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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Is that....Sun?

Today is, I believe, the 6th consecutive day that it has not rained significantly in Cork. This is by far the longest streak of its kind since I've arrived in Ireland. Its almost spooky. We've had brief drizzles on a few of the six days, but they have been so inconsequential that you would not be able to tell that they were happening if you were inside. Its a different side of the Irish weather, I suppose, although one that does not often stick around for more than a day or two.

Yesterday I walked into the City Centre Center and passed a pub named Costigan's. I'm sure I've passed it before because I have walked down this street before but this was the first time I really noticed it. For maybe the next 10 minutes all I could think of was DiCaprio's character from The Departed.

Tennis balls are expensive here. The cheapest can I could find was 5.50 euro, which is ridiculous when compared to 2 or 3 dollars back home. Its easy to pay 10 euro for a can as well, which is roughly a third of the price of a (slightly discounted) GAA jersey I saw in the sporting goods store where I saw these tennis balls. The thought that nine tennis balls could be worth the monetary equivalent of a replica jersey of any sort is completely mind-boggling to me.
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Blarney

I visited Blarney Castle today. Blarney is a small town only a few miles outside of Cork. Its a completely unremarkable town except for the large medieval castle that is located pretty close to the center of the town. The castle itself is pretty imposing, and the top of the castle has an outstanding view of the surrounding countryside, which is gorgeous. It is, I suppose, what a stereotypical "Irish countryside" is like, with gently rolling hills covered with mostly open fields punctuated by trees and the occasional house. The castle was surrounded by a surprisingly large estate which included a lake, a number of small streams (possibly man-made moats), and large fields. The picture to the left is of the main castle from just below it.

We took a bus from the City Centre Center to Blarney, where the castle is about a 2 minute walk down the road from the bus stop. The bus ride was only about 20 minutes, so it was actually very simple and easy journey to make. The castle itself and the grounds were quite interesting, and in relatively good shape for how old they were, I thought.

As you can see from the above picture, it has been recently discovered the defenses of Blarney Castle were far more advanced than any historians had previously imagined.

This picture is of the lake on the castle grounds, although the hills are not owned by whoever owns the castle

This picture is of the Blarney House taken from the exact same place that the picture of the lake is taken from. The castle is behind the house, not visible in either picture.

This picture was taken from the top of the castle, near the Blarney Stone, which is supposed to give one the gift of eloquence if kissed.

And that, for the most part, was my visit to Blarney. Gorgeous place, and being a few stories up made the countryside that much more beautiful. Fortunately it was a clear day.
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Pubs, Trivia, and Rainy Mornings

Last night I went to a pub with a few friends of mine to do a trivia night sort of thing. It was a ton of fun, and I felt like I got a very Irish sort of pub experience out of it because I was the only non-Irish member of the group for the majority of the evening, which was a first for me. Later Bartek, my Polish housemate and coworker, joined us. All in all, it was quite an entertaining evening and me being American actually helped the trivia team. A few questions about American TV, tennis, and the Beach Boys came our way, which I happily helped out with. And we finished tied for 3rd, so we won some money out of it as well.

The most amusing part of the evening was when we ran into a group of English tourists. It was a group of about 6 girls who were part of some sort of organized Cork festival. As they loudly proclaimed their love for all things Irish, it occurred to me that by doing so they very obviously marked themselves as non-Irish, especially because they were describing Irish things in very non-Irish ways. They marked the first group of people who I've come across outside of work who have appeared more obviously non-Irish than I am, or at least the first group that I noticed. I suppose I'm not a particularly good judge of such things, but it seemed a rather interesting thing that I observed to myself at the time.

This morning was gray and rainy, standard Irish weather. I actually quite enjoyed it. A short walk to work in a rather light rain is not an altogether negative way to start a day so long as you're wearing a jacket that does a good job of keeping you dry.

On a completely unrelated note, this is an awesome website.
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Sports, Shops, and Rain

People in Ireland like sports. A lot. It seems like there is always some form of sports on television and nearly half the people you see on the street are wearing some form of replica jersey, usually either something related to the County Cork GAA or an English Premier League team. Gaelic sports, specifically hurling and football, are huge. They vary in relative popularity depending on the part of Ireland you're in. In East Cork, where Cork City is, hurling is more popular, although football is quite popular as well. In West Cork football enjoys more popularity than hurling, although hurling is still quite popular there. You see a lot of red Cork shirts walking around town.

