Chapter 8, In which we begin a day in Galway, and we meet a special friend.

With a 9 o'clock breakfast call, I awoke at 8am, took a shower in the cramped quarters at Kiltevna House (the shower, I might add, was less confusing than at the Limerick Inn, but still a touch complicated in gaining a comfortable water temperature), and headed for a pancake breakfast to start the day. All the B&B hosts were pretty easy going about making us breakfast's without meat; we simply told them the evening before that we were vegetarian, received a somewhat odd glance from them, then were assured we would have eggs or some similar continental breakfast.

Galway was chilly with a mist of rain in the air all day, but it was quite a comfort for two people completely sick of the horridly hot summer we had experienced. On the walk to town, I saw a small grey cat with white paws appear out of a yard. The cat looked at me, made a "mrow," and headed right for us. Certainly, this was the friendliest I had ever seen who didn't know me. He (or she) climbed up my legs, ramming it's little head with brilliant green eyes into my hand, demanding to be petted. Then, after a few seconds of this, our new friend wandered over to Nicole and demanded the same treatment. This went on for a good couple minutes until we decided to continue the walk to Galway, at which point our friend left us be. Sadly, the little guy reminded us of our own three cats left at home, and although we were always missing them, this little encounter pretty much gave us our first case of homesickness.

Probably even more surprising, the cat was probably the friendliest Irish native we had met to date on the trip. It would take a day or so before that would change.

We wandered around Galway probably a lot like tourist wander around Georgetown. We went to a number of shops, looking for something on sale that would be drastically different than anything we could find at home. I started out pretty well; we went to a cute little bookshop where I bought a little tin box full of little math toys, rulers, pencils and such things. The box is green with a map of Ireland on it and lists all the counties of both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. I asked Nicole if we knew any kids that might like that, but she didn't think so. Noticing my disappointment, she asked, "would YOU like that?" To which I answered yes, and here it is sitting on my desk. So, officially, my little Maths Set was my first souvenir.

Following that, we visited a round of music, jewelry, and book stores. To be honest, I was expecting a lot out of music stores, expecting to come home with a ton of CDs produced in Ireland and England that were full of great music near impossible to get in America. But, the only CD stores I did find weren't carrying much of a selection, and their prices were pretty standard at 15 or 16 pounds a CD...that's 24 American dollars, folks. I did come across a pretty neat Wallace and Gromit book in the used book store. Ah, something else heavy to lug in the suitcase...

Click on the photo to see some pictures of our friend.

Chapter 9, In which we visit Taaffe's Pub twice, once for worse and once for better.

With the understanding that we could get some really good lunch time food in pubs, we went to a place called Taaffe's. Although Nicole ordered some soup she raved over, my cheese and salad sandwich left a little to be desired. We did down some more Guinness and I tried a half pint of what Guinness calls their "white beer" named Breo. Blech...like Budweiser gone bad. Maybe even worse than that. From that point on, I decided to stick to the stouts.

We wandered the bustling streets of Galway a bit more, hitting a coffee shop along the way. But by 4:30 we are starting to realize something: everybody runs in Galway. Or, at least, walks really really fast. I've been to numerous American cities and I don't think I've ever seen people move so fast, and become quite so irritated if you are in their way while they are trying to speed to wherever it is they are going. We wandered back into Taaffe's Pub to hear the advertised "trad" music, being traditional Irish music, which was scheduled to start at five. We found seats and watched the pub fill up around us at an alarming rate; it was 5pm on Friday and the crowd was probably typical of most American bars around Friday happy hour.

But, by a little after 5 about 7 musicians began playing music, rotating between 3-5 playing while 2-4 were off fetching beer at any given point in time. We were sitting right by the musicians, to the point where occasionally a guitar neck was floating right under my nose. Respecting the space a musician needs...and my face...I moved back a touch as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

The music was loads of fun, definitely the break we needed from the rather tiring day we had in Galway. The pub patrons were just about as rude as most Americans when a band is playing as such; practically nobody was paying attention to the band and people were talking, if not yelling, at the top of their lungs against the music. A few of us circled around the music were very much enjoying the show, however, and every now and again i sensed that the musicians appreciated that as well.

One of the more interesting musicians was a guy playing an instrument called a Khene. The Khene looks like a number of 3-5 foot bamboo sticks tied together, to which the musician blows through to make a soft, flute-like sound. The Khene player himself only played in one or two songs, seemingly very nervous as it appeared he was playing with the other musicians for the first time. After his songs he disappeared quickly, but it wouldn't be the last time we saw him before our journey was over.

Annoying tourist moment: okay, I'm not going to sit on a high horse and say that we didn't do annoying American tourist things on our trip, but I will say that people who were flashing photographs in the faces of the musicians (and, consequently, my face too since i was sitting right there) and then running off without even pretending to pay attention to the music were just a touch aggravating. One lady went as far as to start asking if they knew some song with the words, "road to London" in the verse, to which the musicians, who by this point were obviously having a really cool jam session and not playing individual songs from some Irish record the lady got for Christmas 15 years ago, pretty much completely ignored her. To which, she stormed out of the pub 5 minutes later. We couldn't help but think that she read in some tour book that she should go see some traditional Irish music in a pub but then not understand why it didn't end up like some sort of Disney ride where she could go pet the stuffed musicians any buy souvenirs at the gift shop afterwards. Oh well, perhaps I'm making too much out of it...

Tho, perhaps even more amusing was the fact that somebody came up to us and said, first thing, "so, you're from America?" I SWEAR I hadn't said a word out loud for 15 minutes by this point, yet somehow this guy could just come up to us and immediately know we were American. I'm not real sure why it didn't cross my mind to ask him How he knew that we were American, or at least Not Irish. In any event, he recommended that we travel down to another pub in Galway, The Crane, where we could hear great trad music in a more "traditional" atmosphere. It sounded like a good idea, and on the walk back to the B&B we went as far as to pass the place, but we were pretty tired by that point and decided to pass on the opportunity. For the record, The Crane Pub was also recommended in at least one or two other books we read, so if you are ever in Galway, it might be worth checking out.

We stayed and watched the band for nearly two hours before heading off to dinner at Trattoria, a small Italian Restaurant. The food was okay, but nothing special. Again, finding vegetarian meals was no problem at all.

Chapter 10, In which we learn a little about European culture.

The next time I hear anybody say anything about how American television is smut with a complete lack of morals or ethics, I have one word to answer to that: EuroTrash. Yes, this wonderful European show covers everything from 80 year old naked men taking nude pictures to "artists" making plaster molds from actual penis's and building complete sculptures from the results. Truly thrilling. But, if you have a little more class than myself and decide to change the channel when EuroTrash is showing, I'm sure you can find one of the thirty-seven showings of Frasier that the BBC seems to rerun over and over again.

Off went the television, and thus ended our second full day in Ireland.