What a relief! Exams are done and I can stop studying!

Exams in Ireland

Exams in Ireland, and I think in most European institutions for that matter, constitute the bulk of your grade for a course. In most cases, the 2 or 3 hour exam accounts for 100% of your marks! Talk about pressure… I had four exams in the past week, two of them counted for 100%, one was for 70% and the other for 60% of my course grades. Needless to say, I think I got a few more gray hairs and a few more wrinkles around my eyes from studying, on top of my research.

It’s been a huge challenge for us this year: moving the entire family to a foreign country, selling our home in St. Louis, taking out student loans to pay for 100% of our expenses, moving to a new apartment after the first 3 months of living in overpriced hell (make sure you do not agree to lease a place without physically examining it first like we did!), managing a three year old that gets sick all the time because of the Galway water problem that was only announced about 1 month ago but was apparently kept secret for most of the time we’ve lived here. This certainly has make it difficult for me to boycott bottled water lately…

Great Craic

Sorry for the rant, but not all was bad about our first several months here. We’ve had some great craic in the Galway pubs. And, we’ve met some fabulous people from all over the world right here in little old Galway City. I had to say goodbye today to a German girl that shared the same passion, perhaps even more so, for economics as me. Best of luck Fran! I’m also going to have many more goodbyes in the coming days as many of us will part ways. So tonight, I will celebrate with some great craic, pints, and a football match at The King’s Head tonight.

Thanks for your patience during my blackout on this blog for the past several days.

Slainte!

In case you don’t know…that means I’m freakin’ busy.

I am coming down to the last few days of my gasoline tax research paper, which is due this Friday afternoon. I apologize to my regular readers for the decrease in posts lately but I hope you will understand. At least twitter has helped me stay in touch with the Twitter Tools plugin.

With all this writing lately, I think I need a study break tonight and someone has come to the rescue. Jimmy CraicHead, aka John Coffey, recently commented on a few of my posts including this one about craic. He was Googling around and found my blog when planning for his trip to Ireland this week. Jimmy contacted me when he arrived here and now we’re going for a pint tonight at The King’s Head!

I can’t say that I’ve ever met anybody online before but thanks to my blog and twitter, I will be meeting a popular video blogger from Philadelphia. He just rang me and we are grabbing a pint at the King’s Head at 6 pm tonight if anyone wants to enjoy some craic. Jimmy will be interviewing me for his next installment.

What a strange, exciting and connected world we live in these days!

Today is Good Friday and everything is closed! It’s weird to see pubs in Ireland closed on a Friday afternoon. I passed my favorite spot, The King’s Head, to find it’s doors shuttered. Further down at the end of Quay Street where a grassy area meets the Spanish Arch (see header image) loads of picnickers lined the River Corrib. I figured they were just out basking in the beautiful Irish Spring day. However, upon further inspection, they were all seeking refuge from the lock-out and enjoying some Good Friday cheer. McDonagh’s, the famous fish and chips spot, had a queue out the door and most places that were not public houses were packed as well. I guess Good Friday is bad for business. The strange thing about all this is that Monday is the actual national holiday. I respect that there is a holiday on Easter Monday, but why should pubs be closed on Friday as well? You can’t even go to the Off Licence to grab a few brews to enjoy at home. What else am I going to drink during the water boil alert in Galway? Oh well…

I have loads of catching up to do with comment replies and postings about my travels this past week, so stay tuned!

It is absolutely gorgeous in Galway today. It seems we have managed to leave Winter behind and charge ahead with Spring. The trees are blooming, the sun is warm on the back and face, there’s a light breeze and the air is Irish Spring fresh. I think today is the kind of day Colgate-Palmolive had in mind when coming up with a clever marketing name. I’m feeling nostalgic lately. I had a strawberry for the first time in a long while. It reminded me of picking them fresh with my grandma back in Indiana. I think Spring is one of the best seasons since it is a time to start fresh. The semester is coming to a close and project deadlines are looming, but we can all take a step forward and start something new.

