This will be the last post in Steven Goes Irish. Tomorrow morning, I’m flying back home to the land of snow, good burgers, and driving on the right.

Yesterday, I went back to the Aran Islands with my good friend Peter, who came up from his program in Greece to see Ireland and London. The weather was rough, but we toughed through it. Inis Mor took on a different feel compared to the time I visited in September. It was dark and cold. Instead of warm and sunny, it felt like a man vs. nature experiance, which wasn’t a bad thing. It was an adventure and a challenge, and a good way to end the program.

We rented bikes again, and this time I got to see the things I missed the first time. We saw the lighthouse and the ring fort, again, but this time we also made it to the the stone circle that we’d noticed the last time we were there.

We had to push through a forest of brambles to reach this place. As you can see, it's really, really big. Modern, though; mostly made of cement. Which wasn't much of a surprise or disappointment, the achievement of getting there was most of the fun.

After the stone circle, we went to the ancient fort on the cliffs, which was the thing I was most disappointed about missing the first time. I’m glad we were able to make it up there.

Most of the fun of the fort was looking over the edge of the cliff. It was a straight drop, a few hundred feet.

I actually didn’t think the fort was a cool as it was cracked up to be. But the cliff was awesome.

Yes, I did hold my camera over the edge of a cliff hundreds of feet above a raging surf.

Eventually, it was time to leave. We left the island, and I went back to the Park Lodge. Bewilderingly, the power was out. It had gone out on the Aran Islands as well, so I imagine that most of the Galway Bay area grid had gone down. It made for a pretty subdued night. Though the power came back on around 10:00, the pub was a quiet place, partly because of the crazy party we’d had the night before. I prefer a quiet pub, actually, and I really enjoyed the night.

Now, I’m all packed. All that’s left is to clean the cottage and say the goodbyes. Tomorrow, we’ll board the coach and say farewell to our home of three months.

Final impressions: I love Ireland. It’s beautiful, with a relaxed way of life that’s wonderfully refreshing. I learned and changed a lot in the last three months, about traveling and living in an apartment. I’d never bought my own groceries before, for one thing. I can cook a few things now, and it’s no problem to book a hostel or catch a train. I’ve handled five currencies in the last three months, in ten different countries.

I’ve kissed the Blarney Stone, walked the Giant’s Causeway, marveled at the book of Kells, canvassed the British Museum. I ate horse in Slovenia, traversed Vintgar Gorge. I’ve been to Zagreb, a place I’d never even heard of before coming to Ireland. I never would have thought I’d go to Hero’s Square in Budapest, or Auschwitz in Krakow.  Three months ago, I was worried about living in Ireland with a professor and 30 other college students. Now, I’m quite sure I could travel alone to any city in Europe, and I’d be just fine.

Now, I’m ready to go back, to celebrate Christmas with my friends and family. But I know that time will pass before I realize how much I loved this trip, how much I learned. I’ve come to love this place, and I’ll look back on it forever with fond memories.

Here at cottage 3, we are blessed with not one, but two fine cooks. I am not one of those people, but I still enjoy the benefits: great food, every night. Where other cabins endure a never ending barrage of rice cakes and noodles, cottage 3 takes pride in their menu.

We made these burgers for Nick’s birthday. Little taste of home, you see. My contribution was the Mrs. Dash that I brought from home (good idea, Mom). This is the closest thing we have to a group picture, so I may as well introduce the members of Cottage 3. On the left is our bald cook, Kyle, at the head of the table is Dave W, next is our other cook Dave L, and the guy with the knife is Nick.

This is Dave's fettuccine. Not sure what he does to it, but it's tasty.

This is Dave's lasagna. I asked him what was in it once, but the ingredient list was too long to remember.

Our only meal that includes many dishes (our tiny kitchen makes it difficult to make highly varied meals), breakfast-for-dinner comes from Dave. The pancakes are so delicious (made from scratch with eggs, butter, flour, sugar and other goodness) are so delicious I don't think I'll be able to go back to the old 'just add water' type. The stuff in the white dish is bacon- funny story about that. Dave bought a block of uncut bacon for this meal, because it was cheaper than the sliced kind. Problem: do you know how hard it is to slice bacon by hand? We ended up with bacon chunks: concentrated deliciousness.

Beef Stew is Dave's tour de force. Delicious, and made entirely from scratch. The biscuits were an addition from Nick, and the wine was a gift from JP, the bartender here at the Park Lodge.

The pizzas are one of Kyle's specialties. We each got one, made to order. He mixed the dough from scratch; even going so far as using yeast and letting the dough rise.

This is Kyle's casserole... but here's the shock: I cooked this! Kyle taught me how. It's noodles, beef, corn, cream of chicken, cream of mushroom, and a concoction of Kyle's called "white sauce".

Bewilderingly, I never pictured Kyle’s signature meal; the famous Chicken Pot Pie. My only explanation for this oversight was that I was too eager to eat the chicken pot pie to bother with getting the camera. I’ve helped him make it a couple of times, trying to learn the process, but it’s deep magic. He makes everything from scratch, even the crust and filling. Inside is fresh chicken, steamed veggies, and the seasoned white sauce.

I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out, having five guys trying to cook for themselves for 3 months. But it’s been a delicious semester.

