What kind of sheep are these? Irish.

My mom’s family, along with a good chunk of America, is Irish.  So coming to Ireland on this trip was not only for the tourism, but also for the pilgrimage.  We spent a week in counties Dublin and Galway, but my family is from counties Westmeath and Carlow.  Next time I have to go to my little landlocked counties, where it will be much less touristy.  Ireland was a good last stop on our trip because it is the most like home.  We heard American accents everywhere, and a lot of the architecture and feeling of the cities is similar to the US.  But we did experience the Ireland we were looking for, especially in the countryside of Galway.

me with the freshest Guinness possible, at the Dublin factory

The city of Galway is known for its lively arts and music scene, but it is also nearby to some of the most breathtaking scenery I have ever seen.  We were hoping to go out to some islands in the Atlantic for a bike ride, but it rained the entire week we were in Ireland, so the bike trip would have been miserable.  Instead we took a bus trip through the Connemara, a rugged district famous for its lakes and hills.  We had the choice of a few different bus trips, so I pointed to the one with a picture of sheep on the brochure.  And was I ever glad I did!  Irish sheep turned out to be the cutest thing on earth!  There are sheep with black faces and legs, but white fuzz, just like in the story books.  The sheep are marked with pink and blue dots in different places on their wool to distinguish which farmers they belong to.  Our bus driver, who told many cheesy jokes at which I laughed way too much, would ask us what kind of sheep they were.  As we thought about names of breeds, the bus driver would respond, “pink sheep” or “blue sheep.”  As the rain came down harder, he asked what kind of sheep were in the nearby field.  “Wet sheep,” he said.  Har har har.

Connemara has huge lakes, rolling hills, and Connemara ponies!

huge old friary that we got to wander through before it started raining

Kylemore Abbey, now used as a school but soon to be used only as a tourist spot

Another spectacular part of our Irish visit was the family that we got to spend it with.  Jon’s dad has a cousin who lives in Dublin, Hani.  Hani and his wife, Jean, have a super cute son named Nikolay.  The three of them represent the new Ireland; Hani is from Iraq, Jean from Ireland, and Nikolay from Russia.  The new Ireland, grown from the economic success in the past decade, means more diversity and wealth.  It was so interesting listening to Hani tell us about when he first arrived in Ireland thirty years ago, when it was still a poor country.  He entered into a place where people didn’t know what an Iraqi or a BMW looked like.  Today, Dublin is just like any other major European city, with people from all corners of the earth and signs of wealth everywhere.  But that doesn’t mean it will last; Ireland was hit particularly hard by the economic crisis, so it is yet to be seen what will happen to Ireland next.

at the complex of Dublin Castle

Eating way too much in Munich

When we arrived in Munich, we were surprised how quiet it was.  The other major German city I have been to is Berlin, which is very urban and loud and gritty.  But even though our hotel in Munich was across the street from the main train station and above a U-bahn stop, it was totally calm and peaceful.  Maybe that’s just southern Germany for you!  We fell in love with Munich instantly from its cheerful people and relaxed feeling.  At any and every hour you will see people enjoying a beer at a sidewalk cafe or munching on pretzels while they sit in the park.  I tried out some of my limited German language, and everyone appreciated the effort.

view over city hall and Marienplatz (the square)

After seeing the obligatory buildings and churches, we headed outside the old city to Olympic Park, where the 1972 games (and the terrorist attack) were held.  It’s now a huge lovely park where people ride bikes and go jogging and play soccer.  From the highest point in the park we could see the Alps in the distance.  The park also holds BMW World and Museum, where we oogled over the pretty cars and watched people do driving simulations.  So at this point, our Bavarian experience added up to soccer and cars.  What was missing?

Ah, yes: absurd amounts of sausage, pretzels and beer.  We were plenty taken care of at the Spring Festival, which is held for three weekends in April every year on the grounds of Oktoberfest.  They describe it as a small Oktoberfest, actually.  I haven’t been to that famed event, but this one was tons of fun and makes me want to join the party in October someday.  We ate meter-long wurst, drank liter-sized beers, and shared pretzels as big as our heads.  There were rides similar to ones we know from home, but they seemed to go on for twice as long, especially the one we rode on after eating a big meal. (I was not happy with that decision! But I made it out alive.)  Some girls were walking around with traditional German outfits, which I am determined to own someday.  There were two big tents at the festival where music played and people ate and drank.  One of the tents was clearly the party tent, as half the room had people jumping on the wooden tables.  As hard as we tried, there wasn’t any room for us to sit at that tent, so we gave up and sat in the boring tent instead.

the ceiling of the main hall at Nymphenburg Palace

One of the things I love to look for while traveling is the level of livability in the cities we visit.  Munich seems like an incredibly livable city, with tons of green space and pedestrian-friendly areas.  We chose to come to Munich just because we wanted to see the city, unlike the rest of our European destinations, which are mostly to visit people who live there.  And I’m so glad we did – Ich liebe München!

