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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Failure

The past few days can be summed up very well by this picture. On Friday I figured out that the compound that I have been working on for the past week or so degraded so it is now useless. Today I attempted to go up to Thurles to watch Cork play Galway in hurling but we were not able to get train or bus tickets that included a return journey so we gave up. Both disappointing, but these things happen.

It was a gorgeous day in Cork today and walking back from the bus station after realizing that going to see the match wasn't feasible we saw some people doing a bizarre sort of martial art seeming thing except it was not any recognizable martial art I have ever heard of. In any case we returned home and watched the match on TV. It was an incredible match that ended up as a Cork victory by a mere two points after battling back from being behind at halftime and playing a man down for the entire second half. It is disappointing to have missed it but the match itself was still very exciting on television and there was no real way that we could have made it to Thurles in time once we realized what was going on with the train and bus.

The past couple days have remained sunny (for the most part). It has been over a week since it last rained harder than a 20 minute drizzle. It's almost spooky.
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Hurling in the Land of 5 Line Poems

Today I traveled to the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick to watch the Munster Hurling Final, Tipperary versus Claire. While the match itself left something to be desired in terms of competitiveness, the trip itself was a lot of fun. Fortunately I got to watch the tail end of the youth final (either under 18 or under 21, I'm not sure), which was actually quite exciting. Cork's youth team beat Tipp's by only a point or two and I witnessed a number of lead changes and ties in the final few minutes that I watched. The outcome was in doubt pretty much down to the wire. As a bonus, the weather held and I wasn't rained on at except for the last mile or so of the walk home from the bus station in Cork.

The match started at 4, so I left Cork by bus around 12:25. It is around an hour and a half journey and the scenery on the way there is gorgeous. Open fields bordered by hedges and trees spreading over rolling hills radiate outwards from Cork city and as far as I've seen from my travels in Munster over most of the southwestern part of the province. We crossed a few rivers in our journey from Cork to Limerick although I have no idea what their names were.

Once in Limerick I began the rather long walk to the venue pretty much alone. The closer I got, however, the more people I ran into. The vast majority of people I saw while walking to the match were Tipp fans, and as we crossed the Shannon River and got progressively closer to the stadium our numbers swelled. Along the way as we began to get very close to the grounds (within a mile or so) we began to run into enormous groups of fans spilling out of hotel bars and pubs drinking beer or cider from plastic cups, vaguely reminiscent of an American college on a weekend night. A friend had dropped off my tickets at the reception desk of a hotel close to the ground, so I went and picked them up. Unfortunately my friend from Claire ended up not being able to make it at the last minute, so I was only able to use one of the two tickets I had at my disposal.

After picking up the tickets I continued on to the stadium itself, walking into bigger and bigger crowds as I went. One of the striking differences about sporting events here and sporting events in America is the way everyone arrives at the venue. In the United States, most stadiums have enormous parking lots surrounding them or at least very close by. Here the stadiums are built into the cities themselves and therefore have no room for large expanses of blacktop to park cars on. As a result, everyone walks from a relatively far distance. It generally ends up being a really cool experience just walking to the match because you get to see the crowd getting denser and denser as you approach the stadium.

Anyway, I got into the stadium and made my way to my seat, which was in the 5th or 6th row on one of the sidelines about 40 yards from the end (the field is around 140 yards long). I pretty much immediately realized that the atmosphere at this match was going to be much better than the football final of last weekend. It seems that more people in Munster care about hurling than care about football. The stadium was packed and was about half blue (Tipp) and the other half yellow (Claire) although I think that overall the crowd was more pro-Tipp. Flags waved all over the stadium although they were concentrated in the terraces (cheap tickets where you don't get a seat at both ends of the pitch). I unfortunately didn't get any pictures inside the stadium, mostly because it didn't cross my mind at all.

The match itself started off quickly. Tipp scored the first point and never trailed after that. In the first half (and to a lesser extent in the second as well) the Claire attackers were woefully inaccurate with their shots, missing at least as many as they put on target. This delighted the Tipp fans I was surrounded by, although the volume of shots Claire were getting worried them. By halftime Tipp had scored a goal and was well in control of the match winning 1-11 (14) to 0-6 (6). The vocal support after points and other good sequences of play were impressive, and the collective outpouring of joy after Tipp's first goal was one of the loudest cheers I have heard in an outdoor stadium, although this may have been because I was in the middle of it yet not exactly a part of it in the same way that everyone else was. It was exciting, of course, but not having any significant allegiance to Tipp I didn't feel the same connection with fellow celebrating spectators like I usually do at sporting events.