I climbed this!

This is Mt. Croagh Patrick, located near Westport in County Mayo. Its name means “St. Patrick’s Mountain”, which refers to a legend in which St. Patrick climbed the mountain and stayed there for 40 days. Because of this, it has become a holy pilgrimage site.

Every year, thousands of people climb Croagh Patrick to visit the chapel on top. A lot of people do it barefoot. Most people, however, don’t climb it in November.

It’s 2,289 vertical feet to the top of Croagh Patrick. The trail starts about a mile away from the mountain itself. When I took the picture above, I was already a few hundred feet down the path. Despite the high vertical climb, the trail is pretty short; just a couple of miles. This makes for a grueling incline.

We didn’t know any of this when we decided to climb the mountain. We’d been to the trailhead before, heard about the pilgrimage, and several of us thought it would be quite fun to give it a try. It took about 2 months of waiting to find a free day with good weather, which is how we ended up climbing on November 29^th.

We took a taxi to take us to the mountain. There were eight of us that would be climbing the mountain that day, and I remember, as we drove up, someone asked “Is that the one we’re climbing? That big white one?”

I just thought, ‘Nah, that’s impossible. We must be climbing one of those small green ones on either side.’

The trail starts a good distance from the mountain itself, and begins with a steep, rocky uphill section along a mountain stream. Everyone who climbs the mountain will tell you that the last section is the worst, but I felt differently. I thought that first section was the hardest of the whole climb.

Every muscle in my body, grown lazy from good Cottage 3 food and too many nights in front of the fire, cried out in pain and frustration during the first hour. It was much, much tougher than I had thought it would be; a steep, muddy haul covered in loose rocks. During this first section, I became eminently convinced that we must be climbing one of the small green mountains directly ahead of us, because if this section was so difficult there was no way the trail would lead up that white giant.

On this first section, we also saw some snow and ice, clinging to the shadowy side of some rocks. What a novelty that was! I even photographed the pathetic little bit of ice, saying “I never thought I’d see snow up close in Ireland!”

From the start, we decided to opt for a ‘go at your own pace’ policy of climbing. This meant that we all split up fairly quickly, though I walked with a friend for most of the climb. It was easier with someone to talk to, and more fun.

We reached the top of the first section. Finally, here we got some respite, as the trail evened out, making for easier going. Unfortunately, as we topped the ridge, the wind began to blow, very cold and powerful. But the view was worth it.

See how low the sun is in the sky? That's as high as it gets. Days are short, this time of year.

It was here that I also realized just which mountain I had set out to climb. The trail swerved to the right, following a ridge… that led directly towards the high, snow covered mountain. I could see people climbing up the side, in the distance. The trail snaked around to the back side of the mountain, which was passable, but still steep.

We started up the side, and as we climbed higher, we began to encounter more and more snow. The trail got steep again, and now the loose rocks were covered in a layer of snow. We reached a cairn along the side of the path, labeled as part of the pilgrimage. It called for pilgrims to walk around it seven times, saying prayers.

I was one of the few to do this. So technically, my climb was slightly longer than everyone else

Once this was done, we continued the climb, up the back of Croagh Patrick. It was tough, but at least my body had accustomed itself to the idea of strenuous exercise by now. It also helped that the end was in sight- travelers coming down kept saying ‘almost there, almost there’, even though we weren’t.

Finally, we reached the top.

No, this isn’t Siberia. I was confused about that too. That’s the chapel on top of Croagh Patrick. I had been looking forward to going inside (As much to get out of the wind as out of religious interest), but it was closed. Apparently, they only open it on the official day of the pilgrimage.

Clouds had rolled in around the mountain, cloaking the mountain in a thick gray. Everything I could see was covered in an inch of snow and ice. It was surreal, to think that two hours I was walking through green fields- on top of Croagh Patrick, it felt like Siberia.

The clouds cleared once, for a few minutes, and I got a few pictures of the bay, far down below.

The clouds cleared once, just for a few minutes, to give us this view.

We didn’t stay on the summit long; we were there for less than a half an hour. We did stay long enough to take pictures of this wonder:

Someone climbed this mountain barefoot! In the snow! I’d seen this guy coming down the mountain, hobbling over the sharp rocks. The leaders of our group caught up with him, and here’s the real wonder- he was the son of the SJU professor who used to lead the Galway program. One of us had even had his father for a class. He himself had gone to the prep school, and he would be on campus in January, playing with a popular SJU band.

Small island, no?

We slowly made our way back down the mountain, careful not to slip on the snow and loose stones. When we reached the ridge, and were about to head down the final stretch, we were struck by one of those freaks of mountainous weather. It started to hail. Just little tiny bits, no bigger than snowflakes, but borne on winds so furious they flew horizontally. It was intense.

Fortunately the hail quickly gave way to snow, which pelted us viciously as we descended. The front of my clothing was covered in spots of white where windborne snowflakes embedded themselves in my jeans. Then, just as quickly as it started, the snow stopped.

You can see the sleet coming down, near the bottom of this picture.

The rest of the mountain went easily, though it took a surprising amount of time to go downhill. Even when we were clear of the snow, everything was wet, and we had to descend carefully to keep from slipping.

