sweet shop | Chaos roaming the world

Our last day in Ireland had begun. At 4pm the ferry to Roscoff/France would leave the port of Cork with us on it. That was quite the exciting prospect, at least for me. I am always excited when I need to get a specific mode of transport at a specific time. Flo would probably call it anxious. 😛

We got up in the morning on the campsite in Blarney, having decided not to bother the Blarney stone with our kisses. In fact, we didn’t visit Blarney castle at all. After a shower, we drove right back into the city of Cork. Leaving at 4pm, we’d probably have to check in around 2pm…a whole morning to spend in Cork. I mean, Cork is awesome. You can spend way more than a morning there.

Entering the coffee roasters hole in the wall

After parking the car, we actually accidentally went to Other Realms, the local gaming den. Being there was quite cool, even if it was mostly empty tables waiting for people to play at this time in the day. A couple of board games were on display, work in progress miniature painting and the newest D&D books. The lady in the shop even pitched the teen D&D group to Number 3 who is clearly far away from his teens.

First thing to do was get a second breakfast at one of the city’s coffee roasters. It was supposed to be have coffee and buy ground coffee for the campground but then the pastries on offer looked delicious and the kids did complain that they don’t drink coffee…

Just around the corner of this tiny cafe under a stairwell was the toy shop where Number 3 had fallen in love with the wooden train set. We spent a couple more minutes there before I managed to lure him away with a visit to the sweets’ shop on the other side of the road. It had a pick’n’mix bar, probably the first proper one the kids have seen. Given that grandma’s bucket of gummy bears was empty once more, we all picked out some of our favourite gummy-things for said bucket.

A bit further was Crawford City Gallery where we’d been yesterday in search of a cafe. Today, we went to actually look at the pictures. Or sculptures as it turned out. The first exhibition was of the Canova Casts. THE Canova had overseen the making of casts after antique statues which were then gifted to the monarch of Great Britain as a thank you for defeating Napoleon in Waterloo. Such strange things exist. The casts were back on display for the bicentennial.

The second exhibition named mEAT & potatoes was a ride through food through the ages as represented in art. It had contemporary art as well as still lifes of earlier times. All in all, our time in the Gallery was well spent.

A glass of milk with a straw – the best thing since sliced bread

From here, we went back to the English market for lunch. The Lonely Planet recommended the Farmgate Cafe for lunch as it used all of the fresh produce on offer in the market. That sounded exactly like something we should try for our last Irish meal. Flo had Irish stew with a non-alcoholic cider, Number 3 opted for the fish chowder (what a brave choice!), while I ordered the grilled goats’ cheese sandwich and a cheese & ham sandwich for the Agent who didn’t want to eat at all. But she happily accepted the kids’ choice of beverage, a glass of milk, which she finished in one go. I think I realized only yesterday that she actually has two new teeth and that this is to blame for her being the worst eater at the moment.

After lunch I got twitchy. Come one people, it was time to get onto the ferry! Flo did his best to slow us down on our way to the car, going on a detour to the only catholic church we’ve been in in Ireland. Alas, in the end, we were all in the car queued up for the passport check and then for boarding. Flo turned into his usual grumpy self because of the wait but it didn’t take much longer than an hour before we were allowed to board. At 3.20pm, we packed our overnight bag (for safety reasons you are not allowed to go back to your car) and checked out our cabin for the crossing. THE. CABIN. WAS. AMAZING.

It felt quite spacious, two of the beds folded down from the ceiling and the couch turned into a bed as well. We had a small table, everything to make tea and coffee and even our own toilet and shower. You might not be able to tell but this is only the second overnight ferry ride in the western world for me.

After storing away our things we went to explore the boat. Battleship might be a more appropriate term as this thing was huge. It even had a small pool on the 9^th deck and there was an entertainer in the bar in the evening.

At exactly 4pm, the ferry left the port. We waved goodbye to Ireland, both of the kids declaring that they want to be back. The rest of the afternoon was rather exhausting for us parents as the kids hadn’t slept on the short ride to the port and all the excitement was a little too much for them. We tried a lot from chilling outside on the deck to having a drink in the bar to playing foosball…nothing kept them happy for long. In the end, we put them to bed early which they seemed to be happy about.

One more drink for Flo and me at the bar while we posted the next blog post and then it was off to bed for me as well. We will leave the ferry tomorrow morning at 7am in Roscoff, still being on Irish time that meant 6am for us. 5 am wake up alarm anyone?

Set timer, run … smile!

Not having to camp meant that we slept in a little. Fereshteh made us an early breakfast as other members of the family were still sleeping. Afterwards, when everyone was up, we took a round of photos as we hadn’t taken enough yesterday. Packing up was comparatively quick and we were good to go on the “short” ride to Hamadan, about 180km away.

