Oops, I did it again.

My greatest travel story ever has to be from Buenos Aires, two and a half years ago.  It was H's birthday, but as we were getting up really early the next day to head to Uruguay, we had a fairly early night and didn't drink too much.  The next thing I remember, I'm having a weird dream about walking naked
in the hallway. I really, really have to pee and it's really bright. I
start walking down the hall outside our room until I see a guy in
uniform (hotel employee) down the hall and I stop and walk back. It is
then that I realize that this is not a dream. I am actually walking down the hall in Buenos Aires naked.  As I start to wake up, and the horror of the reality sets in, I start
banging on our door to be let in. H is sleeping soundly and I'm
vaguely aware that the guy is asking me if I need some help and I tell
him this is my room. He didn't come very close, but I'm sure he saw
plenty.  Finally I hear our room phone ringing and H saying that yes, there is
someone knocking on the door and he will go answer it, but his first reaction was apparently, "Yes, there is someone knocking on the door, could you make them go away please?"  I get back in bed and we go back to sleep, I pray that
this is just a dream and I will laugh about it in the morning. Next day
arrives, and nope, it was no dream.  As far as I can explain, I must have been sleep walking, which I have
never done in my life, and must have gotten up to go to the bathroom
and opened the wrong door. What boggles me is how I did this asleep, as
the door was heavy and probably deadbolted from inside. I was grateful
that we were checking out that day and no one was giggling at me in the
lobby, but I'm sure the story got around. It has to be the most random
thing that has ever happened to me and every time we think
about it, we crack up laughing. H said to me, "You realize that's
most people's worst nightmare, right?"  Fortunately it was the middle of the night, as a few hours later an entire tour group was getting up to check out and the hallway would have been crowded with people.

As I said, I'd never to my knowledge sleep walked before and I never did it again.  Until Portrush.  After we left the pub that night, I remember getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.  This time, I had the presence of mind to put on my fleece, but, uh, nothing else. Though our bedroom had an en-suite bathroom and I was unable to unlock the door even wide awake, I remember going out of the room and down the stairs.  Somehow, I found a bathroom not attached to a bedroom, and went back to bed.  The next morning, I told H that I was fairly certain that I had sleep walked again.  He thought it was just a dream, due to my recollection of the events and the fact that I opened the door and re-locked it.  As we went down to breakfast, I noticed a hallway with several doors separating it from the main part of the house, a hallway we had never been in.  I told him, "I bet you that there is a bathroom in that hallway, separate from a bedroom."  Guess what?  There was.  Fortunately, this time no one was a witness and no one at breakfast looked at me in sheer horror or threw me out.  But again, we were fortunately about to check out, and I hightailed it out of there before anyone asked any questions. 

Maybe I should start packing pajamas?

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Day 6: Death-defying Antrim Coast

So…I left off at the Carrick a Rede rope bridge and my imminent death.  Actually approaching the bridge and seeing how high it was above the water, I started to get quite a bit nervous, but I was determined to do it.  The guide/ticket collector told me it took her several days of trying before she could cross it and not it ain't no thing.  My strategy involved: no other people on the bridge to make it bounce, looking straight ahead and not down or to my sides, and a low center of gravity.  To wit:

I literally shook like a leaf when I got to the other side, and it took awhile to get the feeling back in my legs, I was so freaked out.  It is gorgeous on the other side, but I would just assumed see it from the other side and not cross the bridge again.

Getting ready to go back was almost worse, knowing how it really was.  H insisted on going first so he could photograph my face for later mocking.  Bastard.

But I did it!  A small step for most people, but a giant leap for me.  Speaking of giants, we pressed on to the Giant's Causeway, another supercool feature of the Antrim Coast.  Photos speak more than my description:

It was after 5pm and we had no hotel room, so we decided to head to Portrush for the night, a resort town on the coast rather than drive further to Derry.  Portrush is pretty but nothing too exciting, but we did see this cool abandoned castle on the way.  The story is that the kitchen fell into the ocean in the middle of dinner.  It's also on a Led Zeppelin cover!