Finally, we were done. We made it back down the home stretch, ate at the nearby café, and got back into the cab, exhausted.

After a semester of touring cities and castles, it felt great to get out and do something physical. Croagh Patrick was a tough challenge, tougher than I thought it would be, but that will only makes me feel better about climbing it. It was definitely a highlight of the trip.

Our trip to London was a sort of extra trip a few of us planned over a long weekend, from the 20^th to the 23^rd.  It’s extraordinarily cheap to fly from Ireland to London; the round trip ticket for our flights cost about 50 Euro. A lot of people from the trip planned excursions abroad during this weekend; it was sort of a last excursion before the end of the year.

There were six of us total on this trip. We left the Park Lodge Hotel at 10:00 P.M. on Wednesday. It was a rough night. We got on the midnight bus to Dublin, arriving there around 3:30. Then we boarded a 6:40 flight to London’s Gatwick airport. I slept for about three hours, that night, on the bus.

In Gatwick, we got off the plane and headed towards customs. Right before going into the room, one of the girls on our trip suddenly stopped, and with a terrified look, said, “I don’t have my passport.”

Ah, hell. Traveler’s nightmare, that is.

She tried to go back to the plane, but it was already headed back to Ireland. So, she separated from us, beginning the process of tracking it down. We waited around the airport for about two and a half hours, eventually meeting up with her again. She would have to go to the Embassy in order to get back into Ireland, as no one had found her passport.

We took the Gatwick Express train from the airport into central London (as a general rule, low cost airlines use cheap, out of the way airports to save money… most are at least a half hour away from where you want to go.) Once we were finally in the city, we ate some fish and chips, then set out to decipher the London Underground.

Those are the famous double decker buses in the background. They have them in Ireland as well, but in Ireland they're always scraped up from low hanging branches and narrow roads.

I’ll say this right now: the Tube is WONDERFUL. It’s fast, simple, and cheap. Once you get it figured out, you can be anywhere in central London in about 30 minutes. I loved it.

We made our way to Globetrotter Hostel. This was the cheapest place we could find that still had a decent reputation. The trade off was that it was miles from anywhere. The Tube solved that problem, however. Like our hostel the week before in Cork, Globetrotter seemed to be a former school. Instead of putting up a wall in the dorm rooms, though, they’d cut one down, making for a nice, large room. We also had the whole room to ourselves- definitely a plus.

Once we reached our hostel, we took a very necessary nap. As my friend Tam is fond of saying, “You can’t cheat nature.” And nature was saying that 3 hours of sleep over a 30 hour period was not a good thing.

Understandably, it took us a while to wake up and get moving. Eventually, we got back on the Underground, towards Piccadilly Circus. We needed to find tickets to the musical Wicked for tonight. We’d also had some plans to go to the British Museum before dinner, but getting the tickets took so long, that wasn’t in the cards. We got some cheap seats in the back, ate at a nearby pub, and went to the Victoria Theater to see the show.

Seeing the musicals was basically the whole reason I’d come to London, to be perfectly honest. I’d seen a lot of old cities in Eastern Europe, and I was a little tired of just ’seeing the sights’. Old buildings are only interesting for so long, you know? I didn’t think that anything in Western Europe could top the off-the-beaten-path appeal of the east anyway.

So seeing musicals offered something that the other locales didn’t, and something I was excited to do. I haven’t seen any really top quality shows before, so I was looking forward to it.

Wicked didn’t disappoint. The visual effects were simply incredible. There were times when I forgot I wasn’t watching a movie. Brooms and monkeys and people were flying all over, effortlessly. I couldn’t figure out how most of it worked, which made it even more fun to watch.

After the show, it was back to the hostel for some much needed sleep.

On Friday morning, five of us went to the Tower of London. Our sixth group member, the one who’d lost her passport, went instead to the embassy.

This is the Tower of London. As you can see, it's not a tower, in particular, but more like a bunch of towers clumped together.

The Tower of London was pricey, but definitely worth it. We had a great tour guide, one of the famous tower warders, perhaps better known as the people on the label of the Beefeaters vodka. He reminded me of Snot, from the Renaissance Festival show. It was hard to remember that he had 25 years experience in the army, and could only gain his position after receiving two medals.

This is one of the 35 tower guards, also known as beefeaters.

After the tour, we saw the crown jewels. I remember we used to own a plastic sword, incrusted in comically large plastic gems. The crown jewels were like that, in fact there was a sword much like my plastic one, but the comically large emeralds and rubies were REAL. It was tough to get my mind around.

I also saw the largest diamond in the world. It’s in a scepter of some sort. It’s about the size of a chicken’s egg, though flattened, so it’s about an inch thick.

Now, the Tower of London is not, in fact, a tower. It’s more like a fort. There are actually 20 towers, inside the fort and built into its walls, but the one that everyone thinks about is the White Tower. The White Tower is in the middle of the complex, and it was the first building on the site. It was named the White Tower after one of their kings thought it would be quite lovely if he whitewashed it.

The White Tower holds the Armory; this is a sort of mini museum of British armaments from the imperial times and before. The Armory worked to impress tourists by sheer number of weapons and armor on display. It worked; there were dozens of suits of armor, hundreds of 18^th century pistols, and a rack that held 1,100 muskets. There were fifteen foot long cannons, primitive mortars, and swords by the dozen.

