TRAVELLING TO IRELAND

In 2002 I was studying my degree on English philology and my family and I got to the decision that it was time I spent a year abroad as an Erasmus student. I chose Galway, in the Republic of Ireland and I have to say that it was a wonderful experience, out of which I have earned a great profit. Unfortunately, no member of my family was able to come to see me.

In July 2011, I was beginning my summer holidays, when my sister and I agreed to travel to Dublin. I was willing to show her the country that embraced me for nine months nine years before. Therefore, we booked two return flights to the Irish capital and meant to enjoy the "green country". Since I have a long-time Dubliner friend, Andy, I gave him a ring, but I got no response. After some missed calls and unanswered emails, I realised we would not see him. However, he called me back while my sister and I were queuing to enter the plane. He said he would not only be waiting for us at the airport but he would also give us a lift to our hotel. As soon as we landed on Dublin, an five-day adventure started. We took advantage of Andy's presence to have a tour guide all over the city: O'Connell Street and the Spire, the city centre, Trinity College, Dublin Castle and ... pubs. We paid a short visit to the most well-known ones in the area. We became accustomed to the Dublin atmosphere, both its people and its atmosphere. The journey was not, nevertheless, perfect. We had an everlasting breeze that made my sister doubt whether we were in summer. Moreover, the rain accompanied us, it travelled in our luggage as our toilet bags did. Andy was our leader into the Irish culture and he drove us to beautiful, nearby places, such as Wicklow Mountains and Dundalk although that was not enough for us: we wished to travel to Northern Ireland, to "the United Kingdom's branch in the island".

We did not ask Andy to go to "the North". I knew that, for him, it was just as going to someone's house with whom you had quarrelled some weeks ago. We got quite surprised when Andy told us that a cousin of his was killed in the IRA's terrorist attack in Londonderry in the 1980s and that he had never been to that part of the territory, consisting of six counties. We thought we would go there alone. Notwithstanding this fact, he agreed to. Thus, on the next-to-last day of our Irish tour, we headed for the north Northern Ireland, on the county Antrim's coast. After having withdrawn some pounds from the cash machine, we intended to visit the Giant's Causeway.

My sister got to know there that umbrellas are not useful in Ireland. In the photo I am on one of the thousands of the hexagonal, basalt columns. We were enchanted by the beauty of the landscape. We went trekking around the place and saw some cliffs, on which we took hundreds of photos of the North Sea.

The anecdote during the trip was that my sister was asleep for more than seven hours of the trip to Antrim and, every time she woke up, she got frightened by the cars on the left part of the roads. We still laugh at this memory.