Ireland has pubs!

On my first night in Ireland I hit up a little pub close to our hostel called O'Shea's. They had two people playing music that night, a guitar player and a accordion player. While there a few people started dancing. They were dancing various 8 hands. After a little while the guy who seemed to be the leader of those dancing started telling everyone they had to dance in the next dance as it was a big ceili dance and very easy. So Eric and I, along with some girls visiting from Germany, got pulled into dancing. The picture of me dancing would be from this night. (Just to note, I am trying to order the picutres but they take forever to load and don't want to risk having to reload them so you will have to bare with me for a bit)

We went out into Dublin on Friday and saw the General Post Office. That would be what the picture of me in from of a building with pillars would be. It was incredible to be able to walk up to the building and put my fingers into the bullet marks in the columns that are still there. We saw a few other sites in Dublin such as St. Stevens Green and we walked by the Guiness storehouse. That night we went back to O'Shea's and this night they had ulian pipes (Irish bagpipes) and a fiddle as well as someone singing. This night was also amusing as the bartender seemed to hate just about everyone. When someone would order a drink he would mutter something under his breath about the particular customer. I met a guy from Austria who couldn't understand the bartender when he was making one such comment. I decided that I would try and keep the peace and just told him something a polite bartender would be saying in such a situation.

Saturday we took the train over to Kilkenny. We walked through the town and saw most of the major tourist sites in a few hours. I am going to skip over the rest of Saturday because I am not loading any pictures from that day and we mostly just walked around the town. Sunday we watched the local team take on Wicklow in a game of gaelic football. The match was a little one sided to say the least. The score when we left (we left about 10 min early) the game was 4-20 Wicklow to 0-1 Kilkenny. (For those of you who don't know how gaelic football scores are done, the scores are goals-points so in Wicklows case they had 4 goals and 20 points.) I tool a video of Kilkenny's only point so you can see a little bit of gaelic football. Probably not enough for a real taste but you get something. It was hard to sit through such a beating and I was at most of the cougar football games so I have seen this sort of thing before. Just not this bad. The stadium had about 40-50 fans in it and I think besides Eric and myself, there were only a couple other Kilkenny fans. We stilled cheered them on but it looks like it wasn't enough.






Today I headed up to Galway and walked around the town a bit. I had met a woman from Spain who is living in Galway and she gave me a few suggestions for pubs and places to visit while in Galway so we will be looking into those tonight. But I also asked her about the weather up her and her only comment was that "it's shit." I was a little optimistic that it wouldn't be that bad but we left Kilkenny and the sun was out. When we got to Galway it is cloudy, gray, and raining. Hopefully tomorrow will be a little better.