Arrived in Portrush, where after 4 or 5 tries, we found a room for 50 pounds with a sea view at the Ramona Lodge.  Portrush is a cute harbor town with a lot of nauticalness:


We ended up making more sandwiches in our room and avoiding have dinner out, but we did go to a great pub that was tiny and most untouristy:


We spent the evening drinking pints and watching a fascinating program about home makeovers, one of those when someone British comes over and yells at your housekeeping, but you get it together and make dinner for your girlfriend and you get a crown and a ceremony!  Fun!  Then some local boys came in and complained about the TV, so we watched American COPS again and they asked us if it was really like that in the states.  Not having been busted for running a meth lab, I can't say, but it was another surreal moment.  We made friends with one guy, Dave, who goes by Booger and is horrified that his sister has just become a cop in Northern Ireland.  Here's me and Booger:


His shirt "Zoo York" is a Yankees tee, not some racist comment as I feared.  We were invited out with Booger's peeps to a nightclub, but decided to make it an early night, perhaps to our detriment.  Good times, though!

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Happy Birthday to me

My sister, stenciler extraordinaire, made this shirt for my birthday last week:

It's pretty awesome, as you can see.  I wore it in Baltimore this weekend and got a lot of funny looks.  Several mothers glared at me at a rest stop in New Jersey, not sure if it was because I was exposing their children to profanity or blasphemy of Harry Potter.

Back to Ireland in a bit.

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Day 6: Mo’ Northern Ireland

Our first stop out of Belfast was the charming town of Glenarm, where we stopped for food and ATM.  Very picturesque:

Cool old cemetery:


Lacking any sort of place to get food to go, we bought bread and sandwich things and I fashioned some sandwiches in the car.  We also succeeded in setting up my iPod so that we could listen to some music rather than more obscure talk radio, so I had the surreal experience of listening to Snoop Dogg's P.I.M.P. while sitting in the car on a street like this (actually, I think that little red car is ours):

Sandwiched up, we got back on the road.  Here's what our view looked like most of the time:


Next stop was the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge.  Now, I have a pretty decent fear of heights, but I was assured by many that it was "not that bad" and as long as there weren't other people shaking the bridge, it felt pretty steady.  I was confident that I could do it, as long as I threated bodily harm to any people who looked like they might shake the bridge while I was on it.  You have to walk about a kilometer to get to the bridge from the car park, and the views were amazing.  This is Sheep Island, which begged the question: Can sheep swim?  Consensus: yes, if they have to, but not that well.

Clearly, I'm alive to tell the tale, but I haven't time now to do so, as I'm late to go somewhere. For now, I'll leave a taste of what's in store:

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Day 6: Northern Ireland

Before leaving Belfast, we decided to have a stroll around the (amazingly stinky) river and check out East Belfast, where we saw, wait for it…more murals!



Another peace line:

Guess what this is?  Not a fortress or a prison, it's just a police station, and we saw many in Northern Ireland that looked like this:


Nearly the opposite of West Belfast, the Protestant area of East Belfast was more cheerful than the Catholic section, but again, not at all scary.

The cranes that helped build the Titanic. They are called Samson and Goliath:

If you need more mural photos (and who doesn't?!), I made a handy dandy set of them.

On our way out of the city (actually, it was the opposite direction, but not far from Belfast), we went to the awesome Ulster Transport Museum.  With tons of old cars, trains, motorcycles, and some Titanic stuff, I called it the zoo for boys, but actually I was more excited to go than H!  I took a gazillion photos of everything, which proved less interesting when I looked at them later, but here are some highlights:

The De Lorean, another Belfast product, looks way uglier in person.  Ah, the 80s, they thought it looked really cool:

Cute recreation of a train station newsstand:

Thought this was cool and a bit dangerous:

Funny diorama of the Night Bus, the late night bus that traditionally takes all the drunkies home.  See, the old ladies are all shocked and disapproving, the dude on the left is having smoke and the woman next to him is checking out her ripped stockings:

More neat things:



For the Deadwood fans:

We spent far too long at the museum, but it was a really fun outing and got us wondering why no one is making cool cars anymore.  What happened to the bubble car and other odd but fun designs?  Why do Europeans have so many more cool tiny cars than Americans?  We saw cars there that made the Mini Cooper look like an SUV. 

