the first wave

here is the first tsunami of pictures in what looks like it will be a great monsoon of photography. as usual, i'll get the rest up when i can, which could be a long time. :) you know you love me, you know you do!

there is no cropping, tilting, saturating, etc., because i simply haven't had the time. if i find any good ones i'll put them on my photoblog. sometime. hey, do you know the ten commandments of procrastinating? 1,

i'm just putting the ireland pictures up for now, because this is taking a lot longer than i thought. so...for historical accuracy, here's what happened: natalie and i flew into london and katie met us at the airport. the three of us then flew to Cork, ireland. from there we made our way up the southern coast to dublin...


when we arrived in cork, i immediately attempted to communicate with the natives. i asked the shuttle driver (taking us from the airport to the city center) "if you had one day in Cork, what would you do?" the driver replied, "I would leave." we didn't understand his indigenous tongue and promptly decided to stay an entire day. anyways, this is a picture of cork...






...as is this. you can yawn now. well it's kind of a cute little city, like for families of four, etc.














there was one cool thing about cork. they had a very nice cathedral (St. Finbarre's) with quite the history, none of which i can remember. but it was very long, i think.














oh look, and i took a picture of the history! and there it is.


















another view of the outside of the cathedral. i think that dog was born in 1197 and has been haunting the place ever since he died an untimely death shortly afterwards.
















the church people weren't really excited about us taking pictures of the inside, so i don't have very many.

"kneel to pray." the other side of the kneeling-pillow said "stand to think." the clear implication is that thinking is the opposite of praying. we saw the National Youth Choir of Wales perform here that night. ok, that was a very cool thing in cork. they sang pieces of the Requiem and did some cool father-son pieces that were written at different times. er, anachronisms. :)









hey look, a yellow street, let's explore it! (we ended up in someone's backyard or driveway or something.)

















after a few hours of wandering, we decided to give Cork the thumbs down (of course except for the concert that night). we are smiling because it's still funny, then. also, keep in mind that at this point natalie and i had been awake since our first flight left at noon the previous day. well, sort of. anyways, this was our first full 30-hour day.







the next day, we took a rather ill-advised trip to a town called New Ross. our plans to explore the area were dampened when a woman told us we needed a car to get to anywhere cool. she told us to get right to dublin. we learned from our first mistake of not listening to the natives, and indeed got right to dublin.

this picture is the *ahem* river in New Ross, which smelled bad and was full of trash.





in dublin, we all slept in a queen-size bed. it's a long story. i was in the middle. tee hee. this is the ghetto-ey little "yard" outside our hostel/hotel room. in this picture, i have captured the expressions of serenity and peace on katie and natalie's faces. clearly they are inspired by the blissful scenery, and are resolving to be better people for the rest of their lives.





this is us the next day at Dublin Castle. you can see the different sections of it that were built at different times. this castle was cool to walk around but we didn't go inside.
















"look at this guy! he's just reading his paper but little does he know, there's a CASTLE behind him!"











a pretty section of road in dublin. the temple bar is in there somewhere.

for the record, the temple bar wasn't that exciting (although we didn't see much of it), and i also heard that the people who live in dublin won't go near it. it's ONLY tourists.







this is St. Patrick's Cathedral and katie.


















and this is Christ Church Cathedral. it's massive and it has these ruins that are over a thousand years old.











and we all know we can't keep natalie away from those sexy
red heels, even in dublin.

















a typical dublin street. narrow with straight high buildings.


















this is the grand finale to the ireland segment of our trip. natalie and i stayed at the dublin airport that night because the shuttles didn't run that early (katie flew back to england that night). and hey, it saved us some hostel money. neither of us really slept because of our resolute quest for a good soft spot. then we realized that we had neither a clock nor a way to wake up in time for our 0630 flight. we managed by not sleeping at all. we did make a cozy little camp next to the arrivals sign, though. it had a great view of the first floor.