Beyond Dublin

The main objectives of my stay here in Ireland are the following:

1) Survive in an alien (english speaking) country
2) Get back at least a bit of my english I left behind in Bangalore, India 15 years back
3) Tell people "Yeah, Ireland is like my third home"

Number one and two are going on pretty well, number three on the other hand has not gone anywhere, at least till last week. Thats when I decided Ireland ought to be more than just Dublin. My course coordinator Mr. Marcus helped me in that decision when he decided that doing a teambuilding workshop at a place called "Glendalough" should be part of the course. In that way I came out of Dublin, did something for the course and paid alltogether around 0 € for that. Fine deal.

Glendalough

Don't expect me to quote some guides. I'll just write what I saw there. Those ruines on the photo is told to be the remains of some monastry. The monks also built a big tower (which is not visible on the photo) where they used to hide when the angry Celts felt like visiting them every now and then. If you are not really interested in these old stones, then there is nothing much to be amazed about.
Other than that Glendalough has a nice scenery with two lakes coming together at one place. As we had a tight schedule, I didn't see this particular sight, so just attaching a photo someone else took.

Nice, isn't it? We actually went along this lake like for an hour or so. Reminded me of those places where we used to go from school back in Vienna for something called a "field day" (Wandertag in german). A lot of nature as you can see from the picture.
The actual fun-part of the day was unexpectedly the workshop. We were divided into four groups, each consisting of one of our lecturers. Then we were asked to come up with an innovative idea to set up a start-up company. In the first session we did a brainstorming (what else?) and comprised on a life management system. Actually that was only the initial idea, later we detailed it to a system primarly for health care. Therefore you have a device where you can "record" what you buy in the supermarket and what you eat. The system, which will be having your personal health records saved, will calculate the amount of nutrients you consumed and will propose the kind of food you should be eating in the coming days to maintain a certain diet, which was agreed upon before with one of our health consultants. An additional feature of this system would be, that it can inform you about the things you need to buy from the supermarket, as it has all these records saved in the device. That saving process will be realized through partnerships with supermarkets, who provide a kind of electronic bill, which would be transmitted from their system to our device (via Bluetooth for example). Well, and so on and so forth.
Later we had to write a business plan. Now what I meant with fun is that you could just go on thinking of futuristic systems and services, which would make our everyday life a bit more simpler through information systems. We even had the idea of a pen, which would recognize the amount of nutrients in a plate, when poked into the food. With some kinds of sensors it should be possible we assumed (but our lecturer unfortunately gave up on that idea at a later stage).

Well, assuming that the reader may not be interested too much in such technical details I'm moving on. So, that was more or less Glendalough. It was around 1.5 hours by car south from Dublin, so still in the same county.

My next destination was even much nearer, but far more to rave about.

Howth

Many people here told me that initially they didn't know that Dublin was this near to the coast. So they were of course very keen to go there. Me in my arising thirst for travelling naturally joined them as even being an Indian I haven't seen much of a sea or an ocean. That is when we decided to go to Howth, which is a peninsula near to Dublin (around half an hour with the DART, which is the Dublin Area Rapid Transit, or like we simple people would call it, a train).
The sceneries are really breathtaking. We walked around half of the island (not using that other word anymore as it sounds a bit strange to me) just a couple of meters away from the water at a bigger height though. There were no fences at all, so actually it was quite dangerous, like if you slipped a bit on that quite narrow path, you could easily find yourself lying somewhere between the rocks or even in the water. If you ever need to suicide, please do consider this place. You don't even have to jump, just slip a bit.

It was quite a long walk, like about 4 to 5 hours or something. The main thing you could do is just let your camera capture everything which is around you. Even as a bad photographer you were be able to take some good pictures.

As I raved so much about the scenary, i'll just conclude with a couple of pictures I took (supposed to be that good ones I mentioned in the above paragraph).