We planned to drive up the Antrim coast, loosely following the route taken by my esteemed former colleague, and land somewhere for the night in either Portrush or Londonderry.  If I had it all to do again, we would have spent more time enjoying the glens of Antrim and the coast, rather than just trying to get from point A to point B before dark.

Paranoid I might lose this, so posting…

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Computer says no

*I spent much of the past weekend watching seasons 2 and 3 of Little Britain, so I must reference the bank/travel agent sketch.*

Husband and I are already looking forward to taking a vacation around Christmas, when our offices are closed.  We have $1000 in American Airlines vouchers, 160k Marriott points, and 40k Starwood points.  H wants to go somewhere warm, even though we are not resort people and I know we will get bored lying on the beach for a week, surrounded by other fat Americans, drinking watered down drinks, and being captive to the resort restaurant.  But, as H points out, it would be something different and thus sort of exotic for us.  Naturally, every other moron wants to go somewhere warm for Christmas, so airfares are sky high, hotel rates are exorbitant, and you have to pay double points at any warm-weather Marriott to override blackout dates.  I just don't want to clean out both hotel point accounts to go to Puerto Rico and be subjected to gaggles of children and resort entertainers.  I remember staying a few days in Miami a few years ago at a resort and trying to eat dinner while an overly enthusiastic fat man shimmied at me and sang "Hot! Hot! Hot!" on his headset microphone.  *Shudder*

I have advocated the opposite of warm, and want to go to Europe. I've never been to Paris, and fares are relatively cheap to Belgium.  I'm suggesting going to Brussels and taking the train to Paris, Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges.  I've heard the Belgian cities (well, other than Brussels) are really cool and interesting, and we can use hotel points at the standard rate for most nights.  It'll be much less touristy, albeit cold, but sorta Christmassy and festive.  H is unmoved by the articles I send him about how cool Belgium is, as it will be seriously cold, but no colder than New York, as I point out.

I'm still not over my near coup for tickets to Istanbul.  Last week, Alitalia had an inexplicable fare sale *business class* (and I'm a total slut for business class) to Istanbul over Christmas for about $500 each!  It was only up for a few hours and by the time I tried to book it, it was gone, with no trace that it ever existed.  Damn, really should have gone for it, though Istanbul isn't exactly warm in December, I would have gone!  We are thinking we'd like to go to Turkey next year, but maybe in early summer when we can go to the beach there.

Stay tuned to this riveting drama to find out where we end up…

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Yet more Day 5: Belfast

I will finish this part of the recap if it kills me.  Lessee, I was last in West Belfast, yes?  After our self-styled tour, we took a bus down to the university area.  We went to Lisburn Road, the supposed Fifth Avenue of Belfast.  It's cute, rather like Park Slope, but underwhelming.  Maybe we didn't walk far enough.

We did find a really lovely park with amazingly clean public restrooms:

The University area is quite nice, with tons of pubs and beautiful archicture, as well as a botanical garden:


We ended up at a massive pub with a beer garden and a bathroom dispenser with not only condoms and lip gloss, but thongs for purchase as well (I wonder what the market is for that, for women who forgot to wear any or suddenly fancied a change?)!  We sat in the beer garden and started talking to a very nice but very drunk, self-loathing, gay man from Derry/Londonderry.  We hadn't a clue what he was saying half the time, but he was very friendly, if a bit maudlin.  He did advise us as to what cheap off-brand of cigarettes were most palatable, a useful tip when most brands cost $10 US.

