Galway, the 4th of July, and Responses to Comments

Hey everyone! First I will try to respond to everyone who commented on the last blog. This was the first time I've checked it, so it was nice to be able to hear from so many people. First of all, Felicity, sadly I will not be back until August 30 in the evening sometime. Paul, I'm working on this project the whole time, right up until August 29th when I have to give some big presentation on it. Should be a fun time. Brad, programming at the speed of light is the coolest thing ever. Sometimes I try to slow down to enjoy the view. When I get back, I can try to speak some Irish to you and you can respond in Arabic. It will be fun. Juliann, if you read this post, you'll see about the 4th.

Alright, first I will talk about our trip to Galway. There ended up being 13 of us going! All 7 people in our house went along with a French guy named FX, three more Canadians named Shannon, Sabrina and her boyfriend Conall, a girl from Spain named Elena, and one Irish guy named Anthony. The plan was to catch a bus from Cork to Galway, then immediately catch the connection to Doolin where the Cliffs of Moher are. The reason we didn't go straight from Cork to Doolin was because there was an internet special from Cork to Galway that we wanted to take advantage of. Anyway, the trip started off with a bang! We were waiting for everybody to meet at our house. When it was time to go, people still weren't there, so a group of us went early to make sure the bus didn't leave us or something. So we got there, and we saw Anthony there. We actually didn't know he was coming until right then, so that was kind of a surprise. Anyway, everybody else showed up at the station about 2 minutes before the bus was supposed to leave. We had all printed out our internet tickets which told us that we just had to show that to the bus driver, and he would then print out our real tickets. Well, when we showed them to the bus driver, he didn't even look at them and told us we needed to get our tickets from the ticket booth. We asked if he would wait for us, and all he told us was that the bus left in two minutes. So we hurried to the ticket counter, and there was a huge line there! We didn't think we were going to make it. If we missed that bus, then we would have missed our connection from Galway to Doolin. So Conall, being the genius he is, talked to someone in a suit who looked important and he turned out to be awesome. He ran into where we were all lined up and shouted, "Anyone who is trying to take the next bus to Galway come with me." He tried to take us to another ticket counter, but there was no one there, then he asked the people in line if they minded if we jumped ahead in line. They said it was fine, then he looked at my internet printout and said, "Oh no! You just have to show this to the driver!" He took my ticket and ran to the bus and argued with the bus driver for about 5 minutes. I just looked at Conall and said, "Where did you find this guy?" He said, "I don't know, he was just standing right over there." Finally, we were able to get on the bus with our tickets printed out from the driver. I thought to myself, "Well that was close, but it was nice to get our problems out of the way early." How wrong I was.

The bus to Galway was really bumpy and I actually started getting a little carsick. The bus driver was speeding up really fast in traffic, then slamming on the brakes. It was really annoying. When we got to Galway, it was about 1 minute after the Doolin bus was supposed to leave. We tried to find the bus, and it was gone. We weren't sure what to do, but once again, Conall talked to the right person and we got on a bus that was actually going to chase down the Doolin bus we had missed so we could catch it. We stopped in Ennis, and everyone got off the bus. We didn't know what was going on. The bus driver came back and asked everyone where we were going. He asked each individual person even though we all told him we were in the same group going to Doolin. Alin had actually laid down across the seats in the back to try to sleep. We told him that he was with us, but that didn't satisfy him. He marched to the back and shook Alin and asked in a gruff voice, "Where are you going?" Alin, looked up very startled and stammered "Doolin!" It was hilarious. Now, everyone once in a while, one of us will shout "Doolin!" the way he did. Anyway, the reason he asked everyone was because he had actually caught the Doolin bus at that point and we had to change over. We were able to get on without many problems. As that bus was going, it was raining a lot, and people kept noticing water droplets coming out of the ceiling every once in a while. The bus was fairly full, so people couldn't move out of the way. I think what was happening was something was wrong with the air conditioning, and that was causing some water leakage out the ceiling. As we kept going, the amount of water that was falling kept getting larger and larger. Then, one time we made a sharp turn, and all this water poured out onto some people in the seats. Our group was in the back laughing hysterically. Finally, a woman got her umbrella out to block the water and everyone was laughing. No one was really angry about it, which was good. It was like we were all on an adventure together.

