Day 6: the last full day

Our hotel in Killarney was way nicer than we expected for a smaller city and we were pleasantly surprised when we found out that a buffet breakfast was included in our rate. So we fueled up before heading out to see some of the local sites, despite the rain.

Stop one was Muckross House–a name given for the area, not a family, which I consider a fortunate thing. With the rain and wind coming down hard on our way in, I didn’t get a photo of the outside and indoor photography was prohibited. If you’ve been to the Newport Mansions in Rhode Island before, the Muckross House was a little like that on a smaller, less grand scale. They did it up for a visit from Queen Victoria that nearly ran the family bank accounts dry and many of the features from those updates to the decor are still in tact.

Going much further back in time, we stopped at Muckross Abbey (the rain was much more misty at this point) and because it’s outdoor ruins I got plenty of photos, including one with the pupper that wanted to play with us.

For our last stop in Killarney, we made a small hike down to the Torc Waterfall. It was still raining at this point so potentially getting sprayed by the falls didn’t sound so problematic. They were impressive enough that I’m glad we made the hike down. (And back up to the car that greatly contributed to my phone registering a total of 42 flights climbed that day. )

At this point it was around noon, so we decided to start our long drive back to Dublin. Of course pretty quickly after we started, the rain let up, but we got some beautiful views this way so I forgave the weather.

The drive was long and by the time we got dinner I was ready to wolf it down without letting the searing hot potatoes cool. Beef and Guinness stew covered in potatoes seemed like a fitting last meal in Ireland!

Day 5: it finally rained

We lucked out a lot for the majority of our trip with more sun than I ever could have wished for. On Friday, that finally changed a bit. We made a couple of final purchases (a stop at Butlers and Charlie Byrnes!) downtown in Galway before hopping in the car to head south to Kilarney.

The Burren was along the way, so we made a stop there despite the rain. I couldn’t remember where the bus tour took us when I’d been there before, so we didn’t see the classic table structure that you see in a lot of photos of the Burren, but we still got to see the landscape, which was the main point. Those are what I deemed “Oreo cows” in the picture.

Getting back in the car, I got to have my highly anticipated experience of driving on the left side of the road! Frankly the whole thing wasn’t nearly as challenging as I thought it would be. You can ask Matt how scared he was, though. I took us the rest of the couple hours to Killarney.

Killarney is right on the Ring of Kerry, so there are a lot of attractions around. With the rain, we wanted to find something indoors to start so we hit up Ross Castle.

Despite the rain, we also attempted to see Muckross Abbey that afternoon, but it started pouring so hard that within a few minutes along the path, our pants were soaked and it was no longer an attractive idea. (We were able to see it on Saturday when the rain was more of a mist.)

The rain let up by the time we went to dinner and to a couple of pubs that night. Killarney is considerably less touristy than Dublin or Galway, specifically at the beginning of March. (I’m sure it gets super busy in the summer for folks driving the Ring of Kerry.) We saw a lot more locals at the pubs that night.

Day 4: Connemara & Irish Radio

Important update: we found Matt iced coffee for breakfast on Thursday! Okay so it was an iced latte at Caffe Nero, a place we could easily go in Boston, but it was a step in the right direction.

After getting our things together, we hopped in the car to spend most of the day outside of Galway City. First stop was The Quiet Man bridge–famous for its role in the movie. Matt recreated the classic pose on the bridge. You’ll have to do a quick search to determine for yourself how he did. For context, he might have fallen off the bridge if he pushed more for accuracy, so I was okay with this version. Pretty nice scenery though, right?

From there, our main plan for the day was to head a bit northwest from Galway to the town of Recess, where Matt’s family is from. We visited their church and the cemetery where many of them are buried.

We finished up our time in Recess with Joyce’s Bar (finally got some soup and brown bread!) and Joyce’s Craft Shop.

