Finally... here's another one

Sorry this one took a while to post. I had nearly 45 minutes worth of typing and pushed the wrong button on something and it all vanished into thin air. So I refrained from physical abuse of the computer and went to bed.

Last night Guy gave me his brother's phone number and said they were going "hill-walking" tomorrow and would I like to come? So this morning I ran down to the 02 store and finally got a phone. It cost 99 euros but with that they give you 60 euros worth of minutes - on the plans here you can just buy a certain number of minutes so you only pay for what you use. Kind of a nifty little phone, camera & all. Anyway... So I gave Guy's brother Cian (pronounced Kee-in) a call and basically said, "You don't have a clue who I am but mind if I tag along today?" (What did I have to lose?) He was extremely nice, saying that would be "grand." So by noon I was in this little Saab with Cian, Guy and their friend David once again heading off to the unknown. I sure do have a lot of faith in people don't I???

The car ride unexpectedly miserable. I've never had motion sickness in my life, but the circumstances here are different; Josh you wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes! First of all, everyone drives tiny little cars so you're about 2.5 feet from the ground. No big deal right? I drive a Hyundai for crying out loud. But the kicker is everywhere you go, (maybe instead of guardrails?) there are 3 foot high stone fences lining the road. There are so many rocks in this country they basically HAVE to build stone fences just to put the rocks somewhere. Where there are not stone fences there is a high bank of dirt with 2-inch thorned briars growing up (this stuff looks nastier than barbed wire) intertangled with bright green vines that creep up and overtake entire trees. The cumulative effect of all this really looks kind of neat... from a distance. However it is not appealing from 2 feet away when you're in a deathtrap car going 65 down a very narrow road as smooth as a series of cattleguards with cars wizzing by you on what seems like the wrong side. I think my face was as green as the countryside by the time we got out of the car. In retrospect though, I would have ridden there in a paint shaker to see what I was fortunate enough to see.

The city of Galway sits on the north side of Galway Bay, and where we had driven was basically around the mouth of the bay and down a ways and along the coast of County Clare. In Ireland you know you've arrived at your destination when people basically stop in the road and shut the car off. There is absolutely no shoulder to park on most of the time and in the city they just crank the car up onto the sidewalk. It's quite comical. So we got out and Cian, who was quite the tour guide, informed me that we were at Blackhead. If you've looked through pictures of Ireland, this is the hilly area that is absolutely covered in rocks. On my previous post I said from far away it looks like entire mountains covered in cantelope size rocks, well I was wrong. A closer look shows that certain areas are covered in huge boulders, and others are more slate or shale-like rock, good material for stacking walls, etc.

We started up the slope which was kind of terraced in a way. You'll walk for about 100 yards and then come to about a 15 foot rock face, after which there is another slope. Some of the lower slopes have a lot of loose rock, but as you near the top you start to realize that the whole mountain is really one large rock with cracks in it that look like they delve way down into the earth's core. From a distance the surface looks like an ancient city with large flat squares of weather-smoothed stone separated by nearly straight, perpendicular cracks. Here and there are deposits of soil deep enough to grow marshy grasses. As we climbed higher and higher you really had to watch your footing because the wind at your back was blowing so hard that you had to keep up a near jogging pace, meanwhile you had to place each step carefully to avoid spraining an ankle in the rock cracks. You couldn't just step on the grassy parts though because occasionally you'd hit a boggy spot and you're foot would sink down about 18 inches. It was very interesting ground.

As we climbed over one of the cliff faces, a stone (go figure) structure of some sort came into view. Cian believes it may have been built by shepards as protection from storms blowing in. The place was nearly perfectly round and the stones used were so large I've no idea how someone got them into place so long ago. You can tell the walls used to be higher by the stones piled around the bottom, but they were stacked so well that most of the walls still stand firm up to 10 feet high, despite the lack of any kind of makeshift mortar. The diameter of the structure was about 20 yards so it wasn't exactly small either. We went inside through the opening for the door and right about then you could see a storm rolling in off the ocean. We sat down against one of the walls and waited out torrential gusts of rain. Even without a roof the building provided great shelter from the rain and howling wind.

About 15 minutes later we continued our quest for the elusive top of the mountain. Remember our climb up Mineral Hill girls? This was similar, you think you're near the top and then you come up over a rock face and see more cliffs far in the distance. But I truly enjoyed every minute of it. When we finally reached the top the wind was blowing so hard you could not stand still. I'm not very good estimating these things but I would say it was at least 60mph, plenty hard enough to lean into at a 45 degree angle, stronger than the wind at the Cliffs of Moher. On the top plain there were dozens of rectangular piles of stone all around, Cian believes they were some sort of graves. That makes sense because there is absolutely no way you could dig into the ground up there to bury someone. There really isn't any ground, it's just rock! In the midst of all these there is one solitary sheep hearder's monument on the highest point. (Mom I've got to take you here when you and Dad come.) The most amazing part was the view from the top. To the North you could see Galway Bay and the little villages along the coast. westward was the ocean which is a stunning shade of blue/green, I expected it to be more black that far north. To the southwest you could spot bright green patches of farm land and the Aran Islands out in the Atlantic. Directly south the Cliffs of Moher loomed in the distance, and eastward was miles of cliff faces down below.