I’m off for a marathon training run to blow off some stress and take advantage of this amazing day. Tomorrow, Erin’s parents arrive in Shannon and we’ll head off for a long weekend tour of the West of Ireland. Great places to see, memories to be made, and pictures to keep. I’ll take along my journal and keep you posted on my Irish travels.

UPDATE: I just found this article about Irish Spring in The Onion. Brilliant!

We had a great three-day weekend and it was much more laid back than I had planned, which was kinda nice. On Saturday, I went to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Galway with Erin and Aidan. It rained the entire day. Actually it rained the entire weekend, but that wasn’t enough to dampen our spirits.

Though rainy, the parade was about the best I’d ever been to, period. There were school marching bands, traditional dancers, fun-costumed dancers, Gaelic football clubs, hurling clubs, pipers, ethnic groups of Galway and of course St. Patrick himself and a few fun variations as well. There were only a handful of corporate sponsored floats which is how it should be. The only other St. Patrick’s Day Parade I have attended was in St. Louis and although it was large, it was mostly company sponsored groups dressed up in kitschy garb. I could definitely spot the American tourists a mile away since they were the only ones dressed in green leprechaun hats wearing t-shirts emblazoned with Kiss me, I’m Irish and shamrocks.

The crowd was quite large and estimated to be about 50,000, although it didn’t seem like that many. Maybe the rain forced all but the hard-core parade goers to the pubs to watch Ireland give Italy a pounding in rugby, only to see their hopes of winning the 6 Nations Rugby title dashed after Scotland allowed France to score at the end of the following game. I digress… It was a great parade and I highly recommend attending it next year if you can.

Since it rained all weekend, we were forced inside for most of it. We cooked great meals, drank plenty of Guinness and watched loads of movies. It was a great break before the last two weeks of classes. Off to finish my paper…

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I walked outside this morning and was inspired by the crisp and cloudy Spring St. Paddy’s Day eve (click on the photo to open the photoset in a new window). I decided that I was going to take some photos of the things that I walk by and take for granted. Galway is truly a beautiful city with so much to offer. I felt like a tourist in my own town (it’s still a little weird to think that I live here) and there are certainly plenty of tourists around this weekend. Erin’s parents are coming in a few weeks so I decided to brush up on some scenes of Galway. This post is dedicated to those who have visited us, those who plan to visit us, and those who won’t be able to visit.

I started off by taking a few shots of our flower boxes and pots. We also have a patio garden but not much is happening there right now, though I did plant some wildflower seeds last weekend so my son and I are keeping an eye out for little sprouts. Meanwhile back in the Midwestern US where we’re from, they are still recovering from a boatload of snow. Sorry guys!

I grabbed my bike and headed for Eyre Square, originally a jousting area outside the city walls of Medieval Galway, now the center of town with Kennedy Park in the center, named for JFK’s visit to Galway in 1963, flags of the crests of the original Galway tribes, and a cool metal sculpture representing the famous Galway Hooker fishing boat. I also grabbed a shot of the Skeffington Arms Hotel and Pub because the two flags of Ireland surrounding the flag of Galway were begging to be photographed as they flapped in the breeze on this Paddy’s Day eve. I hopped back on my bike and flew through the narrow streets passing the congestion with ease, thankful that I wasn’t bogged down by an internal combustion engine.

I made it to NUI Galway campus and had never noticed the color scheme of the flowers at the main entrance. Had these always been white and maroon, the school colors? As I said, it’s easy to take everyday things for granted. I some nice shots of the long row of daffodils with the Quad in the background before heading over there to get some artistic shots of the inside of the Quad as viewed from one of the sets of arches. Next, I headed to the other side of campus and rode along a path the follows the River Corrib upstream, past some castle ruins and then to the pitches where some footballers were practicing. I turned around since it was almost time for class and got some great shots of a massive field of daffodils on the back side of the Cairnes Graduate School of Business.

