Northern Ireland — Friday 9 December to Monday 12 December

Friday started for me at 4 AM; at 4:30 for Conor, Josie, and James, and at 4:49 for Adam. For Jessi, Thursday never really ended. We all had varying levels of exhaustion, but I think James summed it all up when, as Josie told it, he plaintively said "please stop..." to her alarm when he couldn't figure out how to turn it off. However, Jessi was able to overcome her exhaustion by being really, really excited about ireland. I think she giggled and said "We're going to Ireland!" about once every five minutes on the forty minute drive to the airport. Thank God we weren't on the metro (same trip is over an hour)...
I love flying. There's something about it. I hate airports, at least the getting into them part, and I dislike the boarding processes, but once I've got my luggage stowed overhead and underseat and myself tucked into a seat, be it next to strangers, friends, or no one, I start getting really giddy. I stare out the window for everything, including the taxi to and from the runway. While I do get a little nervous during bad turbulence, I'm definitely not afraid of flying. Taking this into consideration, I've decided that I have a few backup plans for careers. If the whole scientist thing falls through, I'll try opening a crepe stand (one of those portable things, like hot dog stands: it'd be cheaper than a store, and if I have the money for that, I'm doing my tea/yarn/book store, not food), and if that doesn't work out, either, I'll be a stewardess. I'd get to fly all the time. Even if I don't get to look out windows and I have to put up with far too many upset babies and stupid passengers who try to sneak check-sized bags into the plane and stuff like that, I'd still be flying and even going to potentially cool places. I think it'd be worth it.

Still pretty, even in the dark.

Of course, I didn't get to see a whole lot, given that the sun comes up at about 8:30 and our plane left sometime after 7, but definitely before 8, but still. Flying.
Also, every time I fly, I think of that Weird Al song Albuquerque. The part I think of is 2:00-2:30 minutes, and you don't need to watch the rest unless you're a big Weird Al fan. It's a weird song.
We landed successfully, not too much turbulence, and got slightly lost in Belfast International. Eventually, we caught the Belfast International Express bus to Belfast and decided not to knock around Belfast with all our bags and less than 20 hours of sleep among six people. We managed to catch the sort-of express to Kilkeel just in time, and had a crazy bus ride south (although I had somehow convinced myself that it was north). My internal compass gave up its fight a long time ago, and I've kind of decided that my window is north. Ish. It's probably wrong.
In any case, we bought some groceries (as always, slightly impractical ones; we always mean to get useful staples and end up with pizza, crisps, and muffins) and ordered a taxi to 76 Brackenagh East Road, which I thought was spelled Brackney.
Also, I was completely wrong about my internal compass. My window faces almost due east, but we're north enough and it's winter enough that I think the sun never hits high noon, and lurks off in the south, making it pretty much impossible for me to figure out where it is. Also, too much city-stuff for me to see it setting, and heaven forbid I see it rising. Based on my rather belated walk a few weeks ago, the pretty part of a sunset around here is in the southeast (according to the google maps compass), so whatever. And Clanny House is oriented completely differently versus the coastline than I had thought. Gah... Now I'm going to get a headache whenever I think too hard about it.
Anyway.
We had to take two taxis because they didn't have a van around, so Josie, James, and I waited around for the second one. Our driver was an interesting character who's been all over the world driving taxis and trucks. I've discovered that the northern irish accent is way easier to understand than the southern (like Thomas's... It's like listening to the Swedish Chef from muppets (turn on the youtube captions for that video; it's not vital, but it's funny). I know he's saying words, and I'm pretty sure they're English, but for the life of me I cannot understand him. I don't get why Jessi thought his accent was attractive, because I personally am attracted to being able to understand people.).
The house is adorable. Adam described it as a "Nana house" and it really is, inside and out. It's adorable outside, and it's a little too small and filled with trinkets from long-ago travels as well as more recent trips and pictures of family. The area is what you'd kind of expect from Ireland. It's very green, full of sheep and cool little walls.

Classic.

It turns out that Ireland isn't green because of the native fauna, but because almost every arable patch of land has been turned into pasture or field.

Walls. This is part of the gate to the house.

Pretty good vantage of the countryside. I think that's the Irish Sea on the horizon.

Fields. Walls. I was pretty happy.

Sheep! Or, as Jessi always tries to call them, sheeps. My history prof succeeds at this because no one corrects her in the middle of class, plus it livens up the lecture.

More, um, sheeps. You can't help thinking that it's cuter after a few repetitions. It wasn't fun explaining moose and deer to Jessi, either.

The walls all have huge gaps in them, as seen in the background — no, that's not a hedge — and the left foreground. Our taxi driver said it was to keep the wind from knocking them over. They're new walls made of old rocks.

A ruined building, my guess is a barn, on Brackenagh Rd.

