiful and learned a lot of stuff. Thursday we went to Glendalough which is situated in a valley of the Wicklow Mountains. The front of the valley holds 11th- 12th Century monastic settlement remains. This settlement was started by Saint Kevin. There are several interesting urban legends surrounding St. Kevin and this monastic settlement. One for example is that St. Kevin approaches the King of the Providence about a piece of land to build his settlement. The King not realizing that St. Kevin is a Saint agrees that if he heals a lame duck then he can have all of the land that the duck flies over. St. Kevin picks up the duck and throws him into the air and it takes off. The duck circles the Glendalough valley and comes back. The King sticks to his word and grants him the land. It was built long before the 11th century but until the 11th century wood was used to build the community and in the 11th century they began to use stone. After taking a tour of the monastic settlement remains we took a hike into the Wiclow Mountains. Beautiful beautiful beautiful!!

Friday afternoon we were given five Euro to visit two coffee shops by taking the DART to two different stops between Greystones and Dublin. My friend Bridget and I went together. We got off the DART at Booterstown because I thought the name sounded funny. We walked a little ways and couldn’t find a coffee shop. (We did find the Church of Ireland, it was so cool) So we stopped at a pastry shop to ask for directions to a coffee shop. The lady led us to a shopping center. We went into the first building we saw and looked around. We saw a McDonalds but no coffee shop until I looked up and saw people sitting on the second floor drinking out of coffee cups. I told Bridget we found a coffee shop. Come to find out it is located in the underwear section of this big department store. It was called Café Melt. Funny huh? Anyways, as we were leaving we saw a sign for the DART station. We followed the sign and it led us to a different DART station from which we had come, so that meant that we had walked into a different city altogether. We looked at the schedule for the DART and realized we would be able to get back in time if we got on the DART and found another stop. We decided to stay in Blackrock and find a coffee shop there. We did and when we approached it we saw another group of girls sitting there from Taylor. We stayed there and drank mango kiwi smoothies. Then we caught the DART and came back home.

The weekend was rather uneventful. I studied a lot. By Sunday I was ready to get out of here. I went to this really contemporary Church called Hillside. We sang songs we sing in America like “How Great is Our God” and “Open the Eyes of My Heart Lord”. After Church I decided to take a walk along the beach. It was a beautiful day! So many people were out with their doggies.

On Monday things got much better. We got to go on a hike up this mountain in Dalkey, Ireland. We got to take our pictures in front of Bono from U2’s house as well as Enya’s house. In fact when we raised our cameras over the tall fence to get better pictures of Enya’s house we realized there was a gardener working on the yard. Seeing it odd that twenty or so cameras were suddenly appearing above the fence the gardener began to smile for the pictures, only we didn’t know this until we decided to look at the pictures we took. Once we reached the top of the mountain the view was worth all the toil and sweat to get up the mountain. You could see the Irish Sea and the Wicklow mountains and sun rays were bursting through the clouds… so beautiful! A couple of us took pictures like we were Jack from the movie Titanic when he said, “I am King of the World!”

Today is kind of blah. It’s rainy, cold, and cloudy. So I think I’ll just stay in and study… tonight we are going to learn Irish Dance! YAY!