After class, I headed back into town to find the streets buzzing with tourists. I decided to take a few snaps of St. Nicolas Collegiate Church, supposedly the oldest building still in use in Galway dating from the 14th century. I also took a few shots of the street where the weekly farmers’ market is held next to the famous Sheridan’s Cheesemongers. One of the the best scenes I captured today was at The King’s Head pub, one of the oldest in Galway and my favorite place to grab a pint and catch some music. The back of the King’s Head is also about 50 metres from my apartment, nice eh? They were so stocked full of beer kegs for the big day tomorrow that they had no room to store them so the kegs were strewn about outside the front and the back of the pub. It was brilliant!

I proceeded down Buttermilk Lane and caught a few shots of An Taibhdearc, the national Gaelic theatre of Ireland. It’s just behind The King’s Head Pub and shows plays, musicals, and each fall, Music at the Crossroads, a fusion of modern and traditional Irish music. We saw this last September and it was amazing. Read more about An Taibhdearc on Wikipedia. Finally, I just had to get a shot of the Galway Head Store before heading home, just around the corner.

I plan to continue this series of taking snaps of scenes from Galway. So stay tuned!

I saw this great leprechaun on a poster on NUIG campus today that caught my attention. So, I thought I would give you a taste of St. Paddy’s Day events coming up in and around Galway with some fun facts about the holiday in general.

The leprechaun was advertising the Voluntary Services Abroad Céilí which takes place tomorrow at Cuba on Eyre Square. What’s a céilí, you ask? Well, it’s a Gaelic social dance that is popular especially around St. Paddy’s Day. The céilí is usually accompanied by a fiddle, flute, tin whistle, accordion, and bodhrán. The VSA céilí is on at Cuba Thursday, 15 March in Cuba at 8 pm for €5 with free admission to the nightclub after. Proceeds to benefit VSA in their mission of medical students that bring supplies to developing countries around the world. I plan to go because it supports a wonderful cause and sounds like great craic!

St. Paddy’s Day is celebrated all over the the world with parades, céilís, festivals, and drink. Here’s a sampling of what’s going on this week. Dublin will host over 200,000 people for it’s parade on Saturday but that’s only the icing on the cake. The official St. Patrick’s Day Festival in Dublin actually starts Thursday and will continue until the bank holiday on Monday the 19th. So much for St. Paddy’s Day, now it’s basically a week! Meanwhile, New York City lays claim to the largest St. Paddy’s Day parade in the world, which boasts 2 million spectators. To put that into perspective, that’s about twice the population of Dublin! I guess it makes sense considering so many Irish emigrated to NYC in the 19th and 20th centuries.

As for St. Patrick’s Day in Galway, there’s plenty in store. Some of my German friends are planning a pre-drinking brunch Saturday morning that “should soak up some of the booze 2 come” as one of them said in a text to me earlier today. Then, we’ll head into town for the parade which starts on the west side of the River Corrib and makes its way up Dominic St to Bridge St, up Mainguard then Shop St before finishing around Eyre Square. This parade is pretty impressive for a small city such as Galway, as it will attract over 50,000 spectators. That’s about 3/4 of the population of the city. The route will pass within one block of my apartment so I won’t need to go very far to be part of the action. Finally, the Town Hall Theatre Galway Céilí is on at 9 pm which will feature Breton and Irish Dancing.

So while you other Americans are pretending to claim Irish heritage on Saturday and think celebrating St. Paddy’s means turning Budweiser piss water green, I’ll be having a proper pint (pints) of Guinness and listening to some authentic Irish tunes.

I was out enjoying the beautiful spring weather we’ve been having here in Galway and took a few snapshots of the River Corrib and the Spanish Arch. I decided that my blog needed a more appropriate header image so here it is. I hope you enjoy it!

This photo was taken a few hours ago and what you see from left to right is the Spanish Arch, Nimmo’s Restaurant, and the pastel-colored row homes facing the River Corrib (bottom) which empties out into Galway Bay (far right). I see this image in person nearly every single day and decided it was time to capture it digitally. This is only about 3 minute’s walk from my apartment which is behind the image. Isn’t it amazing what we take for granted? I challenge all of you to enjoy your neighborhood or city and look at it in a different light, maybe take a few photos. Spring is already here in Galway, and I’m sure it is right around the corner for many others as well. Hope you like the new header image and happy spring to you all.

