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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Rental Cars and Northern Ireland?

The plan for the upcoming (bank holiday!) weekend is to rent a car and drive (basically) completely across the island. In theory, 2 of my housemates and I will rent a car tomorrow morning and drive north with the stated goal of visiting Belfast, Derry, Donegal, Mayo, and Galway in roughly that order.

If that happens or not remains to be seen.
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