There always seems to be some sort of sporting event on TV. If no Euro 08 match is on at the time there is always something on, either cricket or rugby or non-European soccer or hurling or Gaelic football. I even saw a bit of of USA v Canada in rugby yesterday. All of this on standard television, with about 10 channels. I'm pretty sure you'd need uber-cable to watch that rugby match in the United States, and here its on their equivalent of NBC. They like their sports here, obviously.

Earlier today I saw the end of a hurling match. Its fascinating to watch. Everyone here claims that its the "fastest game in the world". I'm not quite sure what that means, but the game is very high tempo, although I'm pretty sure its impossible to quantify speed of play and compare across different sports.

Unfortunately, the Irish love of all things sports-related does not seem to extend to tennis. Yesterday I went into town and looked in at least 3 sporting goods stores for tennis balls and returned empty-handed. This could have something to do with the weather. It rains quite often here, making regular tennis training a rather difficult goal.

Speaking of rain, on the way back from town after looking for said tennis balls I got caught in a rather heavy downpour. It rained nearly 2 inches yesterday, and as luck would have it most of that came all at once in the afternoon during my 20 minute walk from the City Centre Center to my house near UCC.
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Soccer in Pubs + Unrelated Pictures

Last night I went out to a pub to watch the Euro match between Germany and Portugal. It was a very exciting match, so watching in the pub was fun even though not many people were there watching with us. It's a strange and wonderful experience to be watching a soccer match in a public place with random, everyday people who arn't very into sports but still understand what's going on. Not like that in America. Oh, and the picture is of the main quad on the UCC campus. Not a bad looking place.

Today we had our health and safety "training". It was, as expected, horribly boring. By the end of the hour when the instructor asked if there were any questions I was tempted to ask if it were ok to drink the chemicals we were working with. Sadly this guy probably would've thought I was serious. Either he really enjoyed repeating obvious things or he thought that pretty much all of us were completely oblivious about lab safety. But that is rather what is expected when someone tells you about a mandatory safety training.

And since people remember the first and last things about writing, here's a picture of one of the main shopping streets in the City Centre Center taken from the end of it where most of the activity peters out:

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MINSTRELS! and pub

Today I went to the big supermarket after work to pick up some food. I expected it to be a rather uneventful experience but little did I know that a rather surprising find would turn the experience awesome. As I was going through the isles grabbing bread, salami, and other various simple food items I saw a packet of Minstrels, which I rushed over to and grabbed immediately. For those of you who don't know, Minstrels are an Irish candy made by Galaxy. They're rather similar to M&Ms except they are slightly larger, don't have varying coating colors, and are made with better chocolate. They are quite possibly the best mass-produced candy I have ever eaten. My day got exponentially better after I found them. Coincidentally, today has been the worst weather so far since I arrived. Wet and gray much as I expected it to be like all the time.

Yesterday night we had an introductory dinner for the internship program I'm doing here. We sat through a brief introductory lecture earlier in the day and then they sent the six international students off to get some sort of government tax number. After we finished that we had a few hours break and then met at a restaurant in the City Centre Center for a sort of social dinner so that we could meet everyone involved with the program. The meal was excellent (and free!), although the portions were so enormous that I almost felt like I was in Texas. Afterwards the group headed over to a nearby pub, which made it much easier to intermingle and meet everyone than it was sitting at a long skinny dinner table.

Today was my first real day on the job. I met my French student supervisor for the first time and was walked through an outline of what my project for the next 10 weeks will be. My supervisor, Guillaume, will actually only work here for another two weeks which he will spend primarily training me how to do the synthesis he's working on up to the point where he is now so that I can continue it after he is gone. Since Guillaume is the only one currently working on this particular project, once he leaves it will become my project and I'll report directly to my PI, not a grad student, which I thought was sorta cool. I'll even get my own desk. It turns out that I have an access card that Guillaume does not have for reasons I do not understand. In any case, my actual training starts tomorrow, I only did some reading today, so there isn't too much to explain, only Minstrels that need eating.
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The Silent Head Nod

The Irish do not use the same forms of silent acknowledgment as Americans do. In America the generally accepted way to say a silent hello while walking past someone is to make eye contact and then nod slightly. I assumed this was a universal form of greeting and that I could use it without any alteration in Ireland. I was, of course, completely wrong.

