Woohoo blogging! Its been a while, and as you can see we've been a few places, so we have a few stories to share.
First of all, I am happy to note we have had many nights of warm cozy sleeps without having to resort to whiskey blankets. Hostels are generally pretty toasty. Tonight is our last night staying with friends in Dublin, so we are both reallllly hoping the farm with have warm sleeping accomodations.
It was sad times to leave the little cafe in Cork, and on our last day it seemed like Pat was contemplating how he could kidnap us and keep us working in the shop so that he could go off to India. But we did leave in the end, and he sent us on our way with some of our favorite tea and chocolate covered rice cakes.We spent the last night in town so that we could get an early bus to Killarney. Most nights that we were in the city we would go to a pub with live music and have a pint, but we had never experienced real Cork nightlife so we decided to go big for our last night. After the most delicious pizza i've ever eaten (so amazing after 2 weeks of very healthy food) we got dressed up and went out. We soon discovered that our definition of dressed up (clean clothes and a bit of eyeliner) was extremely dressed down for Cork saturday night standards... The girls wear 5 pounds of makeup and everybody looks like they want to be on Jersey Shore. Later we found out that that was actually true, they legit idolize Jersey Shore. Yikes. We met this guy who is moving to Vancouver in a few weeks and he couldn't understand why we couldn't help him find a place to live. Not sure he's ever seen Canada on a map before.
The next day we hopped on a bus to Killarney, which is a tourist town in county Kerry that is on the edge of a beautiful National Park. We had some great walks through the park. On our second day there we took a bus tour of the ring of Kerry, which goes around the Iveragh (?) Penninsula. I've already started thinking about coming back to Ireland to hike or bike that area because it was so amazing.
Next we had a quick stopover in Limerick, which we learned later has the nickname "stab city". Awesome. We walked around looking for dinner around 8 and the city was completely deserted, except for a couple sketchy characters on street corners. The most interesting thing about Limerick is that it has gridded streets... and that was only interesting to me because im such a nerd about little urban planning things. But i honestly felt like i was in Detroit or something.
We only really stopped in Limerick because we couldnt get a direct bus to the Cliffs of Moher. We heard the Cliffs were awesome and they did not disappoint. So beautiful and so fun to hike along the edge, beyond the barrier.
After the Cliffs we got to Galway! Galway is totally the opposite of Limerick, a really vibrant fun town with tons of pubs with live music and a beach promenade. We had a lot of fun exploring the town and drinking to the sounds of fantastic musicians. We thought about taking a boat to the Aran islands on our second day, but the weather was bad so we stayed in town. And then we discovered that Galway can also be pretty boring. We had been to all the sights the day before, so there was nothing else to do, and besides the weather was crap. So we drifted from coffee shop to park bench to window shopping in the mall. We bought some olives and dips from a nice grocery store but had nowhere to sit, and then it started raining, so we smuggled our snacks into a mall cafe and hoped we wouldnt get kicked out. Hobos with fancy tastes. Anyway that seems way it is in Ireland, the quality of your day is highly dependent on the weather. We've generally had great weather while traveling though so can't really complain.
Finally, we made it to Dublin! We've been staying with Sarah's lovely friend Emer. Its been sunny and warm and we had a great time. We brought a Canadian flag out to a club for Canada day and made lots of friends.
Whew. And thats it. This post was a little on the dry side, but I had a lot of things to cover, and still a bit hungover so having a hard time recallng the funny anecdotes. Farming for realzies starts tomorrow!!!
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