Our stop at Connemara National Park was rather short-lived for a couple of reasons. One was that upon making the sharp turn uphill into the parking area, a light flashed on the dash of our rental car and we heard a loud beeping noise. While it went away almost immediately, we weren’t about to risk being so far from our accommodations without an Irish phone to contact the car company if we needed it. The second reason was that frankly I really needed to use restroom and they were closed up at the visitor center. So we found a pub down the hill and continued back to Galway for the evening.

The drive from Connemara back to Galway was one of our most beautiful. Matt slowed down a few times for me to get better pictures and there were so many sheep around that if they were grazing too close to the road, he had to give them a beep beep, thought many were unfazed by this.

Side note: Irish radio in the car has been an adventure in itself. We found the Irish-speaking channel, the typical pop hits channels, and this gem, pictured below:

Our last dinner in Galway was the Quay Street Kitchen. I don’t have a photo because I was too hungry. But we hit up both the Front Door and King’s Head as our farewell pub tour afterwards.

Day 3: Galway City 2019 – The Nostalgia Tour

I knew right away that our first breakfast in Galway would be at Griffin’s. There was more Americano coffee, a huge heap of crispy bacon for me that I ate half of and crepes that they call pancakes, a fact that I had forgotten about.

For the next couple of hours, I subjected Matt to the full tour. We stopped at the Galway Cathedral, NUI Galway where I studied, my old apartment, Dunne’s where I used to go grocery shopping, a quick stop in Penney’s to buy sunglasses (you read that right. It’s SUNNY here!), and finally a circle back through Shop Street where we landed at the Quays to have a pint sitting outside.

It was such a nice day in fact, that approximately half of the Galway student population was out by the water enjoying the sun. I’ll let you know if I see a surge of sunburnt locals in the coming days.

We joined them with an awesome view of the famous Galway row houses right along the water.

After a pit stop at the hotel, I wanted to go for a quick walk along the water and have a pint at the Roisin Dubh. For people other than my mum who don’t remember every part of my study abroad blog, Roisin Dubh means “Black Rose” and it was The Black Rose in Boston that Matt and I had our first date!

Dinner was another no-brainer: The Piemaker. I panicked at first because it appeared that they moved their location to a couple of doors down but our server assured me that they still had the four-booth hole in the wall location, it was just being renovated. The new place is considerably bigger so hopefully that means it’s an expansion overall.

More to come about today’s adventures later!

Sláinte

Day 2: couldn’t be Moher excited

After packing up our things from the hotel in Dublin, we hit up Queen of Tarts for breakfast and got not tarts, but scones. This was by recommendation of Sara, who came back with her boyfriend over the summer and described the scones as being as big as your head. Luckily she was right because I was incredibly hungry. Although if I’m being honest I was just as happy to see the lemon and mint infused water they served with it because I realized that in our quest for caffeine and pints the day before, I was now a little dehydrated.

Pictured below: the breakfast that we ate OUTSIDE. Yes, outdoors in the open air because it’s a comfortable enough temperature to do that here. Who knew we signed up for a tropical vacation?

Small side note for a new discovery on this trip: not every cafe/restaurant serves drip coffee the way that they do in the US. When I was here last, I only just started drinking tea and never even thought about the need for coffee. But every time we ask for straight up “coffee,” we’re handed an americano (espresso topped with hot water–but the name is fitting isn’t it?). It’s been good so far, but in the end nothing will satisfy Matt’s year-round need for iced coffee. Please send help.

We spent the rest of the morning walking around Dublin, hitting up the post office where the Easter Rising started and a quick spin through Trinity College. Their open green spaces were packed with students soaking up every ounce of vitamin D they could and the flowers were all in bloom. I would have believed you if you told me it was April.

Side note for a funny story: one tree was so beautifully in blossom that we decided to take a couple of photos. Seeing us do this, a man offered to take some for us. After handing Matt’s phone back to him, he then said, “okay, now my photo.” And proceeded to hand his phone over. Okay this is a normal cultural exchange. But for the next solid three minutes or more, rather than the quick snap from a kind stranger most people expect, the man wanted a photo shoot. He did some with a hat, some without, some smiling, some not, some holding a blossomed branch, some not, some looking pensive, etc. We should have suggested he find a photography student at the university?

