Whelp. The adventure continues to be strange and unexpected and wonderful and, well, adventure-y.
You last heard from me back in Cork. All of my friends had pretty much left, and even though I had spent two nights there, I hadn’t seen the city AT ALL. So in the morning, I packed up my daypack and started on my merry way to walk around, and in the bar downstairs, I ran into one of my Irish friends. I hadn’t realized he would be around that day, and invited him out with me. Even though he is from Ireland, and Ireland is like, half the size of Texas? Maybe? Not sure but it’s pretty small, he had never been to Cork, so we were both exploring the city for the first time.
And it was fine. Like, I didn’t hate it or anything. But it doesn’t have a whole lot of personality. It’s just kinda…there. The definite highlight of the city exploring was we went to this big bell tower. We got to go inside and ring the bells – there’s eight of them, and a book of songs to choose from. I attempted Edelweiss and it sounded terrible, but I’m going to blame it on the fact that I’m pretty sure one of the bells was out of tune. (Side note: can you tune bells? Is that a thing?)
When you climbed even higher into the tower, there is this little door that you have to climb/crawl into, and you’re suddenly in the room where the bells live. Don’t worry, Mom, they gave us ear protection. You are standing literally right next to all the bells, so close to one that there is a big “DO NOT TOUCH” sign on it, and you can watch the little hammers banging them.
And then at the top, you get the most beautiful view of the city. The weather was perfect and I wanted to stay up there forever.
We had pretty much seen the entire little city when it was time for my Irish friend to head back to the hostel to catch a train. Alone again.
I had a couple hours to kill before heading to the play I had bought a ticket for that night, so I sat at the bar downstairs in my hostel and had a beer (this happens a lot while waiting for things in Ireland.) I started talking to an American that sat down next to me, and we got along great. It wasn’t long before I had invited him to come to the show with me while simultaneously telling him “BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO BECAUSE I KNOW NOT EVERYONE LIKES THEATRE,” and it wasn’t long after that that he invited me to travel with him. More on that in a minute.
He came to the show with me, which was ten ten-minute plays. Many of them were quite obviously written by Irish playwrights, but one was written by someone back home for whom I had actually done a reading of a full-length play several years ago. My favorite part was probably in the play that the actors, for no obvious reason, used New York accents. I laughed at it for only a minute before remembering how many Irish accents I’ve done in all my acting and wondering what they would possibly think of those.
My new American friend and I hung out for the rest of the evening (which consisted mainly of me dissecting every moment of the show, and explaining which plays/directors/actors I thought were the best and worst, while he politely listened).
Later that night, I was reminded that there is nowhere private in a hostel, including a couch in a stairwell and an ensuite shared bathroom. Whoops.
So apparently, the real reason people go to Cork is to visit the Blarney Stone. I was kind of on the fence about it – there are only so many old-ass castles you can see – but the next morning me and the American took a bus out there to see what’s up. And it was one of the most fun times I’ve had so far.
The castle is SUPER OLD and hasn’t been modernized basically at all, save for a handrail on the precarious stone steps leading up, and a rope on the ones leading down. I was surprised to find that there was no tour guide and like no staff members hanging out watching you, so you can take as much time as you want to walk through it. The castle was huge and beautiful, but the real highlight were the informational signs hanging in every room. They were the most poorly written signs I’ve ever seen at a tourist spot; they read a bad translation, and half of them made no sense at all. Naturally, we found this to be the most entertaining part of the castle, although having an old guy flip me onto my back and lower my head into a crack to kiss the stone was also pretty cool. Hopefully I didn’t catch any horrible diseases.
Our next stop was Killarney, a little city south of Cork, which we took a couple of trains to get to and arrived in the early evening. It’s SO CUTE; the only way I can think to describe it is it looks like a little Christmas village but without the snow. After checking into our hostel we walked around a bit and ended up in a pub (where else?) where we discovered some really delicious beer appropriately named “Killarney.”
The next morning, our plan was to walk around the Killarney National Park and go see a couple of castles and shit. We failed, however, to properly research how far away all this was from us and had to walk miles upon miles to reach Ross Castle and Muckross (??!!) Abbey and House. And then because Ireland, it started raining. And raining. We didn’t let this stop us, but we were pretty wet and miserable – especially because we refused to pay to go on tours of everything, so the only thing we properly saw was Abbey. It was pretty cool and super deserted.
Soaked but too cheap to pay for a “jaunting car” (took us awhile to figure out this meant horse-drawn carriage), we trudged the hour and a half back to our hostel. We walked something like 13 miles that day, 90% of it in the rain. Hot shower, pub, lots of food and beer with an Israeli girl and a German guy that were staying in my room. We had such an incredible time together – it’s crazy how fleeting friendships are when you’re traveling. You can get so close to someone and then never seen them again. At least Facebook is a thing!
The next day, we had decided that we were going to rent a car to drive around the Ring of Kerry, which is where you can see some of the most dramatic Southern Irish landscapes. Quick reminder: in Ireland they drive on the left, driver’s seat on the right. My friend (should we give him a name? Let’s give him a name. Philip. Sure.) was going to be driving because of course it’s also a stick shift and I have no idea how to use one of those. The weather was terrible again, but at least we had a car that we could blast the heat in. Even though it was rainy and windy and misty and foggy (feel free to insert more words that imply “shitty weather”), we saw hills going on for miles, crazy cliffs, and lots of sheep randomly crossing the road. What.
From there, we continued driving East to the town of Waterford. One thing they don’t tell you about Ireland: traffic circles. Everywhere. In our three hour drive, we probably went through about 40 traffic circles. I’m not exaggerating. And the signs are super confusing and you are never quite sure which exit to take. Anyway. Our hostel was kind of in the middle of nowhere, and if we hadn’t had a car I have no idea how we would have gotten there. It was a cute little place run by this old man, and the best part about it was that there were TWO TINY KITTENS and a BIG FRIENDLY (really smelly ugh) DOG!! The only people staying there besides me and Philip were five German girls who were super sweet and gave us the rest of their pizza. We learned that there was a pub 700 meters away (the old man was very specific about this), so we set out along the random country road in the middle of Ireland in search of beer. We found it and we drank it.
Which brings us to today. We drove into Waterford, which we had heard was a must-see, but was actually not that exciting to us. We walked the town in about half an hour while the weather shit on us, and then we decided to just go directly to our next stop, Kilkenny. Kilkenny is cute and has a great energy about it – I’ve heard it compared to Galway, which I haven’t been able to stop gushing about since the second I left. We grabbed some food and drinks, saw some churches, and then came back to the hostel for a bit of a rest.
We met a couple of girls in our room- one from Germany and one from Basque Country, that we are planning on meeting later for drinks. And uh, yeah. That’s about it so far. We will see what tomorrow brings!