Claire looked better in the second half and it began with the two sides trading points. This made for a slightly more interesting match for me although since Claire was down by 8 points this could not last if Claire wanted to have a shot at winning. After a few minutes, however, Tipp seemingly began to go flat and Claire exploited this, starting to slowly draw closer to their opponents. The end of the pitch with all the Claire supporters got progressively louder and more excited as the momentum shifted in favor of Claire and the Tipp fans sitting around me anxiously watched the match, getting progressively quieter as they began to fear that Claire were taking over the match.

Fortunately for my Tipp neighbors, with about 15 minutes to play a Tipp hurler scored an impressive goal to reestablish an 8 point lead and effectively squash any hope of a comeback by Claire. Almost immediately after Tipp got another point to make it at least a three goal game, making the last bit of the game a mere formality. With only a few minutes to play the Tipp goalkeeper made a rather spectacular save to deny Claire a consolation goal and as extra time began Tipp supporters had already begun jumping the barriers between the stands and the field in anticipation of the final celebration. They barely stayed off the field long enough, and the tide of joyous blue-clad supporters rushed onto the field at the final whistle waving blue and yellow flags.

The bus ride back was marred by some traffic, but aside from that pretty uneventful. The city itself was quite empty aside from Claire and Tipp fans and most of the shops were closed. I was quite impressed by the complete lack of any sort of antagonism between opposing sets of fans. The hooligan culture of European soccer supporters evidently does not carry over into GAA fans.

Sorry, that was long. Here's a picture of what I think is Limerick Castle, viewed from a park along the Shannon River.

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A Weekend of Hurling

This weekend is shaping up to be a potentially rather sports-packed few days. Later today Cork play Dublin in an All-Ireland hurling qualifying match at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork. I'm still debating if I should go and watch that match live but i will definitely at least watch it on TV. The more exciting hurling-related event of the weekend, however, takes place considerably further away.

The Munster hurling final is on Sunday. It is Tipperary versus Claire and is taking place in Limerick at the Gaelic Grounds there, one of the largest GAA venues in Ireland. The plan is to take either a train or bus up there from Cork around noon to make it there in time for the 4pm match. Its supposed to be quite a good match, and I get to see a town that has poems named after it in the process.
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Munster Final (Football)

Today at 2pm, Cork played Kerry in the Munster Final for Gaelic Football at Páirc Uí Chaoimh just outside of Cork City. I was fortunate enough to go to the match and watch Cork pull off an amazing comeback upset over Kerry, the reigning All-Ireland and Munster Football champions. The final score was Cork 1-16 (for a total of 19) to Kerry's 1-11 (for a total of 14) after Cork had trailed at halftime 0-3 to 1-8. The game was immensely entertaining and a ton of fun to watch in spite of some very fickle weather.

We arrived at the stadium by bus about 50 minutes before it was supposed to start and got to watch the end of the Minor (under 18) Munster final between Kerry and Tipperary, which ended in a draw. As we arrived it was raining fairly steadily but not particularly hard and that rain kept up until about five minutes prior to the throw in of the Cork-Kerry match. The weather and expected result (a lopsided victory for Kerry) kept attendance on the rather low side, with the announced attendance at the Páirc Uí Chaoimh only around 22,700 (its capacity is closer to 30,000 or 40,000).

We watched from the very top of the West Stand, the end closest to the city. We happened to be surrounded mostly by Kerry fans with a few Cork fans sprinkled here and there between them. Cork and Kerry are rather bitter rivals as they border one another, and their teams are referred to, interestingly, as the Rebels (Cork) and the Kingdom (Kerry). The match started out pretty well for Cork with the Rebels scoring the first point within a minute of the start of the match. It remained fairly even for a few minutes after that until it was tied at two points each. At that point, Kerry began to run away with the match. By halftime it was 0-3 to 1-8 in favor of Kerry and the general feeling was that it would be kinder to use some sort of mercy rule so that the Cork players didn't have to suffer anymore. The only solace for the Cork fans was that after the rain had stopped just prior to the start of the match the sun had come out and the weather had turned quite warm, sunny, and very plesant.

After the last of the stragglers wearing Cork red trudged to the locker room for halftime, a sort of mini-pitch was set up in the middle of the real field and the girls teams from Cork and Kerry ran out to play a football match of their own, presumably for halftime entertainment. About 60 seconds into their mini-match, however, the sky darkened and the entire stands rustled as literally every person in the stadium put their jackets back on and reopened their umbrellas pretty much simultaneously. It was actually quite an impressive sight to see thousands of people very abruptly and rather frantically put on water-resistant outerwear. Just about as the last of the fans were done getting ready for the rain, it began pouring. It was quite possibly the heaviest rain I have ever been in. In about 60-90 seconds the weather went from quite warm, sunny, and apparently perfect to buckets of rain and strong wind. Fans huddled under umbrellas, some crouched against the back wall of the stand, others rushed out of the stands into the inner hallways of the Páirc Uí Chaoimh. The pouring rain persisted for pretty much the rest of halftime.