Ready to hit the road by 1:00 (or 13:00 here, I still don’t understand their use of military time), we packed up the car we adoringly named The Little Engine that Could, and set our sights west.

Our intended stops changed multiple times during this drive, though the endpoint of the Cliffs of Moher stayed the same. First, we thought a pit stop in Roscommon would be nice to possibly see McDermott’s Castle, but it’s out on an island that you can’t get to so it seemed less exciting to take photos of my ancestors’ old home from afar. Then we thought we might stop at The Burren on our way, but when we realized that it would make us arrive at the Cliffs after the visitor center had already closed, we nixed that too.

Adding in a stop for a snack at a service station cleaner than any I’d seen on my many travels up and down the northeast corridor of the United States and a quick stop for petrol, we were taking our time but making ourselves even later to our destination.

Google maps took us through roads hardly big enough for our tiny hatch-back, and we squeezed ourselves to the side of the road more than once to let a truck go by. It was beautiful, but our lack of speed on country roads that the navigation system didn’t account for caused us to arrive just as the visitor center closed. So no souvenirs for us from them but luckily, you can still walk right up the hills to the Cliffs and the view is free any time.

They were just as incredible as I remembered and I know I’ll remember this sunset for the rest of my life!

From there, it was an hour and a half drive back to Galway for dinner and pints. There was no better place to have our first meal in Galways than King’s Head. Turns out they added a little bistro area for dining in a space just off the main bar, so I had to accept that some things had changed but luckily the food was just as good as I remembered. From there, we squeezed in a stop at The Front Door (which still had Woo Woo on special five years later).

Highlights from days 0 & 1

Day 0

1. When we texted our families from the airport about what they might want us to bring back, both of our younger sisters immediately responded “a sheep.”

2. We ran into Matt’s uncle at our gate, who was on our flight traveling to the UK for work.

3. I fell asleep on the plane watching Crazy Rich Asians but it seems to have followed the book closely so I didn’t miss much.

Day 1

For context, we landed right before 5 am Dublin time and managed to stay awake for all of this:

1. After puttering around trying to find coffee, food, and water, our first stop was to a site called Newgrange. Newgrange looks like a big pile of dirt covered in grass with some stones at the base. It’s a lot more impressive when you find out it’s a tomb that’s over 3,000 years old (older than the pyramids) and they somehow managed to source the stones from miles away to build it.

2. Phoenix Park is the largest public park in Europe. The Papal Cross was put up to commemorate Pope John Paul II celebrating mass there. It was enormous. See the lad with the bike for scale.

There are herds of deer in Phoenix Park so used to people that they practically allow themselves to be pet. We stayed a safe distance away.

3. Last tour of the day for us was the Guinness Storehouse.

4. Not pictured: dinner at a pub in Temple Bar, a pint at the actual Temple Bar, and falling asleep at 9 p.m.

That’s our first day in a nutshell. I need a break from typing on my phone now. 🙂

same country – same boots – different companion

Céad míle fáilte—a hundred thousand welcomes—back to Cheers Galway! I hope you missed reading this blog as much as I missed writing it.

Same country: I leave for Ireland in a few hours.

Same boots: I’ll be wearing the same boots I wore almost daily during my study abroad semester five years ago. (Shout out to L.L. Bean! Your boots are going to last me forever. Feel free to reimburse me for the this unsolicited sponsored content. Thank you.)

Different companion: I’ll spit it out right away. The best thing about my travel companion this time is that I’m in love with him. The second best thing is that he is just as enthusiastic about this trip as I am — even though only one of us cried a few happy tears right after we booked our flights. (Spoiler: it was me.)

We land in Dublin at 5:00 a.m. their time tomorrow morning. More to come as we head out on our adventure!

