Ireland Part 1

Well, I've been home 1 day now, and I'm still bristling at writing up about the experiences traveling around Ireland. There are too many good things to say, I don't want to leave out anything. Plus, I'm sick, have been sick for the past 2 weeks, and am just managing staying conscious for a couple hours at a time.

Let's see, this is going to have to be in parts, and I'm still trying to upload the pictures to flickr. We got into Dublin around 8am, exhausted and already hungover from a wild night in NYC on the upper upper east east side. The first adventure--picking up the car, and actually driving it. It's not as hard as you think, just driving it (a foreign cabby in NYC assured me of this, and although I doubted him at the time, he turned out right). Shifting with your left hand is actually kind of fun, and driving on the left hand side of the road gets easier, although I never got used to seeing the cars coming at you on the right hand side. So, we tried to make our way to our first city, (which we hadn't even planned until about the last 15 minutes of the plane ride), and I have to say that, that i was doing a bang on job driving...except for the roundabouts. Oh, and the fact that there are NO ROAD SIGNS half-the time. So you head into this roundabout (where the speed limit would be 100km, that's 60mph around a roundabout), not knowing what the hell turn you're supposed to take. OR, you might have the opposite problem. Here is an example of the road signs in Ireland, mostly Southwestern Ireland:
Oh, I also forgot to mention what the roads look like. They are only as wide as the Fiat Punto that was our luxury compact vehicle for the week. Most times, it seems you're only choice is either to knock side mirrors with the car coming at you, or drive halfway off the side of the road. Since Colin was nice enough to do most of the driving, we actually survived. I spent most of the time in the car cringing and deciding who would get my VHS collection when we perished on the side of the road.
Our first stop was Kilkenny. Home of the Kilkenny castle, a big arts and crafts area, and Kilkenny beer. We made it in around 10am, exhausted and having no idea what we were doing. So we headed to a pub, thinking we could get something to eat...but were happily surprised to see that it is COMPLETELY acceptable to be drinking at 10am on a Sunday morning. When in Rome my friends. When in Rome. We had to try Kilkenny's local brew, which you can easily get in the US as well. It's harder than you can imagine to drink those beers, they taste wonderful, they really do, but you're so full afterwards, there's no chance of you actually finishing a meal. I have no idea how the Irish do it. After a 4 hour nap, it was so needed, we headed to dinner and then out for the night. We bar hopped, I mean it's a Sunday night in this little village, I don't know that we thought we would actually find something to do. But there were people in every pub. I think there's a pub for every 11 people in every city we went to. And they all look exactly like you think they do. The Irish pubs we see here, I usually thought they were bad replicas, trying to be cute, but they look exactly the same in Ireland. Except every bar looks like that. We finally settled upon Matt the Millers to listen to a band, "Superstition." We learned quickly that the Irish love to cover bad American pop. It wasnt all that bad though, they threw in a Thin Lizzy song (Dancing in the Moonlight, not a bad one actually) and I danced with 2 crazy women, and met a guy from Manchester who told me, everyone from Manchester is a gangster (say it in a british accent out loud and it rhymes). This was the first night, and we learned quickly the correct way to order pints. "Can I get a Kilkenny off ya," is the preferred way of asking for a beer. I mostly stuck with Jameson, no ice. That was our first night, and after a hungover morning breakfast cooked by the lovely Ms. Daly, we headed off to Cork.