On the advice of the drunken Derryman, we headed over to the very promisingly named Sailorstown in search of the Rotterdam Bar, which apparently still has outdoor toilets, live music, and booze.  An honest-to-goodness dive bar, nothing fancy, not for the squeamish.  We could not wait!  I've read that it used to be a holding pen for prisoners enroute to Australia.  If something involves prison, you have my attention.  Sailorstown is pretty bleak and run down, we were there just before dusk, and I wouldn't advise wandering around there after dark, but it's really interesting. Sort of a hard core Red Hook, with old drunks instead of hipsters:

There was an amazing abandoned church down the street which is fortunately being renovated and not being razed for luxury loft condos or some shit:

However, much to our chagrin, the Rotterdam was closed.  An old man standing outside a nearby bar told me the roof had caved in, but I see that it is going to be reopened.  Will have to go back!  With the development all over the city and the authentic character of the neighborhood just aching to be exploited, I'm sure they'll be bitching about IKEA Sailorstown next time.

As much as we wanted to sample one of the seedy bars in the area, it was getting dark and there were no signs of food in Sailorstown, so we hotfooted it back to the Cathedral District, walking under highways and passing empty lots and surly teenagers up to no good.  There's probably a nicer way to walk to the docks, but we didn't find it.  For dinner, we ended up across the street from our hotel, to the awesome Potthouse, which is very clubby and hip, but has an amazing deal for two courses for two people and a bottle of wine for 25 pounds!  Good deal, and good food.  We had the odd experience of watching music videos with entirely different music playing over them while we ate.  We were pretty much the only customers in the restaurant:


It was pouring rain like the end of the world when we left the restaurant, so we went across the street to the Cloth Ear, the public house bar of the Merchant Hotel.  It's a really cool bar, a successful mix of traditional pub and modern bar:

I was thoroughly impressed with the bathrooms, the ladies' has freaky mannequin heads in the stalls and photos on the door which I took a ton of photos of:


The men's room has robots, apparently:

Next up: Mo' murals and peace lines, and the transport museum!  Whee!

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“Who the hell is this Harry Potter asshole?”*

We interrupt our regularly scheduled travel talk to rant about Harry Potter mania.  When I got off the train this morning at Union Square at 8:30am, the Barnes & Noble hosting a midnight release party already had a line two blocks long!  Of. Adults!  I've never read a HP book, but I'm told they are quite good.  A good  friend of mine just wrote this about HP books, which is rather convincing, but then again, she is a lawyah!  Also enjoyed this blog post this morning, at least they have the good sense to be embarrassed about reading kid books.

*The above quote comes from none other than my father, a man of few but all well-considered words.  He said this to my mother a few years ago, when HP mania first began, and I have repeated it with delight many times since.  I can recall telling it to someone in an East Village bar years ago, who told me I could make a million dollars if I put it on a t-shirt.  I was positively gobsmacked (yes, I've been looking for an opportunity to use that word) to find a t-shirt with that very phrase in a London market last summer.  I was too angry and confused to buy one or inquire as to the origin of the phrase, but I blame globalization.  Be careful what you say in bars, there may be some enterprising Brit just waiting to steal your idea. 

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Day 5: West Belfast: Murals! Murals! Murals!

As I mentioned before, everyone says you *have* to take a Black Taxi tour of West Belfast and the murals.  But H, averse to any thing that even hints at tour, was determined we could do it ourselves without a guide.  After some breakfast in the beautiful Great Room at the hotel, we went out to figure out what bus to take. The Belfast bus system is fantastic, all lines begin and end around City Hall, have easy to follow routes, and an all-day pass costs about $5.  Before getting on the bus, we did go inside to see the exhibit at City Hall, but missed out on a tour as they were in session.  Saw the Christmas tree light switch that Bill Clinton pulled when he visited Belfast (they, like me, are big fans of The Bill) and the building is lovely:

Armed only with the vague idea that we should get to the Falls Road area to see murals, we got a bus to Falls Road and just got off when we saw a mural.  Easy-peasy.  For ease of posting and reading, I made a set of all the murals photos: West & East Belfast murals

Falls Road is the Catholic section of West Belfast that has seen a lot of violence, but it's nothing like I expected.  Safe, working-class, sorta like Queens, even a bit boring.  We wandered into a cemetery, which was sad to see many who were killed very young in the worst years of the Troubles.  Some of the graves were like MENSA test questions: "Here lies our mother, Mary Rose, in loving memory by Jack and Shannon. Also her son, John Joe.  Also our uncle, Patrick Riley.  And my wife, Sheila. And our grandfather, John Joe."  Whaaa?