Sláinte ♣

Cheers, Galway

I put off writing this last post because it means that I really am home from Ireland–though it’s a week today I’ve tried to keep the illusion going, but I guess the joke’s up by now. So far the transition is not as difficult as expected in some ways. I did not have the “grocery store freak out” that an advisor from the office of international studies insisted everyone has. Jet lag is gone entirely by now. I don’t think that I talk about Ireland incessantly, but you would have to check with my family to confirm that. I cleared out my wallet of my NUIG student ID, Irish immigration ID, most of my Euros (I kept a 10€ bill that I should convert), an Irish bus ticket, and some receipts I hadn’t filed yet from my last week in Galway. I got a box to put all of my trip mementos in (those I don’t plan on displaying) and it made me sadder than I even thought I would be. It is the small changes that I find most upsetting and difficult: using American dollars instead of the colorful different size Euro bills, not walking almost everywhere I go, the Irish accent. I could go on but you get it.

Everyone tells me that I will go back someday. I will not be happy if I don’t go back. And when I think about this future return trip, I know that it will not be the same experience as my last few months. As sad as this makes me, I know that those months are not meant to be repeated. Those experiences are perfectly preserved, impossible to blemish, in this blog. My next trip will bring about new developments, self-discoveries, and challenges. I look forward to all of them. There were good and bad moments these last few months, but I would not change a single one of them. This blog represents my truth of a semester in Ireland. And I absolutely mean “my truth.” Everything I wrote happened in my life, the way I felt–it was my reality. I wrote about everything as I experienced it. How could I have written as someone else experienced it anyway? And as you might have guessed based on the sheer word counts, there were very few things that I left out.

I trust in my own words, but for once I will bring in another’s. To quote Emily Dickinson (someone who ironically did not travel the world, let alone outside her own home), “this is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me…For love of her, sweet countrymen, judge tenderly of me!” The world has written to me though, and I’ve learned that it can and it will if I just take the time to receive the mail.

Galway was my home, but it was also an additional character in my blog. I suppose that this blog was a letter to Galway as much as it was to anyone and everyone who wanted to read it. If only Galway could continue to write me back until I can return–but in my reality I know that it will every time I open up these posts. Which is why I sign this last post as I do. Cheers means thank you. It means well wishes. It means goodbye, but in this case see you later.

Cheers, Galway ♣

my last Galway days

It’s a little late, but I never really wrote about my last couple days in Galway. This was partially because I didn’t spend much time at my house or with my computer, but it also would have been difficult. There wasn’t a whole lot that went on Monday through Wednesday. Was that really the beginning of this week? It feels like ages ago. Sara and I started packing very slowly and worked on it over the few days we had. As much as I hated it, the rain was actually beneficial in this sense that it forced us inside. We spent a lot of time in town and by the water when we could. We went out to eat a lot and bought last minute souvenirs. Though I decided that I wasn’t likely to wear a claddagh ring, I bought a bracelet with the claddagh symbol on it and got really excited.

Almost everyone we interacted with at stores and restaurants asked us how long we were staying, assuming that we were on a shorter trip. I had the answer rehearsed by the end: We’re leaving on Thursday, but we’ve actually been here since the beginning of January. This would usually be followed by a sympathetic smile-nod combo or something similar. They didn’t know how upset I was.

But trying not to be sad, we still had plenty of fun! On Tuesday, the weather was slightly in our favor and Sara and I decided that we had to go into the water at Salt Hill. There’s a tall point to jump off of, and it was on our bucket list to try it out. We bundled up for the walk and frankly it was pretty chilly. We had extra clothes in our bags (neither of us had bathing suits, so we were jumping in shorts and sports bras) and towels. We changed into our shorts in a cafe and the rest of the walk, we felt like we were walking around completely naked. Our legs hadn’t seen the sun for some time, besides the fact that people in Europe don’t really wear shorts. We got a couple of stares. We got down to the end of the beach and realized that there were some factors we hadn’t considered. Like how deep was this water exactly? I was a little wary, so we asked some people who had just come out from being in for a swim. They advised us to wait until dinner time to jump in. We were going to wait, but it was getting even more chilly with the clouds blocking out the sun. So we gave up and headed back towards town, this particular item on our Ireland bucket list un-checked. But we did manage to check off a different item that evening with a picnic dinner by the water.

