Cork

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.