In Ireland they have a gesture that serves a similar purpose. Unfortunately, it is just different enough to have completely confused me for the first few days I was here. Their form of the greeting begins in exactly the same way, with eye contact (generally while walking past one another). However, instead of nodding as we do in America, they follow it with a short movement of their head to the side, like an abbreviated shake of their head rather analogous to the American abbreviated nod. Until today I was always confused when I nodded to people and they responded with their own shake of the head because I assumed that they somehow disapproved of me or my greeting. It was rather distressing because I thought that if I were interpreting their gesture correctly that the people of Cork were either generally not friendly or they just didn't like me for some reason. I am rather relieved to learn that this is not the case.

On a completely unrelated note, I got a (cheap) Irish cell phone today at the Tesco near where I am staying, which is evidently the largest supermarket in all of Munster (the southernmost Irish province). It was missing the back, so the battery and SIM card are exposed, although after paying 25 euro including 10 euro of credit towards talk time I can't really complain.

On another walk through Cork this afternoon I passed the large Protestant Cathedral (which was quite impressive and rather on the large side considering that the vast majority of the Irish population in this area is Catholic), a number of interesting shops in the City Centre Center, and a small, pub-type place that apparently is among the best microbreweries in Ireland. I haven't really taken any pictures to speak of so far, I've been trying to get my bearings walking around town and get a feel for where everything is before I go around snapping away with a camera. That should start soon though, I think I've figured out the main parts of the city decently enough to get myself around in a reasonable manner. I'll start posting then when I start taking them.
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Irish Euro Commentators and Cork City Centre Center

Irish commentators are infinitely better than American ones in terms of soccer. I feel strange listening to an account in English that coincides with a soccer game and is delivered by someone who has some idea about what is going on. Its awesome though. Not only do they have intelligent commentary, they also have insightful and extensive (taken to a ridiculous extreme, even) post-game and halftime commentary. The thing that surprised me most though was that multiple stations show each match live. It's bizarre. I guess if you don't like one commentator you get a choice, but it still seems strange to me. Sometimes you even get lucky and find hurling while channel surfing at halftime. Always a bonus.

I also went into the Cork City Centre Center today. Twice, actually. A very interesting town. At first I thought that they did not have any street signs to label streets at all but I have since learned that they cleverly hide them by posting them in arbitrary places, often on private houses or walls on the corner of streets. Needless to say, this makes navigation and direction-giving difficult and sometimes rather aggravating. On one of my trips I saw an Irish guy walking around swinging a hurling stick (hurley? I don't know what they call them). I've seen a bunch of people walking around in Cork GAA and hurling gear. Evidently all of their sports teams are the rebels, which I think is a reference to the county's history of resistance to British rule. The downtown City Centre Center district seems rather small but actually turns out to be larger than one would imagine from just looking at its several long, skinny parallel blocks on a map. It contains an almost American-seeming mall, which completely shocked me. I thought those sort of things did not exist in Ireland and it seemed completely out of place next to rows of shopfronts.

Sadly, I saw a Dominoes Pizza on the walk to the City Centre Center. Evidently Dominoes has invaded Europe. I personally think this is horrible news, Dominoes is very low on my list of American food chains that I want to succeed/advertise to the rest of the world. I didn't see any other unexpected American food chains except for a rather interesting-looking European version of Johnny Rockets called Eddie Rockets (and McDonalds, but that wasn't much of a surprise).

Food aside though, I did run into very surprising American items in a sporting goods store that I poked around in for a few minutes while one of my housemates was buying running shoes. Right next to all the Cork GAA and assorted professional soccer team apparel I found a bin of sports balls which held soccer balls, rugby balls, bigger rugby balls, and (to my shock) an American football. Next to it was a rack of 3 or 4 basketballs. They seemed very out of place and I'm sure those same 3 basketballs and 1 football have been in stock for the past 2 months because I can't imagine that there are many basketball courts or football fields in Cork. It seemed like just a run of the mill sporting goods store too, not a specialty store or an extra-thorough enormous one. It was very strange.

Oddly enough, I was almost killed crossing the street today and it was not my fault and not because I looked the wrong way. The guy in the car decided not to slow down coming around a blind corner when turning left on a red light. Fortunately he stopped in time, but rather frightening nonetheless, especially because when I first heard him honk I assumed that I had done something stupid, which didn't turn out to be the case.
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