We finally arrived in Doolin after about 7 hours of bus riding. We checked into the hostel there and decided to go eat at a pub called O'Conner's pub. They served great food there, and the prices for beer were the same as in Cork. We were worried everything would be more expensive because we were basically out in the middle of nowhere. So we went into this pub and it was packed. We couldn't find a place to sit down, but the bartender told us that if we could finish our meal within a half hour, we would be allowed to sit at the musicians table. We figured that that was our only option, so that's what we did. We tried fitting about 10 people around a table designed for 6 at the most. I ended up eating some kind of Irish bacon dish with mashed potatoes. It was absolutely delicious. After we were finished, we looked around a bit and saw some pictures on the wall. I saw this one picture of a group of musicians around a table with some very traditionally Irish-looking instruments. They had a fiddle, an accordian, and several other instruments that looked Irish. I turned to someone and said, "I hope that's what the musicians will play." When the musicians got there, that's what it turned out to be! They played traditional Irish music, and we ended up staying there for about 4 hours just listening to them! It was awesome. Some of the other people got videos of it and promised to post them on facebook, so I'll try to get my hands on some of them too. I had actually left my camera in the hotel because I just thought we were leaving to get something to eat. After that, we decided to go back to the hostel so we could hike around the Cliffs of Moher the next day. At the hostel, we had reserved a room for 8 people and two beds in a room for 6 people. Three people had decided to skip out on paying and just sleep on the floor in the 8-bed room. I decided to take one of the two beds because we were the only people in that room so far, and I wanted to get a good night's sleep. Well, this room was one of those that locks when you close the door, and you need the key to open it again. Nick and I were in that room, and I thought he had the key. As we walked in to the hostel, he said, "Steve, you have the key right?" I thought he was joking and trying to freak me out, so I just said, "Yeah, of course." Well, it turned out that he was serious. The reception had long been closed because it was about 12:30 by that point. Both of us searched our pockets and neither of us had it. I knew that Nick had it last because I had never even seen the key. Then Nick remembered that it was in his hoodie that Conall had brought back to the hostel for everyone, which was in the other room. Conall gave us our hoodies back and the key was in there. We were both really relieved because we were convinced that we would have to sleep on the floor in that other room, which would have been awful. We got ready for bed and went into the bathroom to brush our teeth. The bathroom was outside the room, so I said, "Nick, you have the key right?" in the same tone he had asked me before. I was trying to make a joke about us getting locked out of the room again. He said, "No, I left the door open." I went back to the room, and of course, the door was closed. I went back to the bathroom and said in the same tone, "Nick you have the key right?" He said, "It's closed?" Then he searched his pockets for the key again, and it turns out that we really were locked out of the room that time. We couldn't believe it. We had such a feeling of relief, then we were tense again. I glanced in the other room, and they were having a pillow fight in there. I was glad I hadn't gotten a bed in that room, but I was worried I would have to sleep on the floor in there. Nick and I tried everything to get back into our room. We tried breaking into the reception room with a credit card. We tried to find a way to the roof to see if we could get through the window into our room, but nothing was working. We went back upstairs, and the owner of the hostel was actually telling the others to quiet down! We explained the situation to him, and he let us back into our room. Again, a feeling of relief washed over us. We slept peacefully that night and woke up refreshed in the morning.