A nicely-lit view of Bingian, I think. 

 Within two hours of getting to the house, we had made pizza and tea and set up the TV. Er... We were also walked in on by a neighbour lady who was just "making the rounds, you know, checking that all the doors are locked" while Conor's grandmother wasn't there, and "didn't know anyone was there" (that's a laugh. She probably saw the taxi drive up, and she also probably knew that someone was coming for the weekend through the neighbourhood grapevine.)
As a flat, we hope to be like Josie's nan, who owns and runs a pub on the truck route in Australia, and who ran after a snake in the road and shot it at age 87, rather than creeping on the neighbours to keep ourselves busy. But probably, we'll end up watching TV all day.
Dinner was pretty slapdash. Since we can't really survive on toast, Josie wanted to make pasta with the tomato puree and the Quorn mince that she found, but she had to get creative on the pasta. There was a little penne and a pack of lasagna sheets, so she cooked the lasagna sheets to a little harder than al dente and cut them into strips, then combined them with the penne.
We tried to watch The Two Towers that night, but in spite of the epic battle to get the TV to recognise James' hard drive that ended in hooking my USB stick (yay IT day!) and James' hard drive to Adam's computer and putting the one of the three parts of the extended version (I was expecting two) onto the stick every time we finished one part, pretty much everyone fell asleep before the end. Conor and I managed to stay up, but I suspect that we may have had the most sleep.

Saturday, it was Josie's birthday. I did my best to sleep through the visit from Conor's distant relative. I'm terrible at visiting. Apparently, though, I missed her waltzing into the guest house where James and Josie were rooming before they got up. Again, with the not knocking thing. But she did leave us a steak and ale (or some kind of booze, I forget the exact word) pie, a dish of cheesy potato things, and a pack of four mini mince pies, which are delicious, by the way.
Adam, James, Josie, and I went dinner shopping, and prayed for deliverance on the taxi ride to the store. I mean, daaaang, these people are crazy drivers.
Ireland does not believe in vegetarians. Luckily, there was some Quorn chicken at the house, or I'd have been one protein-deprived vegetarian. After the store, everyone bundled up in preparation to climb what may have been "Bingian" or possibly "Binian", a mountain-y hill just north of the house. And it is north, I checked.
To get to the hill, we had to cross what appeared to be a field but was in actual fact a marsh. Everyone's shoes got pretty well soaked, Jessi went in up to her midcalf, Adam went in up to his knee, I did a hasty faceplant (the brunt was on my shins and my left glove; no facial or even torso contact with the ground), and Josie went in up to just above her ankle.
It was still a good time, and I have some great pictures.

View from the fence after we climbed up a path for about ten minutes. I don't think that the Irish Sea is in the background, but I could be wrong. I can't remember which way I was facing...

I liked the lone little shrub on the hill of grass and heather. And marsh.

We decided to aim for the dip, given that we started very late and the taller bit was completely covered with a cloud.

Adam and Jessi trying to avoid the stream.

Jessi got mad at me for that one, but it's not my fault she was in the frame... She was running to keep her feet from sinking into the ground.

Adam (back) and James (facing the camera) wore vans. The canvas kind. They did say that they don't have any hiking boots anyway, but still. 

All the white bits are water. The wet kind, not the snow kind that they look like in the picture.

James and Adam slogging. I think about twenty different routes to the base of the mountain were taken by the six of us over the half hour that it took to get from the gate to somewhere on the mountain.

Jessi in blue, Josie in pink, and I think that's Conor next to Josie.

The heather in the marsh was orange. I was impressed.

Heather over stream.

I thought that was a spring, and that it was all dry past that. Wrong! It was still pretty, though.

The red bits are soaking, the green bits are full of puddles, and the cream bits sink. Can't win. 

I guess it is pretty emerald under the scrub. Also, walls!

I always wonder what piles of rocks came from. I think I read too many westerns.

We were higher than we thought. I can see the house from here, but I don't know which speck it is.

I think this was of the big protrusion that I photographed earlier, when I wondered about big piles of rocks.

Looking up... fog.

Also up: Adam being a zen master. In Jessi's picture, he's got his thumbs up.

Why two? Cause it's pretty.

