Connemara

Friday April 14, 2006

Yesterday was our second day in Galway. To start the day out we hopped in the car and drove to Connemara. I suppose I should introduce you all to the Ireland gang- Our head leader and master: Yasin. Then we got Erol and the two girls: Jennie and Alisande. We are quite a bizarre little group- 2 Turkish guys and 3 American girls. : P Yeah- very strange, but that makes it that much more fun! Anyhoo we went to Connemara and stopped at the National Park there. Which meant another nice long car ride. The car rides are always fun though cause we never get tired of listening to the strange Irish radio. The commercials are just plain bizarre and they play an odd variety of music. At the Park we wandered their little exibit for a while and learned about bogs. Oooo Ahhhh! Then we went for a hike to see the scenery. It was absolutely beautiful- rolling hills, flowers, and horses and sheep!

I even got some cool pics of the sheep. We didn’t hike all the way up the longest trail though cause we wanted to get back. On the way back we passed an Abbey (Gahhh! Can't remember the name!). Sadly because it was Good Friday, the Abbey was closed. You know this was the very same Abbey that I had a poster up in my room for years! Crazy isn’t it?! So yeah that was a bummer but we did get to stop at ??? Castle- the day i remember the names of these places i will be shocked. The outer grounds were in poor ruins but that made it so beautiful as well. The actual castle part though was in good condition and we went into that.

It had many floors and we slowly winded up the staircase. On one floor we found the "Murder Hole" where people would kill those who were on the lower floor. On the next and top floor there was some squeaking in the rafters. Yep- some bats but we didn’t actually see them. We left shortly after and headed back to Galway. We stopped at the Cathedral. It was quite pretty but we didn’t go in because they had a passion play going on inside at the moment. So instead we wandered back to the hostel through the city centre and looked inside some of the stores there. Can you believe I was actually able to refrain from buying jewelry for myself in Galway? Yeah that’s shocking! But go me! : ) After dropping stuff off at the hostel Alisande and I went back to the city centre to look for a decent priced internet café. We can probably honestly say we walked every single street in the city centre! Hehehe- yeah we looked pretty hard but the only one we could find was 4 euros an hour. Can you believe that? Sheesh! So we decided to go back to the hostel because they had computers there for 3 euros an hour. Still a rip off but ya know- have to have internet. : ) We joined up with the guys after for dinner. Sad enough we ended up going back to the Supermacs. I ended up actually getting that chicken sandwich this time… wasn’t all that great. We later went back there and got some ice cream. I got the same thing but this time I got it in a bowl instead- pff wasn’t going to risk that again! Hehehe. We didn’t get to go out last night other than that though because all the pubs were closed because of Good Friday. Yeah not a drop of Alcohol was sold yesterday- even the Alcohol sections in the supermarket were sectioned off! We don’t know if it was just because of Good Friday or also something to do with some type of peace agreement between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Hmm questions that may never be answered. : P That does remind me though of the radio- they were talking about people’s parties this weekend. Now that seemed strange! Whoo Hooo lets party and get totally smashed to celebrate Christ being crucified! I don’t know seems a strange way to celebrate. Well that’s pretty much it for yesterday. It was actually our last day in Galway. We were supposed to spend 3 days there but we wanted to go to Cork so we have switched our plans and are heading there now. Tell ya about that tomorrow…