Dublin continued, then Galway

My last day in Dublin was pretty eventful, going to the main churches in Ireland, St. Patrick's Cathedral and Christ Church, the Jameson factory tour where I received a honorary degree in the exquisite art of whiskey tasting (notice there's an e in whiskey in Ireland, not in England or Scotland), napped for three hours, went to the Dublin art gallery, and had a true Irish pub crawl. During that crawl I learned many things about Ireland, watched a hotly disputed rugby match, learned about the sports of hurling and Gaelic football, learned a key phrase in Gaelic Irish language, took a picture with a statue of the singer in Thin Lizzy, heard an Irish man sing Hotel California and Leaving on a Jet Plane, and got to sleep before it was even too late.

Then I hopped on a train to Galway. When I first walked down the street, a distinct question came to my mind, and that was, why in the heck am I in Galway for three nights. For those of you familiar with the locales, the entire town is roughly the size of Seaport village or the Santa Monica pier. It's tiny, and yet the craziest place I've been in a while. In one day there was a gay pride parade (right outside the window of my hostel), a huuuuge biker rally, and a raggae festival complete with pot smoking hippies. All in a town of 70.000 (smaller than Santee). I walked around the town, saw the church, went to a used bookstore, read, took a shower, saw the birthplace and home of James Joyce's wife, who lived with the unfortunate name Nora Barnacle (no wonder she was so ready to run away to Triest with Jim), and then in the evening went to a pub where I saw Scotland get massacred by South Africa in rugby, then off to watch a Marley tribute band, then off to a play, and now here! Whew. I've been writing short stories, someday I will share them. until then, cheers.

S