We had mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli and peas, and steak pie and chicken-ish pie for everyone but me, and quorn chicken in a vegetable gravy that I found in the cupboard for me. We also watched the (UK) X Factor (the cousin of American Idol and the older sibling of the american X Factor, and probably a relative of [Country]'s Got Talent) all day because it was Josie's birthday and the first round of the finals was on that night. Spoiler: for her birthday, her favourites both got through, and for the day after her birthday, her favourite favourite won.
Confession: I enjoyed watching and was excited when Little Mix became the first group to ever win X Factor, and the first girl group to ever be a serious competitor even though I haven't followed it at all and won't after this.
The only downside to the day, aside from widespread puddlefoot, was Jessi. I'm going to try not to go into detail, since I've already complained to pretty much everyone (sorry!), but she managed to be insulting to almost everyone and pick stupid arguments with everyone else. I do try to give her grace, since she's doing something that I have never done by going into a culture where no one speaks her native language, but it gets hard to stand down. I'm not the most graceful loser, and to end an argument with Jessi over opinion-based statements is pretty much to lose it, or at least have her feel that she's won. Which, of course, is chalked up by my brain as a loss, leading me to resent the fact that she doesn't seem to notice that she's doing this. She always laughs while she's telling you that what you would rather do in a totally hypothetical situation is flat-out wrong, and it tends to make me feel aggressive, which makes me nervous about having an honest-to-blog fight with her, because we do have a month and a half to go, and I don't want hostility. Besides, she's probably harbouring her own pet peeves about living with me, so I'll keep a lid on my irritation if she does.
Hey, lookit that! My "not going into detail" managed to be the longest paragraph in the whole post!
Josie and James had to leave the next morning, but Adam, Jessi, Conor, and I watched TV late into the night.

Sunday, Conor, Jessi, Adam, and I went to the Silent Valley park, which is apparently where the water in Belfast comes from. It was beautiful enough to overcome my frustrations with Jessi, and I was even in a good enough mood by the end of the loop to make a joke about her rhetorical question that I know the answer to without answering it and irritating her. I may turn into Sheldon from Big Bang Theory when people ask idle questions about science, but I'm working on not answering them if people don't request an answer. At least around Jessi, since she does it enough to annoy Conor, and I don't think my answering does anything to improve relations. Something about that glazed-over, vaguely annoyed look she gives me when I finish... (Was that sarcasm? It was?! I'm on fire tonight!)
Enough about Jessi. Here's pretty pictures!

The Bingian elementary school. Not a lot of kids in this area...

OMG Pwnies!

The walls were busy being built, I think. Either that or they were busy falling down.

Scrub.

Cool silhouette at Silent Valley.

It reminded me a lot of Muir Woods. The trees were smaller, but there was even a stream with a plaque on salmon spawning.

I took a water picture that turned out pretty!

It was prettier in real life... but this is pretty awesome, too. 

After we got back, we watched the final X Factor final while Conor and I made miscellany for dinner. We ended up having baked beans on baked potatoes, the potato and cheese thing that Conor's relative brought over, and the rest of the quorn chicken with peas and green curry sauce. It was pretty good, to my surprise (even though I made it. I don't trust curry, as a rule). Then we had mince pies for dessert, and they were incredible. I always suspected mincemeat of being full of meat (mince is british for ground meat), but it's actually all fruit. I even found a jar of mincemeat at Aldi, and it's got "suitable for vegetarians" on the label. I've got to say, that is one of my favourite things about this country. Vegetarians know what's what. Either that, or the government is tricking vegetarians into eating meat-based products for kicks. ...I still check ingredient lists, by the way.

Monday, we cleaned, made the beds, hid the TV, and headed to Belfast. We caught the bus just in time, and it was another double decker. Yes!
What I saw of Belfast was pretty nice. We ambled through a christmas market, which smelled amazing, didn't buy anything, lost Jessi, found Jessi, lost Conor, found Conor, lost Conor again, decided to leave, and found Conor. We were heading to St. Anne's Cathedral when Jessi got distracted by some fairy lights (which sounds way cooler than christmas lights) and we headed down a little shopping hallway. We were instantly drawn into a pub, where Adam and Conor worked on pints of Guinness for a while because it's supposed to taste better in Ireland. By the time we left, it had started raining hard, and we were hungry, so we ended up sitting in a cafe for a while longer. We had to get our bags from the welcome centre at 17:30, so we headed back there around 17:00, grabbed our bags, and headed to the bus station to catch the Belfast International Express (same one we took from the airport) by 18:00 so that we could catch our 20:25 flight. I was pretty bummed that we hadn't explored more city, and that it felt like we had spent more time sitting around than seeing Ireland, but it was okay.
Adam held us up through security. Tssk. He'd actually been expecting it, since his mild, quiet, unassuming, inoffensive demeanor tends to set off red flags for security at airports. He wasn't expecting his bag to be unpacked, but it seems that Newcastle airport has pretty lax security as far as liquids and aerosol cans go.
I did look out the window for this flight, but it was pretty boring since the sun was all the way down. I tried to doze, but I think the jet stream was in our favour, since the seatbelt sign was off just long enough for the drink cart to go around before we started our descent.
We took the metro home and waited on the train for about half an hour before it started, and I slept for a little while. I think we went straight to bed when we got home. It was a long trip, but a very good one.