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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Killarney + Pictures

Yesterday one of my housemates and I traveled to Killarney. Killarney is about an hour and a half bus journey northwest of Cork City a few kilometers past the county border between Kerry and Cork. The bus takes small, winding roads and we left at around 9:30 in the morning, so by the time we arrived in Killarney i was actually rather nauseous. The bus actually had seatbelts as well, a fact that surprised and initially sort of confused me coming from a land with seatbeltless busses. Fortunately, Killarney itself was a great place to visit and offset any lingering nausea in a few short minutes. After a brief walk from the bus station to the city center, we were greeted with the street in the picture to the left, followed by two busier and more main streets filled with all sorts of restaurants and assorted shops, including butchers, bakers, sports shops, betting places, and a bunch of gift shops (Killarney has been a tourist destination for hundreds of years).

After arriving in the downtown area (which consists of 2 major streets that basically form a big T) we got some food, which was cheaper than it would have been in Cork which could have been a result of practically every other shop along the two main streets being some sort of restaurant. There was a Subway and a Burger King as well, which didn't quite seem to fit in alongside O'Connor's Butcher Shop and O'Leary's Pub. After lunch we walked over to St. Mary's Cathedral, which was built in the 1800s and I believe it is the seat of the Diocese of Kerry. It is a functioning cathedral and there was actually a wedding finishing up as we went to check it out, so we didn't go inside.
Across the street from the entrance to the cathedral (directly behind where that picture was taken from) is an entrance to Killarney national park, an enormous plot of land owned by the Irish Government which contains the Lakes of Killarney, a few picturesque mountains, and the ruins of Ross Castle and Innisfallen Island, home to Innisfallen Abbey, one of the oldest monasteries in County Kerry. The park itself is gorgeous, and attempting to describe it is pretty much pointless, so here are some pictures:


The above pictures are of some of the fields near Killarney taken about a 5-10 minute walk from the cathedral.

This picture with mountains and Lough Leane in the background was taken from about halfway between St. Mary's Cathedral and Ross Castle.

This was taken from the base of Ross Castle looking out over Lough Leane.

All in all, it was a great trip. As a bonus, it didn't really start raining until we were boarding the bus to return to Cork. As we drove back, we could see from the bus window the same rolling hills with their peaks shrouded in low, wispy clouds. It looked really cool. It was a rather exhausting day, but completely worth it. The next travel goal is to head to a county not called Cork or Kerry and venture beyond the far southwest corner of the country. Read more

Disorienting

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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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Jetlag

Traveling from San Diego to Cork (ORK) takes a very, very long time. I left my house at around 11.30am PDT (7.30pm Cork time) on Thursday and landed in Cork at about 1.3opm Cork time on Friday at ORK airport. In other words, about 18 hours of travel time not including picking up baggage and getting a cab to where I'm staying, but both of those took very little time. As I expected, my attempts at sleep on the long plane ride from LAX to Heathrow were futile. Consequently, I'm very tired. It was quite an interesting journey.

My flight out of LAX was delayed by what British Airways called 35 minutes, so we ended up taking off about an hour late. The baggage dropoff system in the international terminal of LAX is, quite possibly, the most poorly-conceived and convoluted system that I have ever seen. After agonizing through that for almost an hour I went through security and walked to my gate, which was in a half-constructed terminal complete with construction noises. Eventually I got on the plane and spent a little over 9 hours sitting in a cramped seat trying to stay comfortable. On the plus side they gave us dinner and breakfast and their in-flight entertainment system had a very large selection of movies and music you could listen to, all in a very cool touch screen setup.

Heathrow confused me. I do not understand why any person would design an airport the way Heathrow is designed. I went through at least 3 sets of immigration/customs/security and had to walk at least a few miles because my connecting gate was so far away from my arriving gate. As I followed the signs leading to my gate, I seriously began to fear that the hallway would just end and nothing would be there. That was how sketchy-looking and remote this gate was. Apparently AerLingus is not the most important of carriers flying through London.

The view from the plane window as we landed in Cork was incredible. The coastline giving way to rolling, green hills that seemed so stereotypically Irish was an awesome first vision of the island. On the ground, its very strange to have to look to the right when crossing the street, and I was completely disoriented in the cab on the way over from the airport, although that could have been partially due to being exhausted from lack of sleep. Either way, I'm probably going to be nearly run over in the next week or two because I look the wrong way when crossing the street.
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