Day 3 addendum and Day 4:

Thursday 1/6: After getting to the hostel at Galway, I met two Korean kids and we played Jenga for about an hour. After that I met Laura, Mora and Maria. Laura is a 19 year old from Melbourne, Australia that is spending 6 months traveling Europe. Mora is a 28 year old Canadian from Nova Scotia that is teaching English to 5 year old Spanish kids in Madrid. Maria works in Quebec as a French and Music teacher. We talked till the wee hours of the morning about many different topics, including the US national debt, the poor pay of teachers, the conflict of interest between insurance companies and hospitals and many other topics I can’t even think of now.

Friday 1/7: Today I did the Cliffs of Moher and Burren tour. This tour was absolutely fantastic! It started at about 10am. 2 of the girls I met last night, Laura and Mora, joined me on the tour. I met another girl on the bus, Maggie, a 25 year old also from Melbourne who also was traveling Europe for 6 months. It seems that the farther away the person comes from, the longer they stay. I plan to make my next trip longer…

We went first to a family farm in The Burren. Burren means fertile rock, and it is. The rocks are almost all limestone, but hidden in the cracks and crevices is grass for the cows the Irish raise to eat. What is so striking about The Burren is the stark separation between the fertile grass valley and the stony mountaintops. There are also many stone walls separating farms and also for different cattle. Some of the walls were built during the potato famine. The English made them work for their meals, but they did not let them improve the infrastructure of Ireland, but instead made them built stone walls over mountaintops for no good reason.

These stone walls are made of just that, stone. There is no mortar involved. The stones are stacked on end so that the weight pushes down on the adjacent stones keeping them all in place. They are impossible to move from the lower level, and even the ones laid on top are difficult to move. They are fitted together with a stone mason’s skill, though none of them have been dressed.

On the top of most of the mountains stands a stone pillar that the English erected in the early 1800’s to help with mapmaking. We all got our pictures taken there with the help of our tour guide, a local farmer named John. We then got to eat traditional apple pie, which was absolutely delicious.

Our next stop was the Cliffs of Moher. No one knows why they are called that, but the Romans called it that in one of their writings in the 3^rd century and it has been called that since. It is believed that there was once a castle atop the cliffs, but it no longer exists.

It was extremely windy and cold at the cliffs, however quite beautiful. The water turns different colors, from dark blue to aquamarine to white as it hits the side of the cliff. The cliffs themselves look black at first, but you can pick out green and gray as you look at them.

I bought Maggie a card at the gift shop because it was her birthday, and the three of us, me, Mora, and Laura, all signed it. She really enjoyed it, and we were all very happy to see her laugh. This is her first birthday away from home, and I know how she feels, being that I just went through Christmas by myself.

We then traveled the coast road back toward Galway, stopping along the way at the ocean. Even at the coast the grass pokes through the rocks as if they are striving hard against gray to live.

The ride back to Galway was filled with traditional music played by the bus driver and the ruins of abbeys, and more stone walls than even I could take a picture of. All in all a fantastic trip and I felt as if I could spend 2 months in The Burren and still not see it all.