Most of the murals are pretty peaceful, mourning the lost or supporting other causes:

Pub on Fells Road (which had snugs!):

Had to explain the humor of this to H:

Without trying, we somehow stumbled onto the ironically-named peace line dividing the Catholic from the Protestant neighborhood.  They still close these things at night!

Despite the ever-present development all over Belfast, the Shankill Road Protestant/Loyalist area is far more depressing than Falls.  And more interesting:

The murals are a lot grimmer and more hostile, as well:

At one point, we wandered by a large lot, filled with broken furniture and wood:

As we stood looking at it and taking pictures, a Scottish minister approached us (he was wearing a collar and said "Have ye any English?", that's how I knew he was a Scottish minister) and told us about the wood.  Apparently, each July 12th, there is a large bonfire to commemorate the Battle of Boyne, victory by William of Orange over the Catholics.  It happened in 1690, yo!  The Scot said the piles would get much higher, and if you look it up on Flickr (belfast bonfire or july 12 bonfire), you will see that they did.  He told us about some of his parishioners, who had their homes damaged by the fire's smoke and heat, and how the peace line next to his (Presbyterian) church shut every night.  He told us about the "thugs" were celebrated as heroes by extremists, though he takes no side in the conflict.  Then the Scot told us all about his favorite Belfast guy, C.S. Lewis.  I learned more about the Troubles and C.S. Lewis standing on a street corner in Belfast than I ever could (or wanted to, in the case of C.S. Lewis) on a Black Taxi tour.  We might have been standing there all day but (thank God, no pun intended) the Scot had a meeting to get to, but invited us to come to service the next Sunday and he'd take us to lunch.  It was a Tuesday and we were leaving the next day, but it was a nice invitation.  I looked him up when we got back to send him a note, it turns out his name is Jack Lamb!  My maiden name is Lamb!  Small world!  Don't think I'm related to any Scot ministers, but neat!

We wandered a bit more of the neighborhood, which wasn't scary at all, but I wouldn't recommend to most tourists to wander there by yourself.  We're just hardcore like that, I guess.  Cool to see a mural being painted:

I think it was going to be something to do with Oliver Cromwell. Or maybe Vikings.  Or pirates!  Okay, maybe not pirates. 

Grimmest community center ever:

On that cheery note, I say good day sirs!

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Day 4 (still?!): Belfast

But back to Belfast.  It's a weird town, at first glance. The downtown area can be a ghost town after business hours, which is true in a lot of cities, but Belfast is small. There are still a lot of run-down buildings and streets, but overall its a very pretty city.  H was quite delighted with the run-down-ness, as nothing fills him so much with delight as decrepit buildings (Montevideo, Uruguay wins the prize for decrepitness, hands down).

But it's also very pretty, City Hall is particularly nice:

What's really amazing is how much construction is going on in Belfast.  I imagine that in a few years, it will look totally different.  You see this sort of thing everywhere:

We wandered the Cathedral District a bit and saw the eponymous cathedrals.  Here's a nice detail from St. Anne's, which looks ye olde, but is actually only about 100 years old.

Interesting buoy things outside:

Stopped for a pint and some dinner at McHugh's, the oldest building in Belfast and a good pub near the water.  Then wandered down to the famous Crown Saloon, the only National Trust pub.  It's under massive renovations, but still really cool:

The big highlight at the Crown (although you see them in a lot of Irish pubs) is the snugs, little booths where you can shut the door and drink in private.  The photos above are taken from within a snug. Some details:


And because we really didn't have enough pubtime on our first night in Belfast, we stopped off at one more, White's Tavern, which has a great fireplace (necessary even in June)  and also claims to be one of Belfast's oldest taverns.  It's in one of the cool Entries, little alleys with pubs and shops hidden within.  I failed to take a picture, but you can search flickr with Belfast Entry to find lots of cool photos.  But here's White's:

Coming next: a trip to West Belfast, it'll be mural-riffic!

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