Eventually, we left the tower, and ate some more fish and chips. Then we took the Tube over to Westminster, and got our first look at Big Ben.

That's Big Ben. The name Big Ben actually refers to the enormous bell inside the clock tower, crafted by a man named Benjamin. In the background, you can see the London Eye, the Ferris wheel.

It was surprisingly impressive. I hadn’t really expected to be amazed, having seen pictures of the tower a million times. I mean, it’s just a clock tower, right?

But the thing is huge. Maybe that’s the quality that made me keep staring at it. Whatever it was, it was awesome.

Parliament was right next to it, but this was something of a disappointment. We couldn’t go inside, because it was in session. We didn’t go into Westminster Abbey either, because no one wanted to pay the 6 pounds to get in. So we walked to Buckingham Palace.

This is the Victoria Memorial, a monument to Queen Victoria. It stands in front of Buckingham Palace, and is actually more interesting than the palace itself.

We couldn’t get in here, either, of course. But the exterior was rather impressive, and it stood before a really cool fountain. I also saw the Buckingham Palace guards (though they’d had one of them on the Tower of London as well). They weren’t wearing their red uniform, but they still had the fuzzy hat, and they walked really funny.

This guy was actually at the Tower of London, but it's the same type of guard. I wish you could somehow see him walk. It was ridiculous.

We took the Tube back to Big Ben to meet up with the one who’d lost her passport. She was all smiles. Apparently, the Embassy had printed her up a new one in about 15 minutes, once she’d gone through the red tape. That was surprising- I’d had to wait about a month for mine.

We ate at a Chinese place called Wagamamas, then I split off from the others to go see The Phantom of the Opera.

I’d already booked my ticket for Phantom, before leaving for London. I didn’t want to take any risks, you see. As I’ve said, my main reason for coming to London was to see the shows, so I wasn’t about to miss anything I wanted to watch. In this case, no one else wanted to see Phantom, so I went alone.

I was already pretty adept at traversing the Underground, and it’s a testament to the wonders of the Tube to say that I was sitting in my seat in Her Majesty’s Theater just a half hour after sitting in my seat at Wagamamas.

Phantom was really great. The visual effects weren’t as spectacular as Wicked, Phantom’s script doesn’t call for the sort of thing. There were some cool moments, though, such as the boat gliding across the stage on a thick fog, or the Phantom shooting fireballs- real fireballs- from a scepter. The real draw for Phantom, however, was the singing. It was in a league of its own.

This was what the stage of Phantom looked like. When the show started, the curtains suddenly lifted to reveal the opening "auction" scene.

The next morning, Saturday, was our last full day in London. We had a busy day planned out, taking us all over London. At my request, we started off at the British Museum, the one we’d failed to visit on the first day.

What a place! I’m kind of a history buff, and a museum nut, so the British Museum was my Mecca. The British Empire shamelessly stole historical artifacts from every culture it ever dominated (and that’s most of them), and all those artifacts were on display at the Museum.

I started with Ancient Egypt. There was the famous Rosetta Stone, the tablet that allowed hieroglyphics to be deciphered. There was a massive statue of Ramses II, the greatest Pharaoh of Egypt. There were tablets covered in hieroglyphs, facades from tombs, and carvings of gods.

This enormous statue is the likeness of Ramses II, the greatest of the Egyptian Pharoahs. This isn't a replica- it stood in Egypt for thousands of years. I couldn't stop staring at it; it was my favorite piece in the entire museum.

Then I went onto the Greece and Rome area. Immediately, I found myself in the room devoted to Alexander the Great, who is my favorite historical figure. I think this is when I knew for sure that the 90 minutes my friends prescribed here would not be nearly sufficient. I met up with them, and told them that I would be staying at the museum. I’d meet up with them at the hostel that night.

This was the best decision I could have made. I canvassed that museum. I saw half of the remaining statues of the Parthenon (England took them ‘legally’ a couple hundred years ago), pieces of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (That was exciting- I didn’t even know there were any pieces left!), as well as statues from Assyria that were so large they had to be cut into four pieces and reassembled, just to get them inside. There were rooms from Greece, Rome, China, India, Southeast Asia, a room full of priceless Chinese jade, the giant Balawat Gates of Assyria, a room full of sarcophagi and mummies, excerpts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Japanese art and weaponry, medieval Europe, Mesopotamia, Ancient Mexico, Native American artifacts, and an awesome set of rooms on pre-colonial Africa.

These statues once stood over the Parthanon, on the Acropolis of Athens. About half of the remaining carvings from the Parthanon are in the British Museum, which causes a lot of contraversy with modern Greece.

There were sixty-six open rooms in that building, and I saw every one of them. I was there for seven hours, from a half hour after opening right up until closing time. I loved it.

Eventually, the place closed down, and I had to leave. I probably would have stayed longer, if I could have.

I was now left alone in London, without anything planned to do. I’d had a vague plan to go see The Lion King, but I scrapped that idea after a ticket agent told me that it would cost 51 pounds for a seat. It’s kind of tough to get tickets to a big show two hours before it starts on a Saturday night. I got a map from the ticket agent anyway, intending to go see if the theater itself had any deals.

