Trains and plains and other flying devices
Traintrips very much resemble one another. So do airports. And so did ours. We took off, flew, and landed and took a cab to the hostel. And there the story could begin with: „You won't believe what happened to me at the hostel this morning..." But that would mean leaving out the night and though some of us would like to do that for one reason or another we should not withhold the fact that we spent it in Temple Bar. That caused us to make first observations on issues of intercultural interest. We were quite impressed by the Dublin girls' dressing habit in January including high heel sandals. Pondering over those phenomena and the one or other whiskey we concluded the night and - back at the hostel - wished that others would have done that, too... Motivated by the idea of travelling and flying my clothes fell out of the window over night and I had the questionable pleasure of climbing up the fire ladder the next morning to pick off them up from the roof before continuing our trip to Achill Island.by Tine Koschmieder
Swedish Perspective
The Swedish group met at Umeå airport to take off for Stockholm at 12.25 pm. The flight from Umeå to Stockholm went well and we headed for Copenhagen right away. We did not get any warm food on this flight either but managed anyway. From Copenhagen we rushed through Kastrup airport on a mad dash to catch the plane to Dublin. This was the longest flight of them all and significant parts of the group (or should we say the Romanian guy who shall remain nameless) were jumping up and down in their chairs wanting to get out of the plane. The atmosphere got a little bit tense by the end of the flight since some participants (not the Romanian guy) really needed to powder their noses and almost climbed over people to reach their destination as soon as possible. At the airport in Dublin we were picked up by a bus taking us to the hostel. Once there we made ourselves beautiful and headed out to enjoy Dublin by night. We were of different opinions about what to do so we divided the group into one beer team and one food team. The food group tried for about half an hour to find a place to eat but all the restaurants were crowded. Finally, hungry and exhausted, we found an Indian restaurant that had a vacant table. After some more waiting we finally got to eat. The restaurant was fine but they played some kind of special music that sounded like it was taken from a video game. When we paid for the meal the women in the group received roses and the men got to leave empty-handed. We had planned to meet the other part of the group later but due to notoriously slow service at the restaurant we missed the appointment and had to manage on our own. We visited Temple Bar and later the Viper Room which was the place for the rest of the evening. Some of the participants of the German group joined us later. We had a smashing time sampling the local Guinness and comparing it to its entirely inferior Swedish counterpart. We ended the night by getting back to the hostel in the early morning waking everybody up and getting to learn some colourful German curses.
Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Last modified by: Marc-Michael Fuchs