Galway Bay

Two blog posts in a week? Alert the media! Jenna has been productive! Joking of course, but only kind of. This weekend a few friends and I had the pleasure of visiting Galway, which has been deemed the most Irish of all Irish cities. I'm not 100 percent sure of the accuracy of this statement because our tour guide didn't really back it up with any evidence but I am sure that this has been one of my favorite cities that I've visited in Ireland.

Our trip began with almost missing the bus to take us to our train which was an hour away. Confused? So were we. Later we found out that there had been a strike thus the train station in Galway was understaffed leaving us to be escorted to Portarlington via bus ride that almost made me puke. Good start! After finally getting on our train we were able to relax for two hours and watch the beautiful Irish countryside pass us by.

Some of us appreciated it more than others.

We arrived and decided that nothing more could happen until we had eaten and promptly found somewhere that was still serving breakfast at noon. As I had been the main negotiator in the "get food first" deal I ate my scone before I could take a picture of it (noticing a pattern here?) but suffice it to say it was amazing! Mary and Jayden had the least American looking American pancakes but they said they were good so I'll take their word on it.

From there we went to get settled in our bed and breakfast which was great except they stuck us in the attic and we almost froze to death. That's neither here nor there. Then we got a hop-on-hop-off tour of the city which turned out to be a stay-on-the-bus-the-whole-time tour but we had an excellent tour guide named Tony who spent most of the time cracking jokes and telling us about how President Kennedy visited Galway right before he was assassinated. 

To clarify, President JFK came from a long line of Irish men and, despite the possibility of a curse on the family for cutting down a fairy fort, they love him here. I have also made the mistake of telling people I'm from around Dallas, Texas as this is the closest major city. Guess what they associate with Dallas? Yep. I swear every time he spoke about Kennedy he was looking at me. Same goes for any other tour guide who I mistakenly told I was from Texas. 

"And there you can see where President Kennedy spoke just a few months before the Texans killed him." -Tony on probably every other tour.

We also learned about several famous love stories that occurred in Galway including one between  Michael Feeney and Nora Barnacle (the wife of James Joyce) who fell in love at just seventeen but when Michael died Nora fled to Dublin where she met Joyce. This story is recounted in Joyce's final short story The Dead. 

My personal favorite story though, would be when Steve Earle (the country singer/songwriter) came to visit and met a lovely black-haired blue-eyed woman. Unfortunately it seems his love was unrequited but it provided one of my favorite songs, "Galway Girl" (also featured on P.S. I Love You, you know the scene where Gerard Butler sings and it's so wonderful you want to die? Yea that song.) which has been on repeat while I write this blog post.  

I like to pretend this is the "old long walk" Earle referred to in his song, but it's really just the Latin Quarter

We spent the rest of the day walking the Latin Quarter which was beautiful and finding gifts for friends and family. The next day was one of the coldest/rainiest since I've arrived in Ireland and while we attempted to explore more, after I destroyed a pair of boots, we gave up (we did manage to see part of the bay so it wasn't a total bust). We boarded the train and spent the next three hours reading (me) and sleeping (everyone else). In typical Ireland fashion we passed in and out of rain the entire ride home and I couldn't be more happy with where I chose to live for these three months.

Brussels; City not Vegetable

*Disclaimer this was actually a week ago but I have very little self discipline and I just finished writing this post today.*

This weekend, three of us decided to have hop, skip, and jump over the puddle to visit Brussels, Belgium and what a great (while perhaps poorly planned) idea. Having never really even thought about going to Belgium, we didn't know much about the city and as a result began our trip by flying into an airport about an hour and a half away. The ensuing chaos included watching cabbies argue loudly in french (I think) and later discussing how we would escape the car in case our cabbie tried to kill us. These are the things that must be discussed.

Burger King the pregame meal for picky eaters the world around

We finally made it safely to our Airbnb where our wonderful hostess had provided Belgian beer and cheese and we finally got to sleep around 2 am. The next day we woke up bright and early and set out in search of Belgian Waffles. 2 hours and several hangry conversations later we sat down at a "Waffles and Churros" stand. These turned out to be the best waffles we had all weekend and due to severe hunger pains we ate them before I could get a picture but I managed to snap one the next day.

I've never had a harder time eating food in my entire life. I mean look at those forks.

We also walked the city and were amazed at the sheer beauty of Brussels. Something great I found about Brussels is that there are literally hundreds of chocolate shops and they sell delicious chocolate for pretty cheap.We took advantage of this, grabbing a few pieces of chocolate in every store ensuring that we would have a massive sugar crash on the plane (which happened).

