Ready? BREAK

Ireland:

Night one in Dublin. Our priority--eating. Had to do a lot of sweet talking, but I got the girls to agree to eat here. Best food I had in Ireland. Could be related to that bit of food poisoning I had after dinner the next night. Anyway, this place was good on night 1


Day 2:
Off to tour the countryside on a beautiful day

The Wicklow Mountains!

PS I Love You film location. This is the spot where they "meet". Meg and I tried to recreate it

We got to get off the bus and do some exploring of the hills ourselves. It was incredible but starting to get a little cold.



When we got back, it was dinner time. We went to an Italian restaurant. I must have had a motherly instinct about the place because I immediately didn't want to go. And I even wasn't going to order anything off of the menu until our waitress read the menu off. The pasta special sounded like the only good thing on the menu. Two hours later, I felt a little weird. 1 AM or so, I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Then I threw up 6 or 7 more times until we decided maybe I should go to the emergency room. So, one anti-nasuea needle, 3 hours waiting and a 250 Euro bill later...(and one last trip to bathroom to vomit) and i was feeling better. We got back at 8 or 9 AM and had planned to do the walking tour the next day at noon. Halfway through the tour I decided I needed to go back to the room and just sleep it off. I ended up not missing much because of the weather and by the time the girls got back I was feeling better. But I am swearing of food from Dublin for the rest of eternity. Unless its from the Bad Ass Cafe.

So, that was....Day 3!

Day 4!

St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin



Guinness Factory where we learned how to pour the perfect cup of Guinness


View from the very top of the Guinness Factory

Walking home to pack and get ready for SPAIN!

Remember Remember the 5th of November

Fei's Birthday is the same day as Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot of 1605 (V for Vendetta...you know?) Anyway Nov 5 is a national holiday called Bonfire Day where they set off fireworks EVERYWHERE. And although the fireworks are set off EVERYWHERE, they aren't set off anywhere near Central London so from where we were standing (Tower Bridge) we could see faint semblances of 3 or 4 different firework shows in the distance.

Dinner Tapas and Sangria (preparing for our fall break trip to Spain!)





Tower Bridge for the fireworks, where Meg dropped her visor into the River Thames!






The birthday visors (very nice, how much?)





Piccadilly Circus for dessert!!


yum yum yum


Is it really almost Christmas? Not really...

Taryn!

Taryn was here, Taryn was here!! It was the best time ever especially her last day when Emily could play with the three of us :)

Day 1!
First we picked Tar and Jon Baker up at the airport in London and brought T back to our flat. Then off we went! To:

Hyde Park:






























Where we did a tour of Kensington Palace:
















It really is pretty big.



















And inside of Kensington Palace were a couple of exhibits. First, Princess Diana's Royal Dress Collection:


This one was my favorite



















Compared to what they used to wear in the old days:





















The other exhibit was on Debutante balls! They stopped officially holding the ceremonies sometime in the 1950s I think. But, the exhibit taught us how to tie bow-ties, how to Waltz, walk in a straight line with correct posture, and some other ridiculous things. All of which we attempted. We were pretty good at all of them except we all failed miserably at the bow-tie thing. Luckily, we're girls.


























That night we took Taryn to Central London to see everything lit up. We also did the London Eye which was fantastic.
































Big Ben from Ground Level and from the London Eye! We kept walking down Southbank and stopped to eat at Gabe's Wharf before coming back to our flat and going to The Rocket to show Tar what college bars are like :)

Day 2!

Meg and Tar did Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Changing of the Guards etc togetther in the morning. Later, we met up with them at Tower Hill to walk across the Tower Bridge and eat out our favorite fish & chips stop.












We started the the Tower of London with our tour guide, Marcel. He's my favorite of all tour guides we've had yet. Here we heard about the torture and imprisonment that used to happen in the Tower of London. After a couple of ghost stories, we headed off to to the Ancient Roman Wall, St. Catherine's Dock, etc etc.

We kept hearing crazy stories of the Plague, and even saw the spot where they buried the 90,000 victims (to the left). Also, did you know that the word Spital became HOspital after someone decided to add "holy" in front of it?