Jon with the giant beer at Hofbrauhaus

Sand in your pita, sand in your ear

Our time in the Middle East was very different from the rest of this trip.  Instead of carting our bags across a country every few days and spending hours walking around cities, we stayed with my Aunt Lenny and Uncle Joe in the middle of the desert outside of Abu Dhabi.  We ventured out either by taking road trips with them, or by hiring a taxi to take us to a destination or two in the city.  It was very relaxing, very hot, and very culturally challenging.  I had to get over the heat and keep my shoulders covered out of respect for local dress.  Almost every woman we saw in public (which is not many — some areas you will not see any women at all) was completely covered in black.  These outfits, called abayas, at first made me uncomfortable since I could not see their faces.  But after a day or two, I got used to them, and I started noticing the high heels they wore underneath, or the flash of gold jewelry, or the designer handbags swinging off their arms.  This is unique to the wealthy country of the United Arab Emirates, for sure, but these women were not suffering underneath those robes — except maybe from the heat — but instead they were the most elite.

me at Abu Dhabi's Grand Mosque -- yes it was really hot in that dress

The craziest thing about the UAE (beyond the construction EVERYWHERE) was the lack of contact with the locals.  Over a two-week period, we never spoke to an Emirati.  That’s because anyone who works in hotels, shops, etc, are from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, or other Arab countries.  Locals only make up 20% of the entire national population, and they are taken care of by the government so that they don’t have jobs that are below them (like pushing the baby carriage at the mall — that job is reserved for Philippina nannies.)  We did get to see where the locals lived on our fun drives along the coast of Abu Dhabi — huge palaces with multiple sets of gates and lots of very unnatural greenery.  And we got to spend a lot of time at the local hangouts: THE MALLS.  Oh, the malls.  Fake thunderstorms, ski lifts, aquariums: I could go on and on!  There are so many other strange things we learned about how the UAE works — the laws that don’t really apply to everyone, the way decisions are made — thanks to my aunt and uncle’s knowledge from living in Abu Dhabi almost one year.  It really gave me a great perspective on how the opposite of a democracy works.

Uncle Joe and I with our fancy drinks at the Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi

So beyond all the cultural modifications like wearing a fake wedding ring when Jon and I were out alone, we did some neat touristy things, too.  In Abu Dhabi we went for tea at the spectacular Palace Hotel, lounged on the “family” beach, ate tons of hummus and tabuleh, covered up at the Grand Mosque, and met camels both wild and domesticated.  In Dubai we saw the tallest building in the world (Burj Dubai) and the craziest hotel in the world (Burj al Arab) and were part of one of the last audiences of Dubai’s Cirque du Soleil.  We traveled to Al Ain, a smaller city in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, to see their museums and oasis.  Our most Arabian adventure was to the Liwa, a part of western UAE with a group of oasis towns surrounded by rolling sand dunes.  Jon got to fullfil his dream of running up enormous sand dunes and then rolling down them (I have video).  He had sand in his ears for days afterward.  We picnicked on the dunes and ingested lots and lots of sand.

Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai, changing colors through the night

farmer and his camels, right before asking us if he can come back to america with us

When we were in the Empty Quarter of UAE, we were about ten miles from the border of Saudi Arabia.  Nothing scares me more than actually going to Saudi, but the fact that I can get that close is pretty cool.  Instead of crossing that border, we decided to take a couple days to explore the capital of Oman: Muscat.  What a beautiful country!  Oman sits on the Gulf and is full of mountains and rolling desert.  Muscat is a quiet city with lots of old white buildings and a big, pretty palace.  It is ruled by a sultan who everyone adores, because the country has come so far in the past few decades.  We walked along the harbor and through the 1000-year-old bazaar.  We stayed in a mostly-Indian neighborhood where there was not one tourist to be seen.  After only a few days there, we decided we must return to Oman to see the rest of the country.  Beyond Muscat, there are coral reefs, sea turtles, and many other historic cities and fishing villages.  Oman is my new secret awesome place, so don’t tell anyone!

along the port in Muscat with the mountains coming right up to the street

beautiful gardens by the Sultan's Palace in Muscat

Beijing: Where do I even begin?

