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.
Read more

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.
Read more