Ireland

Three weeks after our Christmas break, it was time for another break...this time a week off to mark the end of the first semester.  I could really get used to all these days off!  This break is basically ski week for all of Austria.  In fact, so many people go skiing during this break that they must stagger the semester break for each part of Austria over three weeks so that the slopes are overloaded with skiers.  This time, we broke tradition and headed off to Ireland instead of hitting the slopes.  Our good friend John has been living and working in Galway since November.

I was so excited about this trip and it sure didn't let me down.  We arrived in Dublin on Friday and met up with John.  We spent Saturday enjoying the beautiful weather as we walked through the city, enjoying all it has to offer.  For lunch, we grabbed some fantastic fish and chips and then headed to the Guinness brewery to top it off with a pint.  We couldn't have asked for a better day and we sipped our pints on top of the Guinness brewery with a 360 degree view of Dublin.  We then headed off for Galway for the next leg of our journey.
The Aran Islands are a group of islands off the coast near Galway.  John says its probably his favorite place on earth.  That's all the endorsement I needed to hop on board a ferry and head out there.  We spent Sunday and Monday on Inishmore, the largest of the islands but still small enough to explore by bike.  These islands are very remote and only in the summer are they bustling with tourists.  Being in there in February gave us a great feel for the remoteness of the islands and the slow Irish lifestyle led by the inhabitants.  In this part of Ireland, the Irish language is still holding on and is spoken by the natives.  The weather was perfect again (a miracle I thought considering it was February in Ireland).  We biked to various rock forts built 3,000 years ago, walked through fields with goats and horses and crawled up to ocean cliffs dropping hundreds of feet below us.  It was spectacular!!!  The pictures don't do justice but they give an idea of what it was like.

Monday night we headed back to Galway and on Tuesday we got to explore the town a bit more.  Our final night was spent at a local pub listening to students from the university playing traditional Irish music.  As we headed back to Dublin, we enjoyed the Irish countryside once more before boarding the plane to Vienna.