I couldn’t find the theater on the map, though, and when I flipped it over, I found an advertisement for Stomp. Stomp is a performance percussion group whose video our band teacher would always show us whenever we had a free day. They’re pretty famous; I even have some of their clips on my computer. So I went to that theater, and got a seventh row ticket for 20 pounds. I’d paid more for either of the previous nights, to sit in the nosebleed section of the theater. An advantage of being alone: they are desperate to unload the single seats.

I actually really enjoyed spending the day on my own. I could go at my own pace (no one would ever have stayed at that museum with me for that long, and I would have felt bad if someone had tried) and see whatever I wanted to see. It was refreshing.

I had some time before Stomp started, so I wandered into an Australian bar. It was packed, even at 6:15. This was because a rugby game was on- the New Zealand All Blacks vs. the Welsh. It was the first time I’d ever seen rugby. It’s intense, and it was really fun to see. The All Blacks scored, and the bar went wild.

I ate some Subway (a little taste of home) and went into a bookstore called The Murder One. It drew me in because it had a life sized mannequin of Sherlock Holmes in the window. It sold exclusively murder mysteries.

After a time, I heard a sort of chanting outside… “Safe Streets! Safe Streets!”. It was a feminist rally, surrounded by protective policemen. Hundreds of feminists had turned out to push to ‘take back the night’.

After they passed, it was time for Stomp. The show was awesome. They made perfectly timed music out of broomsticks, pots, trashcan lids, snapping their fingers, tubes cut to different lengths, buckets, newspapers- even matchbooks. They even had a part where they hung suspended from the top of a wire fence, and played on assorted junk tied to the fence. It was great.

This was the stage for the Stomp concert. Later in the night, they had six performers hanging from the top of those wire fences, banging on things.

I’d had some intentions to see Shakespeare’s Globe after the show was done, but by now it was getting late, and it occurred to me that going far away to a strange part of the city at 10:30 at night (11 by the time I got there), alone when no one really knew where I was, would have been a bad idea. So I went back to the hostel and got some sleep- necessary, because we would be getting up early the next morning.

Our flight on Sunday left at 10:00 AM, and it was here that the Tube betrayed us for the first time- the line between our station and the one we needed was closed. It was sort of an ordeal to get there, really. We eventually had to walk between one stop and another in the freezing morning, just to make it back to Victoria Station.

Snow was falling that morning as well, which was something of a surprise. I hadn’t expected to see the stuff until I came back to Minnesota.

We made it back to Gatwick Airport (which was not an impressive airport… they wouldn’t tell you which gate your plane was at until minutes before it boarded, forcing you to wait in their shopping mall), and flew back to Ireland. A long bus ride later, we were back at the Park Lodge.

London was a great trip, even better than I thought it would be. I had a lot of fun there, and it proved to be a fitting end to my travels on this trip. I might move around Ireland a bit for the next three weeks, but this was the last big excursion that I’ll be taking on.

Oof, this post was a doozy. If you’ve actually read this far, you probably deserve some sort of medal. In the future, my posts won’t be this long (you’re welcome), not because I’ve decided to control myself (how silly), but because, as I mentioned above, I won’t be traveling anywhere else for the next couple of weeks. I’ve got a few smaller posts planned for the future, so check in every once in a while. I’ll be sure to write at least once a week. Thanks for reading!

Hello again, folks. It’s been a while since I’ve written a post, I know, but now I’m sort of on the ‘home stretch’ of the program, with not much else to do, so I have some time to make up the difference. We’ll start with the Cork excursion we went on a couple of weeks ago.

Cork was our last excursion of the trip. It was a short trip, only Friday to Sunday, the 14^th of November to the 16^th.

Our first stop was in Limerick, at the Hunt Museum. The Hunt Museum is a smaller sort of museum, founded by the Hunt family, a pair of antique store owners. They kept the best things they found for themselves. For instance, I saw an ancient Egyptian vase, aged 3,500 years, that the Hunts used to hold peonies. Eventually, they made their collection into a museum. It had a huge range of stuff, from all areas and all time periods. It also held an original painting of a ’soup of the day’ menu card made by a young Pablo Picasso, and a rare carving of a horse by Leonardo DaVinci. It seemed odd to see a $6 million piece in a small private museum in Limerick, guarded only by a glass case, but there it was.

I ate some fish and chips, then got back on the bus. A note here on fish and chips: I’ve grown to love them. They’re delicious.

After my rendezvous with tastiness, it was back on the bus, to go to the famous Blarney Stone.

These are the grounds of Blarney Castle. The leaves finally got around to changing, and we caught the tail end of them at Blarney.

Blarney Castle was actually really nice. I figured it’d be just a hyped up tourist attraction, but the grounds the castle were on would have been worth a visit, even without the magical rock. It helped, I’m sure, that we visited on the off season, when there were very few other tourists. During the summer months, I’m sure it would have been packed solid.

That's Blarney Castle in the background. The Stone sits on top, set into the ramparts. If it looks like a long, tiring climb up to that elevation, that's because it is.

We climbed up to the top of the castle, where the Blarney Stone is. It’s actually a very common sort of rock; just a square slab at the bottom of the overhang of a machicolation. It’s supposed to a piece of the throne of the high kings of Scotland, or something like that, and it gives you the gift of gab if you kiss it.

