Saturday, December 20, 2008

I'm in Ireland! Baile Átha Cliath Day Four

Baile Átha Cliath is Gaelic/Irish for Town of The Hurdled Ford or Dublin, in short.
Gaelic or Irish is the second official language in Ireland aside from English. It sounds and spells nothing like or alike to English, and it's a completely different language.
The signboards all over Ireland are bilingual, meaning they have English and Irish names.
These are warning stickers found in trains in Ireland. Irish and English.

1100 : Okay, back to my journey report. As stated in my Day Three report, I went to Hijaz's place today. I didn't straight away went to his house, instead we met at The Spire (I know I misspelled it as The Spiral in my previous post, sorry about that) because he planned to take me to Powerscourt Gardens in Powerscourt Estate in County Wicklow. We took a tour bus and it took around an hour to reach our destination. The driver cum tour operator was very entertaining. Apart from the history lessons, he sang a lot as well. All of his songs are folk songs, and luckily he's got the voice for it. We passed Bray along the way and a few small towns.
A train passing by in Bray

1230 : We reached Powerscourt Estate. The bus stopped for 2 hours to enable tourists to take a look at the garden. It was raining so it was horribly cold. But worst of all, it made my shoes wet hence wet socks. Wet socks are very uncomfortable, and I was wishing I could take it off as soon as possible. Hijaz was quite disappointed because the garden wasn't as beautiful as he expected due to winter. But we could imagine how it would look like in summer or spring. It must be absolutely gorgeous; colourful and vibrant.













What we were really interested in was the Japanese Garden. Utter Fail! In winter there is nothing. Nothing.

Fail.

The only thing that consoled us was 'how beautiful it would look in summer or spring'. We can only imagine. I found something amusing though, Pet Cemetery.
Yeap, you read it right. Jersey cow and Angus cow. They were even given NAMES!

1630 : We got back home and rested. Hijaz cooked; and he is a good cook! We went out that night and played bowling (I came in second! Yeay!) with his friends, lepak at their houses and played PES. They're a very friendly bunch of people.

The Most Eligible Bachelor Subang Jaya; cooking. Girls, keep drooling...

That was it for day four. The next day we went to UCD where Hijaz studies and then off we went to Galway (Gaillimh in Irish) for 2 days. That is another story. Until then. Good night (as I posted this. hehe)

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