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.