We spent 13 days in Beijing, the longest time spent in any one city on our entire trip.  You’d think that would be plenty of time — I did — but it was no where near enough.  When I first stepped off the train at Beijing Station, I wasn’t too impressed.  We had just come from tiny Tai An, with the majestic Tai Shan mountain looming above us, and Beijing was so flat and crowded.  Before that we had been in Nanjing, which charms you instantly with its canals and decorative lights; and Shanghai, with its dazzling European architecture.  Beijing just seemed very bland compared what we had just come from.  But the longer I spent in Beijing, the more I fell in love with it.  It doesn’t have an impressive skyline or body of water.  It doesn’t have lots of trees or grass.  It’s hard to even cross the street; there are pedestrian bridges over all the huge boulevards throughout the city.  But all of that is overshadowed by the amazing combination of history and modernity that I think defines Beijing.

We stayed in a hostel set deep into a hutong, which is the traditional Beijing housing style that used to cover the city.  Now, many hutongs have been razed to make room for high-rises.  A hutong is basically a collection of alleyways filled with one-story grey homes.  Our hutong was also filled with lots of clothing shops, fruit stands, and the people who sell stuff on sticks (everything from hearts to scorpions to chicken wings).  But our hutong also had a giant movie theater that was showing Slumdog Millionaire, which reminded me that I was not really in old Beijing.  About a ten minute walk from our hutong was Wangfujing Street, one of the few walking streets in Beijing and a center of shopping, eating, and seeing massive Chinese tour groups with matching hats.

Another ten minutes walking from there, you hit the walls of the Forbidden City and the concrete of Tiananmen Square.  What I will remember most about the Forbidden City is the tour groups, and the relief that I was not visiting Beijing during “tourist season,” because I cannot imagine being surrounded by MORE tour groups (all Chinese).  The city was beautiful, but it was enormous, and I went in thinking I could see it all.  Nope.  Tiananmen Square, the largest public square in the world, was smaller than I anticipated, but I think that’s because my imagination is just too big.  What I will remember most there is the number of Chinese tourists (meaning non-Beijingers) who had their pictures taken with me, Gina, and Arselie (my American friends who met us in Beijing, who have lighter hair than mine).  They spoke no English, and would just approach us with their camera and a big smile, and then pose with a peace sign next to us as their friends took a few photos.  At first we giggled about it, but it happened so much that it ended up feeling normal.

The most spectacular experience for me was visiting the Great Wall.  We went to a section called Mutianyu, where the wall is less-touristed.  There were many parts on the wall where we were the only group of people we could see!  The Great Wall is absolutely the most amazing thing I have ever seen, and I want to visit more and more sections of it and hike as long as I can.  There is no way to really describe how awesome it is.  I mean, it looks just like the photos.  But you can actually stand on it.  And that just blew my mind.  We also picked Mutianyu for a very silly, but really fun reason: They have a slide.  Yes, a slide.  We slid down the mountain from the Great Wall.  Cheesy?  Maybe.  But I SLID  DOWN the mountain from the Great Wall!

There was so much to do in Beijing, we didn’t even see all that we had planned on.  We spent a lot of time at the many parks and small lakes that scatter the city.  The parks are filled with pagodas, decorative gates, and willow trees that make every photo look like a painting.  We also spent a lot of time EATING.  I tried so many new things in Beijing, and every time I was happy.  No, I didn’t eat the scorpions or the brains, but I did eat lotus root, bamboo shoots, tofu skins, Peking duck, and lots and lots of tea and pastries.  After all the delicious tea I’ve had in China, I don’t think I’ll ever like tea in America quite as much.  We ate hotpot often, which is when you order a bunch of raw foods and put them into a pot of boiling broth in the middle of the table, and then everybody eats out of there.  The most fun food experiences were with my Chinese friends, Xiaocong, Yu, and Lili.  I met Xiaocong and Yu in Copenhagen when we were all studying abroad there.  I told them I would visit them in Beijing someday, and I meant it.  We kept in touch for four years, and they made my time in Beijing a million times more wonderful.  All three of them are journalists, so they are very vocal about the problems and changes in today’s China.

