Some trips to kill time...

Last day of classes:

I haven’t particularly told you about the last week in college. The last day of classes was celebrated with a nice get together in college with a glass of wine and some fruit from Sister Delia. Imagine an entire hall to be filled with students, a couple of musicians and EVERYBODY singing along with an Irish song! It’s so cool! The musicians there also played contemporary music like Muse :) It was really cool and weird we still had classes afterwards. I also found out that week that I wouldn’t be able to take all of my luggage in just one bag! I was physically shocked. How in the name of the Lord this did happen? I honestly haven’t bought that many things here. I booked (and bought) an extra bag just to be sure. Bought it at Penneys which is the main cause of my luggage problem anyway :P

Just walking around in the city centre I found out the Tinkers (or Travellers, or Gypsies) are back in town… Not afraid to make a big scene in the middle of a busy street in Limerick. Imagine a 16-year-old girl with a baby screaming and shouting to her (soon to be ex?)boyfriend…Recognisable by their (lack of) clothing, dressed in very short skirts with tops too small and bronze all over their body. Big hair, too much make-up, gold necklaces (with their names) and huge earrings, oh and a loud voice as well.

Dingle and Fungi ;)

Been to Dingle with Amanda and Caitlyn (two of my best friends since I’ve been here) and it’s been amazing. We had beautiful weather and enjoyed ourselves being in good company with good food and good drinks :) We walked around a lot and it’s very pretty around Dingle. Did a lot of souvenir shopping as well.
Of course we went to see Fungi the dolphin. This is a 40 something year-old dolphin !! (which is an amazing age for a dolphin!) that has been hanging around Dingle for the past 30 or so years. It’s a very strange story. He arrived in Dingle a grown dolphin and never left. Nobody really knows how old he is. It is very peculiar behaviour for a dolphin being all alone around human beings for such a long time. Anyway, we went on a boat trip to see this dolphin. I wasn’t really too hopeful because usually these trips end up with people paying money to get on a small boat never seeing a dolphin… but, we saw him! It was pretty cool. He was just cruising around our boat not doing anything special really, until another boat arrived. This guy (of the second boat) knew what Fungi liked: waves! He started making donuts in the water and Fungi Jumped! It was really cool to see. One of my roommates is from Dingle and if you start talking about Fungi and stating that you don’t believe it’s been the same dolphin for all those years, she will jump out of her skin telling you that ‘yes, it is the same dolphin, he’s just very old and nobody knows when he’ll die but they won’t replace him, no matter what!’

Cork ‘French style’

I just came back from a wonderful two-day trip to Cork with Amanda, Caitlyn and Jenna. We had a lot of fun :) When arriving on Tuesday and heard the Hostel owner speaking, Caitlyn turned around to me and I lip dubbed: “He’s Australian!” Which was exactly why Caitlyn turned to me. Then we went out to explore Cork city centre where we bought more souvenirs, like we didn’t have enough already… We also bought some sandwiches and Caitlyn and Jenna bought bread and cheese. We had our lunch in the park :) The only thing missing was a bottle of red wine and we would have had a wonderful romantic French picnic. Later we came back to the hostel just chatting away forgetting about time altogether. It was around 8.30pm when we decided it would be a good idea to go out, get some food and especially drinks. In the back of my mind I already knew we were not going to find any place, other than take-away places, at this time of day and unfortunately I was right. Not one pub was open for dinner anymore and we finally decided to walk to a proper restaurant only to hear from the waitress that they closed the kitchen 15 minutes ago but we could still get take-away if we wanted to. We decided on getting some take-away food. We heard the chef complaining to his mate about it not making any sense not to let us sit down for dinner as they were open till 10 anyways. But our waitress didn’t hear the chef’s complaints so we were sent out with our food. We found a lovely place in the city centre to sit down and have our meal. Thankfully it was warm enough and it obviously didn’t rain. (what are the odds?!) We had a lovely time just chatting away enjoying our (very good) food. An hour or so later, we decided to get a drink somewhere. We could only finish just the one since the pub was closing as well, it turned out to be a short night out.

Unfortunately none of us slept very well that evening since there was a lot of noise just outside our room and the room was very warm. The next day we set off to Blarney and visited Blarney castle. And yes, I did kiss the Blarney stone. Hopefully the stone does its wonders on me. There are a lot of occasions to make a wish around Blarney castle and its mysterious surroundings. We all made sure we took every opportunity.

Right now I’ve about two weeks until I have to fly home again. On the one hand that makes me very happy but I’m sad to leave Ireland behind as well and all the friends I’ve made here. We’ve all made promises to see each other again and keep in touch, hopefully we do…

Some new clips to see:
Our Trip to Kilkee a couple of weeks ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrAU6x-EoMM
Our Trip to Dingle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXbsveWZOu8