Galway

This weekend we had a fabulous trip to Galway and the Aran Islands! We left Friday morning to go to the bus station to catch the bus to Galway. Our bus was about 30 minutes late, but the ride was probably one of the most strange/weird/awful/hilarious rides ever imaginable. The bus was packed to the max, so Josh and I head to the back row. Little did we know that that was the worst decision of our lives. I sat next to a nicely dressed, nice looking man; Josh sat next to a larger man who took up about a seat and a half. What's so bad about that you ask? Well first off, nice guy gets up and walks off the bus and asks us to watch his bag while he goes to get his umbrella. I was thinking, "Yeah, right...it's a bomb. We're going down." Luckily, he came back. It was actually a computer. But then... big starts to sneeze. Not just what i would like to call a "dry sneeze" but nasty, gross "wet sneezes." We were about to die. Josh, nice guy and I burst into laughter. It was absolutely the nastiest noise EVER, and this continued for 2 & 1/2 hours to Galway. I thought the guy was going to die. And no, he did not have a handkerchief. Yeah. Gross.

But once we got there we had only one more problem...where was our hotel? Well, it was a 20 minute walk away from the city center...boo. So we finally decided to go back to town and stay in the hostel. Good decision.

The rest of the day we shopped and walked around town. That night we met up with Josh's friend Aioh (pronounced E) for dinner. He showed us around town and showed up the club that he worked in. We went to eat at a restaurant called Fat Freddy's which was delicious. I had an amazing sweet chili and chicken pizza. After that we went to the club E works at. Bazaar is Morrocan themed and I felt like I was living in Aladdin. We had a great time and went back EARLY by Irish times...midnight.

We got up the next morning at 8 to get tickets for the Aran Island ferries. Shannan and I rented bikes to ride around the island. That's right 8 miles round trip... my booty is definitely sore! This is an island where the people still speak Gaelic and have an old, old, old fashioned lifestyle. We got to see everything first hand and feel the wind (very STRONG wind at that) in our hair. We went to the beach and to the cliffs and fort. Also to the 7 churches ruins. We had a great time. Some of those hills were rough though. We ran into some more American students studying in Dublin from Boston College. The cliffs were huge and we could go right up to the edge and lie down and hang our heads over the edge and look down! It was great. The hike was interesting with my current foot pain, but everyone was great the whole weekend about not walking too fast. The ferry rides were absolutely sea-sickening and the stuffy bus rides were car sickening, but the Aran Islands were great!


We finally got home Saturday night, and got to come take showers (my first in 3 days, by the way). Yesterday, I got to sleep in and go to my friend Johnny's house to wash clothes. It is brillant because I had no clean jeans left... and clean is a relative term these days for sure.