I could write forever on Beijing: Olympic Park, the Summer Palace, Chairman Mao’s pickled body, 798 art district, the markets, the Tibetan Lama temple, the cheap taxis and extensive subway, the streets lined with red lanterns, and the people just wanting to practice their English with us.  What Beijing taught me the most is that I need to spend more time in China.  My month in the giant country was like being in a parallel universe: So much was familiar, but everything was a bit off.  Nothing was ever easy, from catching buses to ordering food, but nothing was too hard to not enjoy.  Wherever we went, we were entertaining to the locals just by being in their country.  The language was incredibly difficult, but by the end of the month I had picked up enough phrases and characters to feel good about myself.  If you love the feeling of being in a totally different place where everything is new and confusing, go to China.  And if you get too lonely, there are plenty of expats (around 300,000) to be your friends.  Hey, maybe I’ll be one someday.

Now we’re in Abu Dhabi, and my laptop isn’t connecting to the Internet.  That’s why this post has no photos in it.  I’ll keep trying to work on it, but most likely I won’t be able to post Beijing photos for a couple weeks.  They’ll eventually be on facebook, where all of my other China photos are now.

Lonely mountain in Tai An

Before the biggest city of Beijing, we decided to go to a very small city, Tai An, to climb the holy mountain of Tai Shan.  We took an overnight train from Nanjing to Tai An, which was an adventure in itself.  We slept in little rooms with two bunk beds that had three bunks each.  Our cheap tickets got us the top top bunks, so we got super cosy with the ceiling and tried not to fall eight feet down to the ground as the train bumped its way north through China.

China has a lot of interesting public service announcement posters, like this one in Tai An

We arrived early in the morning to Tai An and went straight to a “fancy” hotel, the Tai Shan Grand Hotel.  It was huge and looked like at one point it was grand, but now it’s very worn and VERY empty.  We got our room for half price because March is extreme low-season for them.  The draw of Tai An is the holy mountain of Tai Shan, the most sacred of five Taoist peaks in China.  Twice a year the city fills up with people who climb the mountain, but the rest of the year it’s pretty calm.  I don’t think many non-Chinese tourists ever come to Tai An, though, because we got stared at by every single person in the town.  My favorite moment was when I was walking back from a bakery and I passed by three old women sitting around a little table on the sidewalk.  They stared, and I smiled and said “ni hao” (hello).  One of the women went wide-eyed and exclaimed “NI HAO!” with a huge smile on her face, shocked that I had spoken words she understood.  If there is one thing I will remember most about China it is the constant wonder that we bring to the Chinese, just by being in their country.

Tai Shan, the mountain we did not climb, with the temple below

When we arrived in Tai An, Jon came down with his first case of traveler’s diarrhea, something that we were told would have happened much earlier in our trip.  It wasn’t horrible, but it was bad enough that climbing a mountain was out of the question.  So the lonely mountain stayed lonely as we hung out in the town below, where really the only thing to do was visit the Confucian temple.  We have visited A LOT of temples in Asia, which I guess is equivalent to seeing lots of cathedrals in Europe.  We saw the elaborate wats in Thailand and Laos, and now we are seeing an extremely different style in China, the simple Confucian temples.  My favorite part of the Confucian temples are the giant dragon tortoises, which carry poems on their backs.  The only real difference I can see between a tortoise and a dragon tortoise is that the dragon tortoises have scary faces with big fangs.  But that makes them cool enough for me.

dragon tortoise!!!!!!!!!

Since we had an extra day left over from not climbing Tai Shan, we took a quick bus ride down to the town of Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius and the site of his most important temple.  The city’s wall is completely in tact and surrounded by a moat, and less than 80,000 people live in the entire city, making it the smallest city we would visit in China.  The temple is peaceful and takes up a huge part of the old city, and we spent a long time wandering through its many buildings.  Outside the temple we felt closer to Southeast Asia than we had felt in a long time.  Qufu (pronounced chuh-fuh) has bustling small-town charm and gives the feeling that most of what you see has not changed in a really long time.

The wall to Qufu, leading to Confucius's temple and home