ireland and BEYOND (but mostly ireland)

first post and all that, hey sweet oh cool. so i recently got back from an amazing trip to ireland with some good friends, and among the many dangerous things i successfully smuggled over were my pad and my pens. what ensued were a lot of breaks where i stopped, grabbed my stuff, and tried (quickly) to capture that irish magic ya'll. i wish i could've done more, because--as you can probably guess--there's a lot to see over there, and someday i'd like to go back and fill up the rest of my sketch pad. anybody down? everyone? sweet.

this was the view from my hostel in dublin every night. it's the 4 courts building, basically ireland's supreme court. every night, i'd see it lit up yellow and orange from the street lights across from the river liffey. not bad.

glendalough's upper lake. really insanely beautiful up there, like tourst-y beautiful. the lake was from glaciers and science (thanks tali), and so it was surrounded by these huge, green mountains everywhere.

we took a ferry from inis mor to get back to doolin, on the irish mainland. the entire ride there, you'd occasionally see seals in the water, and you'd see these guys kinda peppering the seaside, diving in and out of the water.

these were the cliffs of moher, in doolin, this small fishing village on the west coast. somebody said these were the biggest cliffs in europe, and i believe it. colossally massive juts of rock coming up out of the sea, with the ocean down beneath it, trying to pretend it's not intimidated. in the distance: america, and you.

fun fact: ireland is basically a tiny plateau on top of a massive, scary-ass cliff. these were the cliffs at inis mor, a 7 mile-long island off ireland's coast where you can find dun aengus, a 3,00o year-old fort built right on the very top. the cliffs were so sheer, and you could really see that the island was just one, huge rock, with a thin covering of moss/houses on it.

on that last day, we ended up at trinity college while we waited on folks to all get together. it was nice, and we all were just chilling out reading and whatnot while we waited for the sun to go down (fact: the sun never, ever goes down in ireland. ever.). so, here's my friend tali reading on the steps there.

on our last day in ireland, we all decided to split up and explore dublin on our own for the afternoon. i was pretty excited about it, because dublin's a very cool looking city, and i'd been wanting to do some drawing all week. i had this whole plan of going all over the city and drawing everything, but of course dublin packed its cool too densely, and i only made it through about 3 blocks worth of the city before we all had to meet back up for dinner.

this was at st. stephen's green, and i think i bit off a bit more than i could chew. it was a saturday and the weather was beautiful, so the park was packed with people. i kinda went crazy with the lines here, but, much like a magic eye picture, if you squint long enough, you can eventually see a picture of the park. try it!

so seagulls are absolutely everywhere in ireland. even in areas like dublin, you can't walk too far without wanting to kick one. in st. stephen's green, they reigned as kings, and i drew way too many pictures of them chilling in the ponds there.

st. ann's church in dublin. basically everywhere you go there, you're either gonna find a castle, a cool old church, or a centra (irish for "7-eleven"). now, you can't do 'em all because you'd just run out of ink/hands, but this one stood out to me because of these awesome, bright red doors it had. way to go, ann, way to go. and also, the gold-toothed gypsy i made friends with there. nice!