The next day, we bought some breakfast in the hostel, which sold cheap cereal and milk, and also some really good Irish soda bread. After breakfast, we decided to go on our hike to the Cliffs of Moher. From the hostel it was about a 7 kilometer walk. We started hiking right along the ocean and came to this fence about 30 minutes in. We decided that we had come this far, and if we got in trouble, we would feign ignorance and just claim that we were foreigners. We never ran into anyone... except cows. At one point, our hike led us through a herd of cows, and all they did was stare at us. The hike consisted of jumping over rivers, climbing barbed wire fences, and trying to avoid being shocked as we climbed over electric fences. At one point, I put my hand on a wooden post that was attached to the electric fence, and that ended up shocking me because the post was wet, and there was current running through it. It was very weird. As we went further, the cliffs came into view. We got a picture by a sign that said "Warning! Extreme danger ahead!" We all took a picture beside the sign and kept going. We actually found a really cool place where we were all able to lay on our stomachs and look over a ledge that went straight down over the cliffs. It was really cool, and we got some awesome pictures there. Don't worry I remembered my camera for this part of the trip. We finally arrived at the visitors center for the cliffs, and the cliffs didn't look as good as when we were actually hiking. It was a bit disappointing, but we were all glad that we went on the hike. We ate lunch at the visitor's center and relaxed for a bit, then we hiked back along the road to Doolin. We caught the last bus to Galway and found our hostel.

Galway, of course, had it's own stories. We got to the hostel, and they said that we had booked our rooms for the night before and that we were no-shows. For this particular hostel, they had made us pay everything beforehand, so we had lost €240 collectively, which was about $400. The girl who made the reservation printed off the email and showed them that they had made the mistake, and that we had emailed them asking them to change it. The hostel had emailed her back telling her that they had changed the mistake. So she printed all these emails off and showed it to the hostel. The hostel then got a lot nicer and told us that they were all full, but they would call other hostels in the area and see if we could stay there. Everything had turned out to be full. They offered for us to sleep in the kitchen area for free and told us that they could get us a refund the next day when the manager came in. Some people really didn't want to sleep in the kitchen, so Alin, John, and I set out on foot to find places to sleep. We found this cool Mexican restaurant with rooms above it that had room for everyone for about €30 per night. A lot of people just wanted to sleep in the kitchen, but a few of them took our offer on sleeping at the Mexican place. Also, FX had a friend who lived in Galway at some student apartments that was out of town. He was planning on staying there, and a few of us were going to stay there with him. There were only three people who were planning on doing that, so I decided to join them. After we finally got everything worked out, some of us decided to go to a pub, and some of us decided to hang out at FX's friend's place. I decided to go with FX's group and it turned out that the place was an absolute dump. There was food everywhere, and it looked like it hadn't been cleaned in months. We had a good time there though. We just talked and played games and had a good time until about 4 in the morning. I was going to stay there, but the peole who were staying at the hostel had forgotten how to get back, and I had a map. I just decided to go back with them and show them the way and sleep in the kitchen/dining room area of the hostel. We ended up getting back, and I was only able to sleep until about 7:00 when people came in to have breakfast. This dining room was pretty big, and we were all sleeping off in a corner where there was a separate area with a tv and a couple of couches. I opted for the floor, and couldn't sleep past 7, so I decided to go out and walk around for a bit. It was very peaceful, and I was grateful for it because I was kind of able to recharge without being around people for a while. After that, we ended up walking along the beach and eating at this place that served a full Irish breakfast. It was really good. We caught the bus back in time for us to watch the championship soccer game of the Euro Cup. It was Germany vs. Spain, and I was cheering for Germany as some of you may know for my earlier post. Spain ended up winning 1-0, but it was an exciting game. Anyway, that was the Galway trip.

For the 4th of July, we decided to go to a local bar called Captain America's. We decided we had to do something American, and we could think of nothing that would have been better. I asked if they had any specials for 4th of July, and they ended up not having anything! I was sorely disappointed! Why would you call your restaurant Captain America's, and then not have anything special on the American Independence Day? Anyway, we got some good American beer, Coors Light and Miller Genuine Draft. The Miller was a lot better than the Coors, but we had fun. After that we went back and celebrated some with some rum and Cokes and whiskey. We had invited some Irish people to our place to celebrate with us, and only one of them showed up at around midnight, but we had a great time. We took several videos of all of us dancing to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and Another One Bites the Dust. No fireworks, but it was awesome nonetheless. Anyway, that's about it for now. Thanks for all the comments everyone, and I miss you guys!