To kiss the stone, there is a guy there who leans you back over the edge of the ramparts, where the stone hangs down. You kiss the stone, and the guy pulls you back up. It was actually kind of fun- and the most action I’ve gotten in some time.

This is one of my friends, kissing the stone. You can actually see part of it in this picture; it's that long, lighter gray colored rock at the bottom of the wall.

And yes, I have heard the rumors about the locals peeing on the Blarney Stone. I didn’t care.

After kissing the stone, and wandering around the castle grounds a bit, it was time to move on to Cork.

Our hostel in Cork was not one of the better ones we’d stayed at. It used to be a school. (Ireland is awash with former schools, ever since free public education and the decreasing number of practicing Catholics has eroded the number of parochial schools). Problem was, they’d put a wall in each dorm room, splitting one room into two. Then they put three bunk beds in each room. The result was a narrow corridor with only about 18 inches of space between the beds. But, we got our own bathroom and free breakfast, so it wasn’t a total failure.

That night, I toured some of the pubs in Cork, performing an exhaustive study of the three Irish stouts: Guinness, Beamish, and Murphy’s. I’m happy to report my findings: Guinness is indeed the best, though Beamish is good too. Murphy’s is just a cheap Guinness.

On Saturday, we got up to a tour of the city. The tour was actually quite disappointing. I got the distinct impression that there simply wasn’t anything to see in Cork. The University was pretty picturesque, but the only unique item of interest on the tour was a place called the English Market. It was an enormous building, full of fresh sellers of every kind of food (especially meat) you could imagine. They were selling things I’d never even heard of before.

This is Cork University. It was a sort of quiet, green oasis right in the middle of the city.

Still, it was a little depressing to think that the best Cork could offer was a giant butcher’s shop. I was glad that our next stop took us out of the city, to a place called Charles Fort, on the coast.

Charles Fort was a British fort, shaped like a star and placed along a narrow harbor entrance, guarding the town of Kinsale. The fortifications were still intact, though everything inside had been burned down in the Irish Civil War by the retreating Eamon DeValera. During the course of its life, the fort had only been attacked once, and it was taken. So I guess you could say it has a 100% failure rate. Teams of sailboats were practicing in the harbor as well, which was fun to watch.

These are the outer fortifacations of Georges Fort.

We toured Kinsale a bit, then headed back to Cork. A group of us went to Mass at a little church near the hostel. We got there early, and talked to the priest beforehand. When the mass started, he began by welcoming “The young students from Minnesota and Wisconsion, from the University St. John’s”. Being the only young person at a mass has its advantages- the priests always want to chat with you, and you definitely feel welcome.

Afterwards, I did something I’d sworn in Tralee to never do again- I went back to Hillbilly’s Fried Chicken. I’m not sure what compelled certain members of our group to even consider returning to that pit of deep fried hell, but peer pressure won out.

As I’ve perhaps mentioned before, Ireland is on the same latitude as the Hudson Bay- that is, even farther north than Minnesota. That doesn’t matter much, on account of the warm ocean current from Africa, but it does make a difference in terms of daylight. When I’d first come here, I hadn’t been expecting it to get dark at 5:30 in mid November, but it does. It’s taken some getting used to. Even as I write this, it’s 7:30 PM, but I feel as though I should be getting to bed, because it’s been dark for over two hours.

Anyway, on Sunday, we packed up and headed back towards Galway. We made a couple of stops along the way- the first one at Cobh harbor museum.

Cobh is where all the immigrants in Ireland sailed from, moving to America or Austrailia. There was a museum there, detailing their journey, and the conditions they lived in for their weeks-long endeavor. Cobh is also where the Titanic sailed from, after completing her sea trials from Belfast, as well as the last place the Lusitania sailed from, before she was torpedoed by U20, pulling America into WWI.

This is a statue of Annie Moore and her two younger brothers. The fifteen-year-old girl was the first person to ever go through Ellis Island. Someone gave her a $10 gold coin for being the first.

Our other stop was the Blarney wool market. Normally, the wool market is a pretty sedate place. But the recent financial crisis has the entire European continent on edge, and retailers all over are cutting prices to entice nervous buyers. Apparently, it worked, because the place was packed. Also, they’ve already started their Christmas sales here. They have no Thanksgiving in Ireland, of course, so there’s no buffer between Halloween and Christmas. The retailers put on the Christmas music a little earlier than in past years, also to entice buyers.

We got back to the Park Lodge, all of us aware that this was the last time we’d all be on a bus together. This was our last group excursion. From now on, we’ll all be left to our own devices.

Sorry folks, but there will be no post this week. I was meaning to write one today about my weekend in Cork, but it’s been a very busy day, and time as caught up with me. I’m leaving for a weekend in London in about a half hour, so I won’t have time to get it done today. I’ll just have to write a double dose of Steven Goes Irish upon my return.

Talk to you all then.

Well, folks, as several of you have noticed, I haven’t written a blog post recently. Frankly, I didn’t realize that it had been so long.

Things have slowed down here for the past couple of weeks, ever since we came back from Poland. But here’s what I’ve been up to.