Let me know what you think in the comments below…

I am surprising my wife with a gourmet dinner this evening

• Syrah for starters
• Fresh Irish Goat Cheese and Kalamata Olives from Sheridan’s Cheesemongers
• Fresh Baguette from Griffin’s Bakery
• Tomato, Basil, Fresh Buffalo Mozarella Salad
• Scallops from Galway Bay Seafood @ the docks in Irish Butter and Garlic Sauce served with Pasta
• Fancy Chocolate Cake with Glazed Strawberries, Kiwi and Lemon Slice served with Riesling from The Gourmet Tart Co. on Lower Abbeygate Street, Galway

The display was too good to pass up…Happy Valentine’s Day and sleep tight tonight!

Today my family and I are headed to Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands. We will take a bus to the ferry which leaves from Ros a’ Mhíl (Rossaveal) in County Galway. The Aran Islands are a Gaeltacht, or Gaelic-speaking region situated at the mouth of Galway Bay in the West of Ireland. We are staying at Ard Einne guesthouse in Kilronan and plan to tour Dún Aengus, an Iron Age fort, and cycle and/or hike around the island. I’ll post a few pictures on Sunday when we return, just in time for Ireland v. France in the 6 Nations Rugby tournament. Erin Go Bragh!

Photo: A Galway Bay Hooker, originally uploaded by NoirinP.

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Something I’ve been meaning to post for quite some time is a list of beers readily available here in Galway, Ireland. There is certainly no shortage of public houses (pubs) off licences (liquor stores) in Ireland, and Galway is no exception.

One of my favorite pubs is The King’s Head, est. 1649. The atmosphere is great in this restored medieval home with a coal and peat burning fireplace downstairs inscribed with the date, 1612 as well as exposed stone walls and medieval artifacts which lend to this pub’s distinct feel. The live music is always a treat and is on almost every night when there is not a football or Gaelic games match on. Of course the Guinness is always grand (great, for you Americans) and the Heineken draft makes one wonder why they even call it Heineken in the States. It is smooth and creamy, not ’skunky’ like many of my friends would say. Other options are Budweiser, Coors and Miller Genuine Draft, the latter being the only one I can tolerate. Finally, The King’s Head offers Murphy’s Irish Stout (second class citizen to Guinness), Carlsberg (Danish lager, a nice break from the famous stout), and Smithwick’s (pronounced without the ‘w’) which is loads better than that copycat Killian’s Irish Red, once described to me as Coors with food coloring.

It has been my experience that these options are pretty standard fare in most Irish pubs. One may expect to find the occasional bottle of Corona (new to Ireland in the past few years as I understand, woo hoo!) or trendy drinks such as WKD or Smirnoff Ice (nasty). The King’s Head is highly recommended by this author, though there are many other pubs in Galway well worth asking for “pionta Guinness led thoil” (a pint ‘a Guinness, please) such as Tigh Neachtain (pr. tee knockton’s, Naughton’s Pub) or Tigh Coili. I would be amiss if I failed to mention, Roisin Dubh, Galway’s, and perhaps Ireland’s, top venue for live music. Check out their site for some of the acts coming up.

This brings us to the off licence. I have to admit, I occasionally miss American microbrews such as Red Hook and anything from New Belgium Brewery but never fear, the local off licence usually offers a wide selection of world beers. My favorite off licence is Harvest, with several locations in Galway. They offer the standard Irish brews that you would expect, along with a few surprises. The first time I visited Harvest, I was aghast to see Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. They also have on offer a few from Samuel Adams and Goose Island Honker’s Ale. As we turn our focus to the old world, you’ll find Chimay, Newcastle, Tenents, Tuborg and a number of smaller English and Belgian ales too numerous to list.

I trust some will find this post useful upon venturing to Galway. Just keep a few things in mind when going for a pint: Remove your hat when you enter the pub, always say ‘please’ when ordering and ‘cheers’ when you receive it, be patient for the Guinness, “it takes 119.5 seconds to pour the perfect pint,” and above all, enjoy the craic. Slainte!