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WAAWAAWAAWAA (think Peanuts cartoons, adults speaking)
On Tuesday, we booked a trip on one of those coach tours that take us to different places. We went North of Dublin to a place called Newgrange. Newgrange is really, really interesting. It is over 5000 years old which is 500 years older than the pyramids of Egypt and several hundred years older than Stonhenge. This is an ancient buriel place that was built underground. On top of the ground, it has a "window" where once a year, during the Winter Soltice on December 21, the sun comes shining into the tomb. We were able to walk into the tomb and see the sacred place. Then the guide turned off the lights and we were plunged into pitch darkness. And I mean complete dark- you could not see your hand straight in front of your face. Then with small wattage light bulbs, they re-created the sun coming into the tomb from the window that was built from the outside. It was fasanating and eery all at once! An interesting thing about this tomb is it was built from several types of stones and built into a kind of cone shape - kind of like a teepee. But what's interesting, there has NEVER been any water leakage into the tomb in 5000 years! And knowing how much rain there is in Ireland (and believe me we know!) that is truly remarkable.
The tour then went onto another cemetary place, but it was freezing cold, blowing wind, and raining sideways, so quite frankly I have no idea what he told us about this place because my teeth were chattering too much!
The guide on this tour was not very good. He would just talk and talk and talk and talk, and then he'd go off onto a tangent and talk some more about that and say "I'll get back to that later" but as far as I could tell he never went back to the subject again. I think most people just slept through his droning. You know the Peanuts cartoons where the adults just speak in nonsensical moans, well this is what the tour guide sounded like after a while.
It's too bad too, cuz Newgrange was pretty fasinating, but the tour guide sucked.
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