Our classes still haven’t gotten any harder. The week goes by very fast; mostly because of our schedule. Monday afternoon, I have Irish Catholicism, Tuesday morning it’s Archeology, Wednesday morning I finish out the week with Gaelic Literature. On Thursday morning, we have Senior Seminar, though this is often rescheuled to Wednesday night, securing a nice four day weekend.

We eat fairly simply for breakfast and lunch (cornflakes and toast for breakfast, ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch), but we splurge on dinner. Cabin 3 is blessed with two great cooks, and I’m pretty sure we eat the best of every cottage. (Except maybe the program director… but is wife is a dietitian. How are we supposed to compete with that?) But more on that later.

Four day weekends are long, and offer a huge amount of free time, especially due to the fact that we receive practically no homework in any class. I’ve taken up cribbage, and I’m writing a lot for fun.

I’ve caught a bit of a cough over these past couple weeks, though it’s subsiding now, perhaps due to the curative powers of Guinness. The famous slogan “Guinness for Strength” is more than just a slogan, you see. They really believed it had healing powers.  They actually served that stuff in hospitals, back in the day. It was a common treatment for pregnant mothers, in fact.

Signs and slogans such as these are all over in Ireland. Usually they come without the morbidly obese dog, though.

Yesterday, we went to see the play “Juno and the Paycock” in Galway. We read the play in Gaelic Literature (it’s a famous one, written by Sean O’Casey), so it was really neat to see it performed. The show centers around a husband and wife in Dublin. The wife, Juno, struggles to cope with her irresponsible, lazy husband as he carouses around town, ’stutting like a paycock’. (paycock… the Irish pronounciation for peacock). It sounds grim, but it’s actually pretty funny. The Town Hall theater performed it excellently, and it made for a great night.

And today, I got my very first dance lesson. Shocking, no?

Our program director hired an Irish Dance instructor to come in and teach us all a thing or two. It was actually a lot of fun. Eventually she got us all dancing in a fairly complex step that had the thirty of us all moving around and mingling, trotting up and down the room. I was disappointed when it was over; I thought it could have gone on longer.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. Tomorrow I leave for Cork, home of the famous Blarney Stone. I’ll write you all a proper blog post upon my return.

And moving farther into the future, I plan to go to London on the weekend of the 21st. At this point in my time here, I feel as though I’ve gotten my fill of looking at old, historical buildings and touring great cities. I’ll look through London, of course, but my real ambition is to see some shows. I plan to see Wicked, and I hope to see Phantom of the Opera as well. It ought to be a great weekend.

This is the final post in my account of my travels to Eastern Europe. If you haven’t read the first one yet, I recommend you read ‘Eastern Europe: Venice, Ljubljana’ before this one.

I woke up early on Friday, the last morning of the trip. Our flight was scheduled for 12:20, so I had a little time before I had to go to the airport.

I had been feeling a little disappointed by the previous day’s tour of Krakow. I felt like we hadn’t seen a lot of what Krakow had to offer, so I had some of the excellent Greg and Tom Hostel breakfast and headed out to view the city on my own.

It was gloriously liberating to be alone, even if it was only for an hour or so. I’d been traveling with 5 other people for a full week now, and it felt great to go at my own pace, go wherever I wanted. I went back through the city center, and made it all the way down to the castle in Krakow, a 500 year old model known as Wawel Castle. I’d forgotten my camera in the hostel during our tour the day before, and I had plenty of photos left, so now I snapped pictures like a madman.

I’m really glad I was able to make it to that castle. It gave a great view of the city, and had some nice gardens in the courtyard.

I ran back to the hostel through a beautiful wooded park, and bought some trinkets from some street vendors in the city center. The trumpeter playing on St. Mary’s warned me that I was nearly out of time, so I returned to the hostel.

Back with the rest of the group (all eight of us, for the other two were back from Prague), we packed and headed to the railway station.

The train took us out to the countryside, and dropped us of between a couple of fields. We then boarded a bus, which took us to the airport, located even farther out in the middle of nowhere.

We got through security quickly, and had a pleasant flight. We landed in Dublin. I had a bit of steak-and-Guinness pie at the airport- back in the land of expensive things!

The bus ride from Dublin to Galway was agonizing. It took hours, and we were already exhausted and impatient from travel. We got into Galway, though, and took a taxi to the Park Lodge Hotel. The weather was absolutely wretched- windy, cold, and rainy, the worst I’d yet seen in Ireland. None of my roommates were back from their vacations yet, so I had the whole cottage to myself. I spent an extraordinarily relaxing evening (alone, which was a luxury) by the fire.

Eastern Europe was a wonderful experience. When I look back on these blog entries and see the variety and scope of the things we saw and did- from Vintgar Gorge to the House of Terror to Auschwitz- I feel like we got the most out of the week. Overall, the cities were clean, safe, and friendly, and the language barrier wasn’t a problem. I got a good feel of being among another culture, especially through their fantastic architecture and public art. I learned a lot about Eastern European history, as well as about travel itself. I visited places most Americans have never even heard of, places I never thought I would see. We covered a lot of ground and saw a lot of stuff, and I’d do it again in a second.

This is the seventh post in my account of my travels to Eastern Europe. If you haven’t read the first one yet, I recommend you read ‘Eastern Europe: Venice, Ljubljana’ before this one.

