Hello, back in Galway. This time I'm staying at a hopefully quieter hostel, not as close to the pubs. So far I have a 10 bed room to myself! That will probably change, however.
My plans for this week: staying here in Galway for another day and a night, then going to Belfast on Wednesday. Things I want to visit there: the Botanical Gardens again, the University, whichever friends from my days at Queens' are still in town, and hopefully see the Giant's Causeway, finally!
After that, I'm going to the aftermath of Esje's wedding in Edinburgh, a camping trip on the beach. Hopefully there won't be all those strange little beach lice or whatever they were this time. Hopefully there will be starfish again, though. Hooray for starfish!
Speaking of coastlines, I went for a long walk in Liscannor a couple of nights before I left. It's strange to think I won't be back there, probably for quite a while. Unless, who knows. Maybe I'll be back sooner than I think... maybe I'll get tired of going through the night without a baby crying, and spending all day trying to get an overactive five year old to calm down. :) Anyway, it was beautiful, looking out over the sea to Lahinch on the other side of the bay, from the dock. The sun was just setting--though behind clouds, so no pretty colours.
Yesterday I took a ride with a couple of friends, Eireen and her daughter Emily, through the Burren and to the Cliffs of Moran. They have a little shop at the Cliffs. I took a few pictures, which I'll get up after I get a USB cable for my phone. But how beautiful. We were actually planning on going to a birthday party, but when we got there they discovered that it was actually somebody else's birthday party who they didn't know. And we were late, so we just saw the end of a very poetic and gloomy story about the Famine, which was illustrated by an artist, and four pictures were put together to form one large picture of a seal at the end. What the seal did, I'll never know. So I'd had a pint, and it was just enough to make everything magical. Not that it wasn't magical anyway! The stone of the Burren is amazing, carved away by water until it's in large pieces, called clints, that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Between them are the grikes, or deep grooves, in which all kinds of small plants are hiding, some Alpine, some Mediterranean, including orchids and ferns. That was a lot of commas.
And the cliffs of Moran! It was misty, which made them fade off into the distance. The air was cool but not cold, and the wind whipped our hair around.
Ok, time to go and probably meet Couchsurfers. And have dinner. I'm hungry.
Did I mention that I was able to get a free doctor's appointment and
then a prescription of antibiotics that cost me 50 eurocents? All of us
had this cough, and it wasn't going away, but with my British National
Health Insurance number I was able to get care without spending a
fortune, which I was worried about. Good stuff.
Whenever I come to Ireland I get a wonderful feeling in my heart. It will be sad to leave, to Britain, which feels a lot less gentle. I wonder.
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