Cliffs with the Consumption Ward

Thursday we took a tour to the Cliff of Moher and the Burren area, despite all my visitors' terrible coughs which sounded like the consumption-ward-choir. We took the same company: Lally Tour (and still got the same driver Martin that we've now had five times on tours of two different regions-- I'm beginning to think their guides are an army of clones) Instead of stopping at the Allwee Caves first like we did when I went with Emily and Katie last month, we stopped at a farm; I think because we had a group on the tour from Dublin for a day-trip to the west coast of Ireland, it was pretty exciting. At the family-farm-turned-family-farm-with-tours-and-fresh-pie-to-boot.  We got a nice little tour of the farm, and a fun walk up the hill behind the farm-house so we could see more of the burren landscape. Burren comes from the Irish for "rocky-place" which is a ten-points-for-captain-obvious sort of name. Yet, despite how rocky it is the limestone covering the area holds in heat and water allowing a huge range of plants to thrive. Everything from Alpine-wild-flowers-like-blue-genetry to palm-trees can grow in the Burren since it nearly never frosts. Our guide explained the fairy-tree where you tie something to a branch and leave your problem behind, and ruins of seven churches and the famine walls-- stone walls you can see crossing over all the mountains dividing nothing from nothing and keeping nothing out of anything, they were built for woolly-brained-land-lords in exchange for soup during the Great Famine.

Lovely day for a Guinness

Carthage College Choir and George's Mom

     Last night Star, and her roommates and I went to hear choral music at St Nicolas (the really old Anglican/ Church of Ireland church, really old= hundreds and hundreds of years).  The singing was wonderful and the old stone church was built with amazing acoustics.  First a choir from Carthage College in Wisconsin performed and then the local choir from Galway sang as well. The spirituals were the highlight, although Star and I were ridiculously excited when

George's monument 

the American choir sang Oh Shenandoah as their final song. (It was our theme song at camp in 2006 and so we got really excited when we saw it in the program, like excited-to-the-point-we-kinda-scared-star’s-poor-roommate-excited.)

St Nicolas’s is full of incredibly old tombs along the walls (and in the floors as well, which makes me feel slightly odd to walk across them). My favorite of the tombs is this one on the wall memorializing young George Fredrick De Carteret who was my age, 22, when he died in 1843.

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It's still a little hard to read, but this is the close up of what it says

I’m a history and literature major because I love stories. A lot. (I love people, they’ve all got stories!) The plaque has so many stories packed onto one carved stone scroll. His mother seems like the type that would be organizing MADD if she lived a century and a half later. And the verse she chose is not one of hope, or comfort, it’s just descriptive because it relates to young George’s mother as well. It also captures such a particular moment in the childless mother’s grief when the loss is overwhelming and “irreperarable”. Plus how many sentences warrant the use of a word as awesome as tempestuous?

Today I went to a coffee shop and enjoyed some tea, a chocolate muffin, and their free wifi. As well as worked on the job seeking and all. Shop street was fun since it was bustling with people and street musicians (who have an impressive balance, I’ll get a picture next time I pass them, really I will).