SO MUCH CHOCOLATE

I don't want people getting the idea that all we did was eat on this trip, we walked a lot (between chocolate and waffle shops) and saw a lot of beautiful architecture and statues including Manekin Pis (the statue of the little boy peeing), and the main square (where we saw a beautiful wedding which was really just a giant party that we weren't invited to but crashed anyways).

A giant building. Probably important, definitely beautiful.

Probably my favorite part of Brussels (besides the waffles) had to be the small side streets scattered throughout the city. Most of the time you were walking through streets lined with shops and people but every now and then you would walk past a street that looked like it hadn't changed in decades.

Probably my favorite street in Brussels which I found by accidentally walking out of a fire exit in a shopping mall. 

Overall I was pleasantly surprised by all that Brussels had to offer not only in the way of food but also in regards to architecture and history. Truth be told, I would go back for the waffles alone and I probably should be embarrassed about that but I'm missing them too much to be embarrassed, so I'm going to go eat a grilled cheese and cry about it.

-Jen

Birthdays and Blarney

How many people can say that they had the opportunity to spend their 21st birthday in Ireland? Well I can! If you know someone else who has, don't tell me, I want to feel special. I'm so thankful to all of the wonderful people who made my birthday great, like my family and friends back home and my new friends here in Ireland. It was truly an experience I will never forget.

I decided that for my birthday I wanted to go on a day trip to somewhere in Ireland and after much planning (about 2 seconds worth) I realized that I had yet to kiss the Blarney Stone. So a few of us booked our tickets and prepared for the insanely early start we would have that day (it took a lot of preparing and we still left late).

Now I didn't take pictures on the bus ride up because I was pretty enthralled in my book and it was still dark (people really shouldn't wake up before the sun does) but our first stop was the Rock of Cashel and I certainly made up for the original lack of pictures. Unfortunately there was scaffolding on the outside of the building as one of the chapels is under construction but the inside is just as beautiful and spooky as ever.

A gigantic spooky wall

I've noticed that no matter where you go in Ireland, there is probably a cemetery there.

Legend has it that The Rock of Cashel originated in the Devil's Bit mountain, when St. Patrick (who brought christianity to Ireland) banished Satan from a cave. Satan then proceeded to bite off the top of a mountain (hence the name Devil's Bit)  and drop it onto St. Patrick who didn't get squished because that wouldn't be a very good story.

Next we got our chance to visit Blarney Castle and kiss the Blarney Stone, which is supposed to give anyone who kisses it the gift of gab and seven years of good luck. As we climbed what I imagine to be the smallest/longest staircase ever, we met a couple of guys from Perth who enjoyed scoffing at our American accents and informing us of how different Australia and America is. It was really very educational, and while they spent a lot of time laughing at the "odd" things Americans do, they spent an equal amount of time deriding the British, which everyone seems to enjoy here. 

 

The very beginning of the stair case. It only got smaller.

 Kissing the Blarney Stone sounds easy enough until you get there on a saturday and have to fight off annoying tourists (other than myself of course) to climb the ridiculously long and tiny winding staircase to reach the top, and then hang over the edge of the castle, backwards, to kiss a stone built into the wall about 4 feet below where you are laying down. If you skipped over a bit of that run on sentence, I had to HANG OVER THE EDGE. I'm not scared of heights but I also had to put a lot of trust into the guy holding on to me and that's just not my thing.

"It's not that far down" - the man clutching me in case I fall to my death

There are several legends surrounding the origin of the Blarney Stone but my favorite is that there was once a witch who lived on Cormac McCarthy's land (he built the castle) and he once saved her from drowning. In gratitude the witch then devoted her life to McCarthy and watched over him and his family. One day she came across his son, shot dead from an enemy's arrow and she used the stone to bring him back to life (don't ask me how, it's magic)  and then enchanted the stone so that anyone who kisses it will be given the gift of eloquence to talk themselves out of trouble.

While we could have stayed all day in the castle grounds, we only had time to visit one more place, called the wishing steps. Apparently, if you walk down and back up the stairs (backwards) with your eyes closed, while thinking of nothing but your wish, it will come true in a day, a month, or a year. It is also important to include that all of this was told to me by my guide who also believes you should only cut your hair on a growing moon, so judge the accuracy of these myths yourself.

Picture of Kate walking up the steps (backwards) instead of me, because she looked a lot more confident than I did.

All in all it was a great birthday and I ended it the next day (my actual birthday) with a trip to my favorite pub, where the band sang me Happy Birthday and the bartender gave me a free beer that I didn't drink. As far as location, I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else.

-Jen