Strangely enough, the rain began to taper off before the half started and after about two minutes of the second half the rain had stopped completely although some clouds persisted. Cork looked better to start the second half and began to pull some points back but after about 5 minutes a Cork player was sent off for a second yellow card, making the outlook for the Rebels even bleaker than before. Nearly right after he was sent off Cork scored a point, but it seemed small consolation as Cork were still down 5 points and a man.

The Rebels didn't give up though, and a few minutes later scored a goal to put them within 2 points of Kerry, making the match interesting once again. At that point you wouldn't have been able to tell that Cork were a man down without counting. A mere minute or two later a Kerry player was sent off for what appeared from my angle to be a vicious elbow/shoulder to the head of a Cork footballer sprinting down the wing. At this point Cork were trailing by two but seemed by far the better side of the half, and they quickly got two more points to draw level with the Kerrymen. The teams traded points, but by looking at the two teams it seemed only a matter of time until Cork pulled ahead for good, which they did soon after. Cork eventually won by 5 points, a remarkable achievement considering that they were down by 8 at half time.

The announcer made repeated requests to fans to "please stay off the pitch" after the match was over, but these requests went completely unheeded. Eventually the police simply opened the gates onto the pitch so that the supporters didn't have to hop the fences.

The Cork captain raising the cup (taken from the pitch).

As we made our way out of the stadium, it began to rain once again. The Cork weather ended up bracketing the match with rain before, at halftime, and after. Somehow the times when the players were actually playing stayed fairly dry. Read more

Gaelic Football

Today Dublin played Westmeath in one of the Leinster semifinals for Gaelic Football. I watched it on TV, and it was a fascinating game to watch. It was the first complete gaelic football match I’ve watched and it was really quite entertaining. Gaelic football is played 15 v 15, just like hurling and rugby, and has a scoring system identical to hurling. You score points by putting the ball either into the goal (which is very similar to a soccer goal) for 3 points or over the bar and between the uprights (like a field goal in football) for a point. Here were some of my thoughts at the time, in bullet form:

Evidently when Dublin plays matches at Croke Park (their home stadium) the matches always start late because their supporters can’t get there on time. They have the shortest distance to travel there and are the only set of fans that are chronically late. Go figure.

Everyone seems to expect Dublin to crush Westmeath by 4 or 5.

Westmeath have a goofy prematch ritual in which everyone gets into a big crowd and throws themselves around trying to bounce off one another for about 30 seconds. Reminds me of the Hawaiian football team dance, except its less organized and decidedly less intimidating.

1st minute Dublin wins the throw in, which is very similar to a basketball jump ball except 2 players from each team are allowed to participate.

2^nd minute That was fast. Number 4 for Westmeath fouls a Dublin player, and with the resulting penalty a Dublin player scores a point. This looks like it might be high scoring.

4^th minute Two more shots from Dublin, two misses. We are no longer on pace for 35 points.

5^th minute Point! Maybe I was wrong, this could turn into a pointfest after all. This time its Dennis Glennon for Westmeath, and we’re tied.

6^th minute First blood (literally). Dublin player leaves the pitch to get treatment for rather extensive bleeding in the general face area. He is replaced by another guy, a “blood sub”. It seems like if somebody is bleeding you’re able to replace them temporarily while they are treated, after which you can put them back in.

7^th minute GOAL! Westmeath guy plays a long ball through the defense and a teammate gets there a fraction before the Dublin keeper to punch it over him, and it bounces into the goal. This removes any remaining doubts I may have had about how exciting this sport is. It seems to be on the high-scoring side.

9^th minute Another point. Westmeath are in danger of running away with this, they’re up 5 points to 1.

10^th minute Dublin respond with another point off a free kick. We’re 1/7 done with this thing, and we’ve already got 7 points between the teams.

13^th minute Dublin foul results in point for Westmeath. This just doesn’t stop. In case I’ve missed something, the score is Westmeath 1-3 to Dublin 0-3 (the first number is the goals and the second number is the points, so to get totals you’d multiply the first number by 3 and add it to the second number). To most people, that’s 6-3 Westmeath is leading.

14^th minute Basically the same play and foul leads to a free kick for Westmeath, which leads to a point. 7 to 3. The bleeding Dublin guy is back and no longer bleeding.

15^th minute That looked painful. A Dublin player was running at full speed and abruptly pulled up clutching his hamstring. I don’t think I’ve seen that while watching a sporting event in quite a long time. I’m happy I don’t see it more often, it hurts to watch. No surprise, he is subbed off nearly immediately.

17^th minute Dublin point!

18^th minute Times two. These points seem to come in flurries.

20^th minute And a bad Westmeath pass is intercepted and leads to yet another Dublin point. They’re only down by 1 now, 7 to 6 Westmeath.