The hike down was more challenging than the hike up. At times you absolutely could not move forward because of the wind. We went down in a different direction and saw a few little Shetland ponies with some serious dreadlocks from the wind. Cian was kind enough to feed one a Chicklet for minty fresh breath. Back on the road, we drove a few miles south to a little fishing town called Doolin, and stopped in a pub for the best darn bowl of seafood chowder I may ever have. We drove a different way home that had a few lower fences and more chances to see out, so I was happily nausea-free.

Back at the hostel I was (not too difficultly) persuaded to go downtown with two girls from my room. One girl, Nine, (pronounced Nina) was from Holland and the other, Patricia was from New Zealand. We had a great time talking about little differences in our countries with language, etc. Nina is still learning English so we filled her in on a few phrases like "it cost and arm and a leg" and "holy cow!" In New Zealand if you've had a rough day apparently you've been "hard done by." After sitting in a pub where the pints were only 3 eruos (because the volume of the soccer game was 12,000 decibels) we moved on to Tig Coili, which I still cannot pronounce. I was pleasantly surprised to walk in and see three people that I "knew." This is a great little pub that always has different groups playing traditional Irish music. The atmosphere was priceless.

We girls met three guys from Ireland and wound up talking to them for the rest of the night. And I am proud to say I won over my first skeptic. A guy named Noel (pronounced Nole) was with two other two that were very outgoing, but you could tell Noel was kind of hanging back not saying much, not unfriendly, just quiet. (At times you can just tell that people are observing your American opinion, waiting for you to say something like, "Well America is the World Police and we have the right to bomb the hell out of anyone who doesn't agree...) He and I finally started talking about politics, cultures, etc. after his friend told me that Noel really doesn't like George Bush. Like the people from the other night I explained that for every person that worships Bush you can probably find someone who hates him in the states, but that overall most people are fed up with the whole scene and not really knowing the facts about things like Iraq. I told him generally a lot of people are embarassed about our reputation because of the Iraq situation, but are behind our troops 100% and understand that we've started something that we can't simply abandon now without making people more angry. Personally I feel that if the Muslim and American cultures had a way of breaking the language barrier and communicating directly with tolerance, without governments involved, I think we would find that we are very similar people that both just want our friends and family home safe and a quiet life without conflict. Hopefully I'm representing people in the things I say, but the best I can do is just give my own views of things.

Noel opened up a lot more and explained some of his ideas. He, and a lot of Europeans, believe that though we claim to have a right and a left wing, our left side still seems very right wing to them. He personally believes in a lot of socialist values. We talked a lot about how Bush shifted the focus away from Osama bin Laden to Sadaam and Noel didn't realize that a lot of Americans are skeptical about that as well. He mentioned an interesting theory to me that I hadn't heard... The general idea was that on the video of Sadaam being captured there are fig trees in bloom, yet at the time we captured him fig trees were supposedly out of season. Some are wondering if we captured him earlier and didn't say anything. I guess you never know. It's just interesting because you probably wouldn't hear that theory on American TV. I also learned that a lot of Irish are raising a brow at their own government because they are a neutral country, but are letting American troops stop over in the Shannon airport. Just some food for thought.

Well that's enough politics for one lifetime. I'm sure there will be times I'm so tired of talking about it I'll just pass myself off as a Canadian. But it was good practice to discuss with someone. I really don't mind it, I think people need to understand that many Americans are much more tolerant and open-minded than we are often perceived to be.

Thank you all for your emails, etc - and Brynn for calling - yay! Brynn mentioned that she heard there were international calling cards at Costco for a decent price, I know the rates are killer. That's probably what I'll wind up doing too here soon. Oh, and believe it or not text messages are fairly cheap to send internationally. It seems that texting is a very popular way to communicate over here, just 7 cents a message. Oh - and just in case you were wondering when I was going to get around to it... my phone number is 011 353 863549653. The 011 part is the international code, 353 the area code. I'm 7 hours later than you guys in Montana so a good time to call is early morning or around noon your time. Afternoon is all right, but if it's too late here I may be in a pub where I can't hear my phone. Love ya & miss ya all!

Cheers. (Here 'cheers' means everything, hello, goodbye, thank you, here's your change, see you later... )