Gorgeous Scenery Galore!

I'm back off to London tomorrow, after quite a lot of time on buses and a short period of time on a plane. My time here has been really grand - lots of fun, very relaxing, amazingly beautiful.

Yesterday, it was really quite gross out, so I stayed in all morning writing (the most writing I've done in quite a long time!), and then I ventured into the library. The library wasn't so much disappointing as unenlightening; I found some books and took some notes, and maybe I'll look those books up again via the magic of interlibrary loan, but I didn't find any of the local history I'd been hoping to. Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places. After that, though, I went to a cafe and had some tea and a delicious cupcake (eating cupcakes with a fork seems so civilized!!) in a cafe called Beile le Cheile, which the server told me how to pronounce and I have promptly forgotten, but she also taught me how to pronounce An Daingean, which is the name of this town in Gaelic and also its official name (the English version isn't recognized in terms of government anymore). It sounds something like "ahnDEYNGin." How that got Anglicized to Dingle I shall never know.

Today, though, I spent the morning doing a bit of writing and a lot of scrolling through all the pictures from this semester (I've taken over 1,000 photos this semester. Sheesh!!), and then after lunch I followed the recommendation of one of the guys who works at the hostel and walked out to the Dingle lighthouse.

The trail out wasn't so much a trail as it was a walk along the edge of the harbor through various cow pastures, but that's okay. The weather was cooperating, and I took tons of great pictures and met a very nice Canadian woman along the way.

And then I was rewarded for ducking around cows by this view:

 Oh man, but it is gorgeous here. I just love the way the clouds look, the different shades of yellow and green and brown on the hills, the light on the water, the way the blue of the harbor fades into the grey of the distant mountains. The way the sheep and cow pastures creep right to the edge, and then the land falls away, the grass disappears into jagged rocks that shoot down into the bay. It looks very different than how I imagined it to look. Everyone here is so friendly and helpful, and this tiny town is such a vibrant one. I am so lucky that I got to come here and see this for myself; hopefully I can do this place justice in my book!