Sláinte!: Galway

This past weekend I took a short trip to Galway with a couple of my girlfriends. It was interesting to say the least! We arrived friday afternoon at about 1 after a 4 hour bus trip from Cork and proceeded to walk about the city of Galway after checking in at our hostel. We toured a very beautiful church in galway and took a look through the various tourist shops. We also got a nice Irish lunch at a hotel in the city center. After being shopped out we went back to the hostel and got some pizza and prepared ourselves for a night on the town which turned out to be quite fun! Once we returned to the hostel however, we realized that our new bunkmates were quite the crowd---2 of the 4 had already been in jail that night! There proceeded to be a lot of awkward drunk singing by our new bunkmates and enough fear to keep most of us up for the night! I guess thats what you get for paying 15E for a room! Saturday morning we woke up and took a bus tour of areas around Galway. Our first stop was the Ailwee cave system. We took a tour into the cave which is in the side of the Ailwee (meaning yellow) mountain. It was very neat! There were remains of the European Brown Bear in the cave which has been extinct for thousands of years as well as an underground waterfall, impressive stalactites and stalagmites and fossils from when the area was under the ocean. Next we began a scenic but somewhat long drive to the Cliffs of Moher, which were in a word, amazing. We spent a lot of time at the Cliffs and I couldn't believe how impressive they are! We lucked out with the weather and got to capture some great pics of the cliffs. On one of the cliffs is the O'Brien's Tower, which is a three story tower, if you look at the building in the pictures it really puts the size of the cliffs into perspective as the three story building suddenly looks tiny! We then headed down to the small town of Doolin and had some delicious Beef and Guinness stew before heading back to Galway, and then from Galway caught the late bus and headed back to Cork returning at about 11 at night. It was a long day, but we got to see some really awesome things on the way and I had a lot of the fun with the girls I was with!

This morning I went to mass at the campus church and it was pretty neat, there were a lot of students and the mass was geared towards younger people. This week will bring some more school work and on Tuesday I will be going on photographic tour of Cork with the photography society so that should be real neat! On Friday my friend Mari from high school is coming to visit as she is studying abroad in Dublin so this weekend should be fun as well!