We got a slow start this morning. That’s another problem with traveling in such a large group: it takes a long time to get 6 college students up and running. This was also the first day of the trip when the weather wasn’t wonderful- it was chilly, and a light rain had begun to fall.

Eventually, we got up and got outside, but spirits were rather low. Some of us weren’t dressed as heavily as others, and it was a cold walk.

One of the trademarks of Krakow was the famous trumpeter of St. Mary’s. Every daylight hour, a bugler will play a tune from the top of St. Mary’s Basilica, in the center of Krakow. It’s a commemoration of a legendary trumpeter, who warned the city of an oncoming invasion. One of the peculiarities of his song is that it ends abruptly, in the middle of a note. This is supposed to reference the original trumpeter, who was shot in the neck while he played.

This is the center of Krakow. That tall building is St. Mary's Basilica, where the trumpeter plays every hour.

Next we went to see the Krakow Dragon, an old statue down below the castle. Apparently, Ljubljana isn’t the only city in Eastern Europe with a cool dragon statue. But Krakow’s statue actually breathes fire!

It shot off about a 4 second burst of flame every 3 or 4 minutes.

We hadn’t yet seen a synagogue from the inside, so we went to the Jewish quarter to rectify that oversight. We went inside a little old synagogue, not nearly as impressive as the one in Budapest would have been, but still charming and intriguing.

We ate in Jewish quarter as well, in an incredibly Jewish restaurant. It had the whole works: scripture written on the walls in Hebrew, Jewish music playing, menorah on the table, an old group of Jewish folks conversing in their language. Even the names of things on the menu were very Jewish; for instance, ‘The Soup of Beautiful Rachel’.

The troops were pretty cold by now, so we went back to the hostel. The girls went shopping at the nearby modern shopping complex (a surprising thing to see in that part of the world; it rivaled any mall I’ve seen in America.)

We ate dumplings at a place recommended to us by the hostel. It was sort of our last meal, as we would be flying out the next morning. It was nice to buy something and feel like we were getting our money’s worth. We all knew we wouldn’t get that feeling again until we returned to America.

Finally, we went out and had some Polish vodka. The interesting thing about the bars in Krakow is that they are all underground, cellars. It’s a really cool atmosphere. We celebrated the end of a good trip, then headed back for a good night’s sleep.

This is the sixth post in my account of my travels to Eastern Europe. If you haven’t read the first one yet, I recommend you read ‘Eastern Europe: Venice, Ljubljana’ before this one.

Wednesday: Krakow, Auschwitz

We arrived in Krakow at 6:45AM, and made our way to Greg and Tom’s Hostel, a short walk from the station. It was an awesome hostel: as soon as we arrived, they offered us something to drink, let us take whatever we wanted from the breakfast table, then sat us down and told us all the good places to eat in Krakow, and told us how to get to all the attractions in the city. When we asked, they set up with a tour to Auschwitz.

We signed on with a good tour company to take us to the camp. It was a nice change from trying to get everywhere ourselves. They showed us a movie on the way to the camp, about the liberation of Auschwitz, and the conditions in the camp. It didn’t hold back. I couldn’t watch all of it.

Auschwitz is actually a complex of three camps. When people think of Auschwitz, they are actually thinking of the camp designated Auschwitz-2 (known as Birkenau), the largest of all concentration camps. Auschwitz-3 was a work camp with no gas chambers or crematoriums. Auschwitz-1 was where our tour began: it was a relatively comfortable camp with brick buildings (it was a former military barracks). The Nazis had kept this camp in order to impress the International Red Cross.

"Work brings freedom"

It’s estimated that at least 1,000,000 people were killed at Auschwitz. I still can’t comprehend the magnitude of it. I think one of the most telling measures of the scale of the murders at Auschwitz was a statistic given to us by out tour guide as we walked up the warped and worn stairs of one of the brick buildings. Auschwitz has been a museum since the war ended, but it took 50 years for number of tourists visiting the camp to outweigh the number of people killed there in 4.

The tour was too powerful, really. It started by taking us through the famous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate. We saw mountains of clothing, piles of shoes, even baby toys and clothing. We saw mountains of human hair, harvested and sent to German textile mills to be used to form the stiff inner lining in Nazi uniforms. The worst were the piles of Zyklon-B gas canisters, torn open and discarded.

They showed us the Death Wall, where prisoners were shot before the use of Zyklon-B gas, the discovery of which was made in a room nearby. Then there was the suffocation cells, where up to four people would be shoved in a cell so tiny they couldn’t sit down. Finally, They took us into the gas chamber of Auschwitz-1, showed us the vents where the Zyklon-B pellets were dropped from above. Next door was the crematorium, with the ovens lying open.

We next went to Auschwitz-2. There wasn’t much left of it- the stone buildings were mostly destroyed by the retreating Nazis to cover their crimes, and the wooden barracks deteriorated and collapsed. The museum rebuilt some of the barracks as examples.

The most incredible element of Auschwitz-2 was the size of it. The field was incredibly vast. Two things remain from the original camp: the barbed wire fences, and the chimneys from the heaters in the original barracks. For every two chimneys, one could imagine one wooden building.

It was a long, quiet ride back to Krakow.