My husband, my parents and I just got back from a two week sojourn in the British Isles: one week in Ireland, and one week in England. In a two-part blog, I’ll share some of the things I learned from my visits to these two countries.
- Jet lag is real. Most flights to the British Isles from the east coast of the US leave in the early evening, fly five or six hours overnight, and land in Ireland or Britain the next morning. But “the next morning” over there is five or six hours (depending on daylight savings time) later than the time in the Eastern Time Zone, so to the weary traveler it feels like the very wee hours of the morning back home – say, one or two o’clock in the morning. Unless you were able to grab a few hours of fitful sleep on the plane, by the time you reach the place where you are staying you’ve been up for as much as twenty hours. This is the consequence of jet lag. If you take a nap as soon as possible and then take the rest of your cues from the daylight, it passes fairly quickly – or at least it did for me.
- There is a lot of daylight over here in the spring and summer. The sun sets much later than it does in lower latitudes, which means that there is still plenty of twilight left even as late as ten o’ clock in the evening. The sun seems to rise earlier too – like around four thirty in the morning.
- Temperatures are surprisingly warm. The average during my stay was around twenty degrees Celsius, which is about seventy degrees Fahrenheit – perfect shorts weather, and very comfortable. And those rumors about palm trees growing in southern Ireland? They’re true. They’re small palms, not giant Florida-type palms, but hey, a palm’s a palm, right?
- Dublin is a living, breathing United Nations. People from all nationalities are here, and of all the languages you hear spoken on the street, English can be one of the rarer ones. It is also a very young city – at a glance, most of the populace appears to be under thirty. In order to get a feel for “old Ireland,” you need to find a way to get out of the city and into the countryside.
- When you order a hamburger at a McDonald’s in Ireland (and yes, we did go into one, because we were looking for a snack that was relatively cheap and relatively familiar), what you get is a lot greasier than what you’d see in the US.
- Ireland really is the emerald isle. You can find every kind of green in the countryside. It’s stunningly beautiful … and I can’t wait to go back.
MSW episodes set in Ireland:
- The Wind Around the Tower (season 9)
- A Killing in Cork (season 10)
- Another Killing in Cork (season 11)
- Nan’s Ghost, parts 1 and 2 (season 12)
- The Celtic Riddle (post-season movie)