22^nd minute That was odd. Westmeath got a free kick and immediately kicked it directly out of bounds. I’m not sure if that was incredibly stupid or somehow strategically significant. I’ll go with the former unless this is some subtle mind ploy that I do not understand (which is I suppose possible, considering that I understand very, very little about Gaelic Football)

24^th minute FOUL! And Dublin’s number 8 gets the first second yellow card of the match. I have no idea when the first happened.

26^th minute Another yellow card for Dublin now, and I’m very curious about that first yellow card that the announcers keep referring to but do not show a replay of.

27^th minute A pretty sequence of play from Westmeath following the yellow card leads to a point. The 3 or 4 passes leading up to it seemed to be the Gaelic Football equivalent of approximately what Spain have looked like in Euro 08

32^nd minute A yellow card for someone from Westmeath (the first one not to go to a Dublin player) quickly followed by two missed shots by Dublin. They’re supposed to be walking all over Westmeath today. Apparently Gaelic football commentators have similar powers of prediction to most American sports commentators.

33^rd minute Dublin point! That ties it up at 8 all

34^th minute Dublin number 9 is replaced again by number 18 as a blood sub. This guy bleeds a lot, evidently.

1 minute of stoppage time

35 + 1 minute Halftime. Whew, that was an exciting first half. These GAA people like their sports high scoring.

Aaaaand they’re back. Dublin made 3 subs, apparently. Or maybe it was Westmeath, he just said a manager’s name that I did not recognize, although it sounded very traditionally Irish.

36^th minute Dublin win the throw in and then score almost immediately. Their first lead, I think.

37^th minute A shot at goal! Those don’t seem to happen too often, no goalkeeper to block points. The Westmeath keeper saved this shot though. I’m not exactly sure what the goalkeeper’s special privileges are (if he has any) because everybody is allowed to use their hands.

39^th minute Wow, that was a bad shot. Westmeath player tries for a point, comes closer to the corner flag than the upright. Dublin crowd jeers.

44^th minute Long span of possession followed by missed shots ends with a Westmeath free kick that they convert for a point, tying the game at 9. The action has seemed to slow down, after this amount of time in the first half we had seen 7 or 8 points.

45^th minute And of course just as I say that, Westmeath score another point to pull ahead, 10 to 9. This is back to looking like it did in the first half, we’ll see if they keep up with they points in flurries theme.

48^th minute Evidently not. A Dublin player misses a painfully easy free kick that I think I could’ve made (20 yards out, pretty much centered between the uprights) off one of the posts. Dublin number 9 comes back from bleeding. I wonder how long this will last, he seems to be rather blood prone.

51^st minute Yellow card for Dublin number 19. I have absolutely no idea what for, that seemed really arbitrary to me.

52^nd minute Two quick points put Dublin in the lead again, although most of the action has degenerated into the middle third of the field (which, incidentally, is massive. Even with 15 people per team these guys must be doing an incredible amount of running.) Scoring and chances have cooled off in the second half.

56^th minute That was very strange. A Westmeath player fouled a Dublin player, resulting in a free kick. Dublin took the kick too quickly for the ref’s liking, however, and so as punishment he gave the ball back to Westmeath. That strikes me as bizarre and could almost encourage fouling in some situations. Maybe that’s just me.

A few subs happened in the past few minutes, is seems like each team is allowed a lot of them.

60^th minute TRICKERY! CHEATING SCUM! Or at least this is what they tell me. One of the Dublin players just threw the ball, which evidently is a sin similar to handball in soccer. All previous (legal) handpasses have been rather like an underhand serve in volleyball with the ball held in one hand and struck with the palm of the other. This motion looks (to me, at least) nearly identical to the underhand throwing motion this Dublin player was just penalized for. Go figure.

64^th minute After a few more assorted misses on either end, Dublin appear to be preparing a sub. How may of these are allowed?

66^th minute Man down! Man down! Westmeath number 5 is lying on the field in pain.

He’s ok now.

67^th minute Point! We have more scoreboard changing to do! That took long enough, and puts Dublin up by 2 with only 3-4 minutes to play. Westmeath are not in such great shape, but they aren’t down by the 5 or 6 that all the pundits were predicting before the match.

69^th minute Westmeath are reduced to playing long balls and praying for a goal. It does not look good for the underdog at the moment.

70^th minute And that is probably the final nail in the coffin. An impressive buildup of passes by Dublin leads to a point to put them ahead by 3. One minute of stoppage time.

70 + 1 minute A free kick for Westmeath is turned into a point, but it is not enough. The match is over, Dublin are advancing to the Leinster final.

Dublin 0-13 (13)

Westmeath 1-8 (11)

That was very interesting. And there is a Euro 08 final to watch later. Read more

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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