Galway Hooker

Yesterday, I took a train all the way across Ireland! It took 2 hours! Ha, I arrived in Galway in the afternoon, a smallish town on the west coast of Ireland. I can't post pictures from this computer but they'll come eventually. Galway is really beautiful, right on the Atlantic Ocean. When I first arrived, I was pretty tired so I dropped off my things at a hostel and went for a walk through the town. The main street was filled with cool sights - street musicians, people selling art and jewelry, shops and pubs. So many pubs (I'm thinking that most of the streets in Ireland are pub-filled)! I came to a river which was crowded with people, all drinking, eating, playing music - just having a good time. I was taking pictures of the scene when an older gentleman named Daithi (Gaelic equivalent of David) offered to take a picture with me in it. David, a Galway local, was showing his friend Lee around, who was visiting him from England. I joined the two of them for a walk down the coast - it was absolutely beautiful. They joked that I must have brought the sun with me from California! I guess it's been raining so much this summer that there have been flash floods all over Ireland.

After I parted ways with David and Lee, I went back to the hostel to eat dinner and tried to mingle. For some reason though, my fellow hostellers weren't interested in mingling. Maybe I had something in my teeth. Finally I managed to strike up a conversation with an American named Kane, who has spent practically his entire life traveling the world. He's been all over Europe, is currently living in Ireland and will soon be going to college in Australia. He's traveled so much, in fact, that he has this crazy pseudo-Irish/Australian accent. Since he's lived here for quite a while, he showed me around to his favorite pubs, told me which beers to get (I highly recommend the Galway Hooker) and told me one of his favorite games to play while traveling - getting drunk tourists to believe outlandish stories. By the end of the night, most of Galway's tourist population knew us as Kalen and Kane, siamese twins from Arkansas. We were joined at the shoulder at birth, but are finally enjoying our independence from one another after a very extensive surgery. Ha! Needless to say, it was a very fun night.

Today, however, things got a little tricky. I had been planning to go to the Aran Islands, which are known for being incredibly beautiful. There are ruins and cathedrals and all that - I figured it would be a great photo op. Unfortunately, the only option for visiting the islands required returning to Galway at 7PM, and I had already booked a train ticket at 6PM. I decided to roll with the punches, and caught a bus heading toward the Cliffs of Moher instead (huge cliffs towering 277 meters over the ocean). Here's where the going got tough. Or, more accurately, the going got nauseating.

First of all, the bus driver was a lunatic. Second, we were driving down narrow, bumpy, winding roads through the hills of the Irish countryside. Third, the speed limit on these narrow, bumpy, winding roads through the hills of the Irish countryside was 100 km/hr. Now, maybe something gets lost in the conversion there, but I'm pretty sure that's just a ridiculous speed for roads like these. Oh, and did I mention the round-a-bouts? Irish people love their round-a-bouts! This trip was like tilt-o-whirl meets roller coaster meets tumble cycle on my dryer. Anyone who knows me knows that most the kiddie rides at the fair will make me puke, so they'll understand that I couldn't deal with this situation. It was awful. Ok, granted, the couple of pints of I drank last night definitely weren't helping the situation.

I thought it would be really cool to vomit off the Cliffs of Moher, so I really tried to make it through the insanity of the ride. I ended up feeling too nauseous to continue, though, and decided to get off the bus in a town called Burren to take a breather and wait for the next bus, which was scheduled to arrive an hour later. What I didn't know is that apparently "schedule" is a very loose term here. I waited for three hours, but the bus never came. It was actually fun- the weather was beautiful and I met a bunch of really interesting people at the bus stop. I met one man who drives a bank! There are all these tiny little towns that don't have banks, so he drives a mobile bank from town to town. He also has relatives all over the world, in the U.S., in France, England, South America; he even has a nephew who's a general in the army of India!

Anyway, just when I was on the verge of almost not enjoying myself any more (due to the worries about missing my train), I saw a group of french students around my age that I recognized from my hostel! We started talking and they told me that they'd just come from the Cliffs. When I told them I wouldn't be able to make it, they gave me a souvenir keychain that they'd bought there! They ended up giving me a ride back to the hostel, with plenty of time to spare before my train leaves. (Just enough time to write this entry, isn't that perfect?)

So I didn't really get to see anything that I planned on seeing, and I didn't get to puke off of 277 meter high cliffs (that's honestly what I'm most disappointed about, haha) but I had a lot of great conversations and got to be a siamese twin for a night. Totally worth the trip.