Tuesday night was our last chance to go the Silent Disco, so we made sure to do that as well. We got super (well, for us) dressed up in skirts and heels and danced the night away, singing at the top of our lungs. I almost lost my voice entirely after this. And finally and too quickly, it was Wednesday–our last day. We spent the morning packing so that we wouldn’t have to worry about it later. It was nice enough that we were able to walk around town and just hang out. We went into the Galway Museum for basically the first time because it was free and we didn’t have much to do. For our last meal in Galway, we went to Quay Street Kitchen, one of our favorite places. For our last night out, we went to our favorite three pubs: Kings Head, Quays, and the Front Door. The entire night was a more bittersweet experience than I have ever had in my life. By the time we got home it was late and we were planning on getting up really early, so sleep seemed like a formality and it just didn’t happen.

I cried as soon as we got on the bus to the airport and even with my sleep deprivation, I barely dozed the entire three hour ride. With every step through check-in, security, customs (we had pre-clearance in Dublin rather than in Boston) I was in a sleep-deprived, upset fog and frankly I think I already blacked out some parts of it because they are not things I particularly wanted to remember. It was the same with the flight. I watched Black Swan, Say Anything, and started watching another movie that was kind of dumb and made me want to fall asleep. But the flight passed quickly enough and before I knew it I was standing by the baggage carousel and saw my dad wave. I ran over to my parents and as I hugged my mum, I openly sobbed into her arms. I cried because I missed them so much even with them standing in front of me, because I was so tired, because I was finally home. Because my incredible experience abroad had come to an official end.

One final reflection to come,

Cheers for now ♣

what I learned–a little about school, a lot about life

Secondhand smoke is a very real thing. If I ever get lung cancer, I will blame the smokers of Europe.
Most anyone will talk to you if you want to talk to them.
Pack the extra pair of underwear, but skip the extra t-shirt
Make plans
Don’t make plans
Eat a doughnut.
Walk everywhere that you can.
Different is different, not wrong.
Save tickets, brochures, etc.
Take pictures, but don’t make them your entire purpose
You don’t need to speak the same language, but it would be useful
Being practical is not always over-rated
Street performers are some of the best musicians I have ever heard
Can everyone please just pick a numerical system–imperial or metric?
I wish American brands and chains would stop branching out to other countries
Irish french fries (excuse me, chips!) are better than any other french fries in the world. It’s all about the potato
The concept of the “man purse” is alive and well in Europe
Ask for help
Figure it out yourself
European men’s clothing shows just how much American men need to step up their game.
If you go out at an Irish pub, your clothes will reek of smoke by the end of the night
Markets are the best places to go shopping.
Help fellow tourists and travel karma will be in your favor.
Stop being too cool to put your hood up against the rain.
Wifi should always be free, but McDonald’s, Starbucks, etc. will save you in a pinch
Just because you both speak English does not mean you will be able to understand each other
When in Ireland, you have to at least try drinking a Guinness
If it seems like you might like it–order it
Treat staying in a hostel as if you were camping
Sitting in airports for hours is not nearly as miserable as people make it out to be
All traditional Irish music sounds the same to me
Walk into a pub with confidence and they won’t bother carding you
Don’t let rain stop you from doing anything, except maybe tanning
Sometimes taking a selfie is the best way to document the moment
You don’t always need to take a guided tour
Traveling is exhausting–take a break
Do things you can’t do anywhere else
Buy things you can’t buy anywhere else
Don’t allow yourself to get too comfortable–seek new things
I am more able than I thought, braver, smarter, more adventurous