Talking About Chemistry and Saying Goodbye

Yesterday I presented what I did for the past 10 weeks in the lab along with all the rest of the UPCRO students who did the same program that I did. There was 12 of us, so it ended up being pretty much a full day of presentations that lasted roughly 20 minutes each. We had a crowd of 25 people or so (including all of the students). My talk went pretty well, I think. Afterwards they gave us some free food, after which we cleaned out our desks, gave back our swipe cards, and left.

After taking the free food that we were given, we all went our separate ways, walking home from work for the last time with plans to meet up to celebrate finishing our presentations and say goodbye. While I'm not leaving Cork until (very very early) Monday morning, most of the non-Irish students are going home earlier, today or tomorrow. The end of the program leaves me running around to finish off the last few things that I need to do before I fly back to the States on Monday wondering if I'll ever see any of these people again.
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A work-filled weekend and nearing the end

This weekend will be the first weekend in at least a month where I will not do any substantial traveling/tourist activities. I've got a rather long report to write (supposed to be 30 pages) and then a 5 page summary of that report and then a 20 minute presentation to prepare. It isn't an overwhelming amount of work, I just don't think I'll have quite enough time in the coming week to do it all in time for my last day on Friday.

On the plus side, the weather today is nice. The English Premier League kicked off this weekend, with the first game of the season at 1pm. It was pretty cool to be able to watch it on a fairly basic television channel without having to either pay a ton for cable or go to a pub, as I do in the States. It was also nice that it was on at a fairly normal time for a sporting event.

In any case, this weekend will be one for report writing and taking care of a few things that i need to do before I head back to America a week from Monday.
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A Green, Wet Peninsula (Part 2)

To pick up from where I left off last night, we checked into our hotel. The view from our hotel window is above. From there we drove back to the town of Dingle, which was a few miles from our hotel, and began our westward loop around the coast.

As we set out west from Dingle the rain, which had been on and off all day, began to let up and the misty fog that had shrouded the peninsula since we had arrived began to gradually lift. We proceeded around Dingle Harbor to the next protected bay, Ventry. There we stopped at a beach and circled around the bay to look at it from the other side. At this point it is a lot easier to just use pictures:

We then proceeded further west towards the eventual tip of the peninsula, stopping a few times along the way to appreciate the breathtaking scenery and wonderful ocean views, which got better and better as the visibility gradually improved. We stopped at Dunbeg Fort, a Stone Age archaeological site on the edge of a coastal cliff. We stopped at a few curves in the road, passed a hairpin turn where a rather substantial stream flowed over the roadway, and suffered through the nerve wracking experience of driving on the incredibly narrow roads that were pretty much directly on the edge of cliffs. At one bend in the road (at Slea Head) we saw a crucifix which seemed rather randomly placed, and no obvious reason for its location was given. We passed Ryan's Daughter, the westernmost point on the peninsula, and eventually proceeded back to our hotel for dinner.

As we went to bed, we could hear rain pounding outside and the wind howling across the hills of Dingle. We were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and it was great.

The next morning we returned to Ryan's Daughter and hiked out through fields sprinkled with sheep to the westernmost point on the Dingle Peninsula. It was VERY windy on the summit of Ryan's Daughter, which is actually a slight hill in addition to a finger of land extending into the Atlantic Ocean. As we walked out to the small stone hut on the hill, it began to rain in a very light, misty, cold fashion, blown in from the ocean. This sort of rain persisted intermittently for the next few hours.

We then went about a mile north to hike out to the end of the next finger of the peninsula, which does not extend as far west and is a bit rockier and taller than Ryan's Daughter. From there we could see a good deal of the western coast of Dingle.

From there we completed our loop around the peninsula, passing Mount Brandon and the wonderful car-falling-over-cliff sign. We returned to Dingle town for lunch at around 1pm and then began the drive back to Cork city, passing through Inch and running into traffic due to Puck Fair (an event I know nothing about other than that it generates traffic in Killorglin). On the way home we listened to Cork's Gaelic football team beat Tyrone on RTE radio followed by Cork's hurling team losing to Kilkenny (also on RTE). Both were quite entertaining to listen to.

All in all, the Dingle peninsula is awesome. And to cap off my Dingle ramblings, here is a picture of Ryan's Daughter:

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An Daingean (Part 1)

I spent this weekend in County Kerry on the Dingle Peninsula with my dad, who was visiting me for the weekend on his way to work in Tipperary starting on Monday. It was a pretty incredible experience. The tip of the Dingle Peninsula is the furthest west point on mainland Ireland and the islands just off the peninsula are the westernmost points in all of Europe. While the weather wasn't perfect, we didn't mind seeing it in the mist and occasional rain because a little finger of land jutting out into the ocean seems more natural if it is exposed to the elements in a rather harsh manner (or maybe that's just me).

We left Cork city on Saturday morning in a rented Nissan Note armed with a map or two, a hotel reservation, and a change of clothes. The drive was to theoretically take around 2.5 hours and take us through Killarney and a variety of small towns in Cork and Kerry (including my personal favorite, Inch). We stopped in Killarney for lunch, but ran into very little traffic and ended up being on the road for just about 3 hours. Even before we arrived in Dingle town itself the trip became pretty interesting in terms of sightseeing and general entertainment. Below is a rather narrow street in Killarney. At that point in the journey we thought that this sort of street was incredibly narrow. We later learned that by comparison, this street isn't bad.