But the reason we initially wanted to do this was because it's called the Jack the Ripper tour. Meg and I love Jack the Ripper (the history of it, not the guy) because we saw an episode of Criminal Minds before coming to London about a copy-cat and we've been interested by him since. Jack the Ripper was not his real name, he was actually called the White Chapel Murder....this is the White Chapel. Churches used to be prime places to pick up prostitutes (alliteration much?) and Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes just around the corner from here. Did we go there? Yes we did. We stood on the cobblestones where he murdered his last victim. And did they ever find him? No, they never did. Because forensics sucked in the 1800s.

And to keep with the theme of misery....we went to Les Mis! Which was wonderfully done and we were super impressed. PS. Taryn is wearing my clothes. Nothing has changed, even in Europe.

So, Les Mis, dinner, O'Neills!

And yes, I dressed Taryn. Like I said, this aspect of our relationship will never change :)





































Taryn on her first double-decker bus!! I'm pretty sure she hates this picture but I'll leave that for future Nirvana to deal with.



Day 3!

Chelsea Stadium where we took a lot of extremely odd pictures. They have a photo wall going down the perimeter of the entrance where you can pose with images of the players. Um, they should really consider making those down at Buckingham with the royal fam.

I should mention Day 3 was also Halloween. Meg hates Halloween so we just wore witch hats and went out to Zoo Bar in Leicester Square.




So much for maturing during college...













Past & Present photos hahaha.

Day 4!

Emily Beyer comes to the market with us! BruCru reunited :)

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Dinner at Giraffe's. Coolest restaurant ever. Yummiest brunch ever.






Skype date with our favorites!

Tar left the next morning :( But I can't wait for the Spring when we're all back together again.

Reality

I hate homework. It's just a draft of a paper that's due. But they don't believe in structure here which means I'm totally guessing as to how this paper is supposed to look AND what's really annoying is that I know my topic well enough to write a dissertation on it but it won't matter because without GUIDANCE it's going to look like a blob. A giant pool of a blob.

In other news, three days til Taryn! And I still really don't want to leave London ever, but I have to book my ticket from SD to DC. So weird...

Pictures from Scotland:


Edinburgh, Day 1. View of New Town from Old Town



Holyroodhouse Palace!

Scottish Parliament. Totally different from British Parliament.
Thing. With crests.
Bagpipes guy!

Our tour guide, Owen. He's from Canada. The steps behind him are preserved from back in the day when people use trick steps as a form of home security.

View of Edinburgh from the Edinburgh Castle (yes another castle in the same city). It was gorgeous that day!

The Edinburgh grave yard where JK Rowling frequented for inspiration. Here is Tom Riddle's grave, he was a real person!

The restaurant JK Rowling spent everyday in, writing her first two novels. We ate dinner there that night.

Beautiful.

The crew in front of the Edinburgh Castle.

Building.

The table in The Elephant House that JK sat at everyday while she wrote.

Hostel. Reminiscent to the hotel I first stayed in when I went to New York with the littles. This speaks for itself.


These pictures are from Day 2 in Scotland where we went around the country on a 12-hour bus tour:

Stop #1: Pitlochry. Cute little town that pretty much looks like this up and down the one main street. Meg decided she could totally spend the rest of her life here.

We took lots of pictures outside our windows. This one's blurry but you can imagine that it was amazing. This is when we started entering the Highlands...I think.

Stop #2: "Loch" means "Lake" and there are a million of them in Scotland. This was the first one we stopped at!

Stop #3: All the next pictures are at Loch Ness!! We did NOT find the monster :(


They really just made the Loch Ness Monster into some cute little pet, like a big worm.

Stop #4: Three Sisters Mountain
This is one of the sisters, the other two are on either side of it. They were HUGE and there was no way to get all three of them into one camera frame. I even crossed the other side of the freeway to try!

I'm an awful human and told Fei I would tell her how to pose to make it look like she was climbing on top of the mountain. It took her WAY too long to realize I was messing with her haha.
We felt like taking "epic" poses.

Stop #5: Whiskey Capitol, Scotland
Free drinks anyone?

Stop #6: Hamis the famous "coo"!!
We were cold and tired to say the least. Which was great since this was our last stop before returning back to Edinburgh. Fei went to dinner with a friend from school who was studying abroad in Scotland while the rest of us had dinner at some place that was not DEACON BRODY'S like I begged. No one listens to me. (Deacon Brody was the real inspiration of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde) Whatever.

Then we got back to London. And showered. Be thankful you didn't run into us between those two things.