Bisotun, the ancient inscription site, lay on our way. Again, we had to pay the standard price of 400.000 rials as tourists (about NZ$20) to gain entrance. The site is big though. We started with a short hike up to a rock which has carvings of human figures on three sites. One is identified as a king while the others are not as clearly marked.

charming greek decor

Further into the park, you pass a Hercules statue. Hercules, you might ask? Yes. Well, the Greek left it as a “hah, we conquered you” gift. Originally, there was a lion statue depicted there; the Greek then added the Hercules on the back of it, making a rug out of the lion. Charming fellows all around.

There used to be a Parthian relief of Mithrades II next but it has been defaced with a giant inscription plate in Arabic. I didn’t even take a picture of it.

Sadly, all hidden away behind scaffolding

Next up was the main attraction: Darius as a bas-relief with inscription panels in Elamite, Akkadian and Old Persian around the scene. This was an utter disappointment. Almost nothing of it was visible as a scaffold told of renovation efforts. You could only take a picture from far, far away or have only the scaffold on it. I even hiked up to the beginning of the closed off zone to see if there was any way of getting a look but nope. Especially Flo was disappointed. He didn’t feel too well to begin with as I might have given him my sniffles.

The site stretches out quite a bit after Darius but we were hot and tired already. So we walked to Farhad Tarash to have a look and then turned around. Farhad Tarash is a huge, cleared area on the rock face some 200 meters long which was dedicated for an inscription which has never been done. So now, it’s just a huge, smooth, vertical surface at the bottom of the cliff. So odd. From here, we also had a view to an old caravanserai but didn’t go anymore.

He gave us a free lunch because we are guests

Time to head back to the bike and get on the road. Our excursion had lasted longer than we expected. Hunger caught up with us before we reached Hamadan and we stopped at a roadside eatery which advertised a burger on its door. When we went in, two guys just bought ice cream. There was a little kafuffle when they left and one of them pointed at us while refusing to take his change. So the next thing that happened was ice cream, appearing in front of us. Those guys had just shouted us ice cream! How nice is that? We still needed real food though and went with falafel sandwiches. When we wanted to pay, the owner didn’t take it. Instead, he showed us a word in Farsi on an app similar to google translate: Guest. What were we supposed to do? We thanked him for his kindness and felt really good about the world and its people. 🙂 Not much else you can do after that.

Now Hamadan was only a hop away. The Lonely Planet listed some cheap options and we found the perfect place in the Ordibesht Hotel. A spacious room (3 beds), clean toilet facilities and even a small kitchen with a samovar providing hot water. If we could have exactly this place in every city, we’d be so happy.

Nina’s normal reaction to a cake shop

Flo felt off so he got to have a two hour nap while I updated the blog and commented the photos for it. At 5.30pm, we left in search for dinner. Right next to the hotel, I stumbled upon a cake and sweets shop. Everything in here looked delicious. The owner didn’t speak any English but speaking with hands and feet we got the information that he would close at 8pm tonight. Enough time to go for food, come back to choose a dessert and go back to the hotel.

Searching for dinner was a tedious thing. Both restaurants we wanted to go to were closed (Friday). So we wandered back towards our hotel, looking for food and ended up in a fast food joint at Imam Khomeini Square. The fast food was Irani for once so I got to try the large “samosas” (that’s how they look like to me) filled with potato and herbs while Flo had a bun filled with salmon or some kind of sausage and a very meaty looking pizza pie. My food was really yummy so this is something I would go for again.

Hamadan in general was nice to us. The sun was shining and while wandering around looking for food, many people smiled at us, greeted us and welcomed us in their city/Iran. Some even stopped for a conversation. One young lady must have followed us for a bit (I think) as she had three questions which sounded like she spent some time thinking on how to phrase them. She was lovely, as were all the others. Hamadan doesn’t see that many tourists so the feeling of being famous or a rockstar returned.

Nina struck gold 🙂

One last thing needed to be done…buy dessert! Going for the smallest available box, I was slightly overwhelmed with the choices. I got cream-filled puffs, chocolate cupcakes, slices of a creamy looking cake, cookie sandwiches and dry cookies where I had no idea what they were. My box was full to the brim in the end. And the owner wanted to give it to us for free. Trying really hard to pay this time while buying “luxury” for us, the owner only accepted half the money it would have cost us. Leaving the shop with a box full of sweets that I bought for NZ$2.20. That’s maybe a euro fifty for you European folk.

Everything in it was yummy though one thing needs to be singled out as heavenly. Flo had spotted the cookie sandwiches and I am very grateful for that. Between two crumbly cookies was a gooey marshmallowy cream which had softened the cookies a little bit. It had something of an overly large macaroon but with marshmallow in the middle. Divine!