From Killarney we continued on to Killorglin, where we turned north briefly until we ran into the R561, which we took west through Inch and eventually towards Dingle. We made a brief stop at Inch point to look at the beach and coastline extending beyond the point and out into the ocean mists and rain of the western coast of Ireland. After about 3 hours in the car we reached Dingle town just as it began to absolutely pour. We then got directions to our hotel, which was in Ballyferriter (Baile an Fheirtéaraigh), a small town a few miles outside the town of Dingle where the primary spoken language is Irish. After checking in (at around 4pm) our actual exploration of the peninsula began.


More to come on the Dingle visit, most likely tomorrow.
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Things not to do

It seems like there should be a "don't do this" label on this sign. Self-explanatory, maybe, but what if the sign were advocating this sort of behavior?
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Inexpensive Haircuts and Future Visitors + Completely Unrelated Picture

So the pint of Guinness to the left is completely unrelated to this post unless you want to start pondering the half full or half empty question. Actually, that is also pretty much completely unrelated to this, but it might be slightly more interesting if you're into internal intellectual questions that have no real answer. In any case I got a haircut today for 8.50 Euro. I was shocked at how cheap it was. I stumbled upon Frank's Barbershop completely by accident, it is on the 2nd floor of a storefront on the fringes of downtown Cork and is not particularly well marked. A small little place that seemed pretty much identical to an American barber shop except for the Cork accents.

Also, my dad will be in Ireland starting tomorrow and will be spending some time in Cork. The plan is to head over to the west coast into West Cork and Kerry, possibly Dingle, and do some sightseeing. It should be a good weekend.
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A New Munster County, the Land of Crystal

Today I succeeded in traveling to a tourist destination. Sadly, given the past few days, this is an accomplishment. We went to Waterford by bus, about a 2 hour trip each way that went off without a hitch, further cementing my opinion that in Ireland bus > train. Waterford is situated on a river and is a fairly major seaport in southwest Ireland. The bus ride took us through Youghal and Dungarvan, both of which are pretty cool little coastal towns, so that worked out well too.

As the above picture illustrates, one of the stops we made in Waterford was the Waterford Crystal factory. We got a tour that involved being shown through their functioning crystal plant and watching their master craftsmen at work and eventually being herded into their gallery (the largest collection of Waterford Crystal on earth!) like sheep to look at very nice glassware that costs more than I make in a week (or, depending on the piece, a number of weeks). The tour itself was pretty cool for me because I have always been intrigued by glassblowing and other glass-related art. We got to see all their major production departments, including glassblowing, molds, cutting, sculpting, and engraving. All of them were pretty cool except for sculpting, although that may have been because we saw an empty room with nobody working.

The town of Waterford was pretty cool, on the larger side in terms of Irish cities I've visited. The river Suir, which runs through Waterford, is much larger than the river Lee, the river that runs through Cork. Waterford is also apparently the largest city in Ireland that retains its Viking name (it was originally a Viking settlement just like Dublin, Wexford, Cork, and most major Irish cities).

As a bonus, it didn't rain today until well after we returned home. And to close the post, a crystal mailbox!

ok so maybe no crystal mailbox, the picture upload thingy is being screwy. Use your imagination and maybe it will work tomorrow.
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Cobh Broken Down Trains

Yesterday I attempted to go to Cobh with one of my housemates. Cobh is about a 25 minute train ride from Cork, so we walked to the train station and bought tickets for the commuter train to Cobh. It was the second time I've ever been to the Cork train station. I have yet to successfully leave said train station actually in a train.

First, the train scheduled to leave for Cobh was running late, so the boarding and departure was about 10 minutes after it was scheduled. We all got onto the platform at track 1, right next to an empty train on track 2. After about a 5 minute wait somebody thought to announce that the train to Cobh was actually the one on track 2 right behind us, which had been there the entire time we were there. We all turned around and boarded that train and waited for what we assumed would be a minute or two so everyone could get on and then we would depart. We were, of course, mistaken. The doors closed, we sat there for about 2 minutes, and then a muffled voice announced over the PA "mumble mumble train mumble mumble service to mumble bus service mumble".

People began to trickle out of the train and it became clear due to some individuals who either possessed incredible hearing or the ability to speak airport announcement translated the message to "Train broke down, we're trying to get you a bus to wherever you need to go". By the time we returned to the terminal it was about 5 minutes before the train was scheduled to arrive in Cobh. By this point we figured that it was late enough that it wasn't worth the hassle of getting a bus, so we got a refund and walked back to our townhouse.
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On Friday we went to Belfast Cork Airport and back

On Friday I learned a useful lesson; If you are younger than 23, it is pretty much impossible to rent a car in Ireland (or at least Cork). As I said a few days ago, the plan for the weekend was to rent a car and drive up to Belfast and sort of tour Northern Ireland for a few days. This effort, as you may have already guessed, ended in utter failure because 21 year olds are not really able to rent cars here in Cork and having a car was pretty central to our plans. On the positive side we got to go to ORK (yes, I will use any possible excuse to type the abbreviation for Cork Airport) and the weather was pretty nice.

So that didn't really work, and the revised plan is to go to Cobh tomorrow and then Waterford on Monday (horray for bank holidays). Hopefully this plan will work out a little better. Fortunately no car rentals are involved.
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