Sláinte!

I feel like I've had a very long week that has gone by very quickly, however odd that sounds.  I've done so much, but how was that only five days?

Sláinte, by the way, is a toast in Irish.  It basically means "Cheers!".  I'm quite pleased to have learned a bit (a very little bit) of Irish this week.  But anyway, it'll be easiest to go chronologically.

I met my tour at 8:15 Monday morning, and we were on the road about half an hour later.  There were eighteen of us, ages ranging from early twenties to late thirties, mostly from America, Australia, and New Zealand, with the odd people from England, Germany, and Peru.  Our tour guide's name was Sean, and he was great.  Very knowledgeable and very funny.  He told us that Monday would be our most travel-heavy day for most time on the bus, and he joked that it'd only be ten or twelve hours until we reached our first stop, and one of the Aussies was like "Really?"  I laughed, because I'd be surprised if it took twelve hours to cross the whole country.

Most of our stops were photo stops, with longer breaks for lunch and then dinner in our overnight town.  I don't really remember all the names of the places we stopped, because there were a lot of them.  Our first stop, though, was the Rock of Cashel, which was an old castle and monastery.  On our way there, Sean told us about the basic histories of monasteries in Ireland, which is mostly: built in the fifth or sixth centuries, attacked by Vikings a lot because people would keep their valuables there.

From there we went to Blarney, to visit Blarney Castle and the Blarney Stone, and Sean told us both history and myths about the Blarney Stone.  This was where I had my first piece of bad luck on this trip, because it was sort of drizzling and in front of me on the path to the castle was a big puddle that stretched across the whole width of the path.  I decided to go on the grass around the puddle, but the grass was slippery enough that I got my hands and jeans all muddy.  That sucked.  I could wash my hands in the bathroom, but I couldn't really do much for my jeans, so I had to wear my muddy jeans until we got to the hostel that night.

Regardless of that, though, I did make it to the castle, and I did climb to the top, and I did kiss the Blarney Stone.  I'd had no idea that thing was placed so awkwardly.  Before coming to Ireland I'd though oh, you climb to the top of the castle and kiss a rock up there, okay.  Except it was on the outside wall and sort of underneath the battlements so I had to lay down and lean back and grip the safety poles to actually kiss the stone, and there was an attendant there to make sure we stayed safe.  I wasn't allowed to wear my glasses in case they fell, so I did get a picture of me kissing the stone, but no glasses.

We also stopped at the Mitchelstown Caves, into which we did a bit of climbing, and which were pretty awesome.  They had these calcite ribbons that were really amazing.  We went about a kilometer into the caves, where our guide said they held an annual concert for charity, because in that particular cave was a sort of natural stage.  To show off the acoustics in the cave, the guide decided a group of people should sing, and he picked the Americans.  There were six or seven of us, but we couldn't think of anything we all would know except the national anthem, so we ended up singing The Star-Spangled Banner in a cave in Ireland.  Very odd experience.

Our final stop on Monday was in Killarney, where pretty much the first thing I did was a bit of laundry.  More importantly, though, one of the best things about this tour was that I pretty much immediately fell into a group of friends, so the six of us (four Americans, one Aussie, one New Zealander) roomed together the entire time and spent most of our free time together or in some variation of the group.  It was really awesome.

Sean suggested things for us to do in all the towns we stopped in, and we pretty much always took his suggestions because we didn't know anything else to do.  In Killarney, he suggested going to this pub to listen to this storyteller, who told hilarious and poignant stories about this fictional bar.  That was a pretty great time.

Tuesday we left Killarney at 8:30 and started up the Dingle peninsula.  We started in Dingle for a bathroom stop, then basically made a circle along the coast road, ending in Dingle again for lunch.  We saw some great scenery along the coast road, including the beach of Inch, which is actually about a mile (Sean making a joke about this being the only place where an Inch is literally a mile), and we stopped at another particularly awesome beach at the bottom of a short cliff, which we actually climbed down so we could walk on the beach for a bit and write our names in the sand.  The tide would soon wash that away, of course, because apparently this particular beach is under water most of the time and Sean said he'd never seen as much of it before as he did when we were there, so that was nice.

Which reminds me, the weather was actually pretty great most of the trip.  It did rain on me a bit, but not that much -- most of the time when it rained was when we were on the bus anyway, and even then it wasn't as much as I was expecting.  We actually saw a lot of sun.  It was great.

Anyway, we continued along the coast road, Sean telling us stories about Fionn mac Cumhaill, a big-time Irish mythological hero.  I was so pleased to be getting Celtic mythology stories on my tour.  Awesome stuff.  We had lunch in Dingle, and then started heading north, because we were going to be crossing the Shannon River on a ferry and spending the night in Ennis.

On the way to the Shannon I started feeling worse than my normal mild motion sickness, so once I the ferry I bought a 7Up and that settled my stomach a bit.  By the time we got to Ennis, though, I really wasn't feeling well or up to much at all, which made me sad, because Sean told us that Ennis and County Clare were well known for their traditional music and we should go listen to that that night.  Also, at the hostel, they were going to give us a lesson in Irish set dancing.

I wanted to listen to the traditional music and learn the dances, but I was not feeling well.  When we got there around five, I took a nap.  The dance lesson was at six, so I woke up and went down there to watch, but I didn't feel well enough to participate.  It was over after an hour, and everyone else went to dinner, but I wasn't hungry and I just wanted to sleep more, so I went back to bed.

I woke up again when people started coming in around midnight, and initially I felt better, because I decided to take my shower.  I made it through the brushing my teeth part of my nightly routine when I became very grateful that I hadn't had dinner, because my lunch decided to revisit me.  At least I was already in the bathroom, so I made it to the toilet with minimal mess, but that was very unpleasant.  I did feel much better after my stomach was empty, though, so I took my shower, drank from the water bottle one of my roommates and new friends was kind enough to fill for me, and went back to bed.  All in all I slept about thirteen hours.

I'll stop it there for now, because it's almost midnight here and I'm zonked.  Tomorrow I'm going to see more of Dublin and then I'll be getting back to London, so I'll probably finish the story of my tour on Sunday.