This entry will be lacking in details, historical tidbits, and, sadly, anything remotely resembling a sense of humor. It’s currently 11:30 p.m., and I’ve just had a couple of pints. More details will be coming later. For now, just kind of… deal.

So with tears in our eyes, we left Ennis, vowing that one day we would return. And in time for a music festival which includes a good ceilidh. Or ceili. I don’t know how it’s actually spelled; I suspect that the proper spelling depends on who’s drawing up the flier.

It’s been a few days since I’ve posted, and I’m sorry about that. Things have been moving quickly; we’re drawing into the last week of our trip, which is making me pretty sad, and we’re working on catching more things.

After Ennis, we made our way to Galway, via the Cliffs of Moher (which were so shrouded in mist that we coulnd’t see anything, so I took this picture instead just to amuse you) and the Burrens (which was prefaced by Kilfenora). The Burrens was not as barren and desolate as the name would have you believe; but the landscape was made primarily of the same limestone which makes up just about the entire west coast of Ireland. The principal site of interest, I thought, was the portal stone which still stands, after thousands of years. Here ancient Irish folks would bury their dead in a pit under a tomb designed to look like a doorway, facing east. Imagine the sheer force of will involved in lifting and moving that capstone. It’s unfathomable.

Galway, I’ve decided, is probably my favorite city in Ireland, if not the world; it’s a university town, for one thing, which is always a plus in my book. There’s an energy and dynamism in university towns that is lacking in other places. Street performers litter the town. One fellow we encountered had dressed himself up entirely in silver, in an outfit which I think was meant to look like a statue of Oscar Wilde (or maybe not; you decide, as his picture is here). We also came across a pair of girls singing along with what I presume was their younger brother. Included in their repetoire was the ubiquitous “Fields of Athenry“.

We spent Saturday just kind of bumming around town, exploring the city and seeing what it has to offer. This is my favorite part of traveling in a strange place; getting lost in town and seeing what’s there. Galway is as ancient as any other town in Ireland, and, as in every other place in Ireland, the ancient mixes with the modern. Part of the original city wall still stands, for example, and now serves as part of the infrastructure for Eyre Square, a large shopping mall. Saturday night I wandered through the city, watching people and looking for music, but finding none (except for three forlorn musicians in the back of a tiny pub whose name I couldn’t begin to pronounce; the crowd was so noisy, though, that the musicians could barely be heard).

Some (but not all) of our pictures from Galway are here.

On Sunday, we took a ferry out to the Aran Islands. We took a tour of Inis Mor on a horse-drawn buggy (because nothing screams “TOURIST!” like a horse-drawn buggy), but after that was done there wasn’t much else to do. We did explore Dun Aonghasa (pronounced, in the bizarre logic of written Irish which insists that “Siobhan” is pronounced “Shivon”, as “Dun Angus”). The cynical part of me says, “Yawn, another 3,000 stone fort built by some ancient Celts”, but the truth is that I’m still awed by the engineering marvels that these structures are. The fort is solid, well built, and includes not an ounce of mortar. Inis Mor, like every place else in western Ireland, is made of limestone, so there is certainly no lack of building materials (what do you do when your field is full of rocks? Make a house out of them! Duh!), but finding the right rocks and piling them up into a wall which will protect you and yours from attack for millennia is a feat that we just can’t seem to replicate these days. We sat at the harbor and waited for the ferry to take us back to the mainland, because most of what’s worth seeing on the island was too far away for us to make it on foot.

Some of our pictures from Inis Mor are here.

We returned to Galway, and spent a pleasant evening in our B&B, relaxing and watching Irish television. Which was mostly just imported American television. Go figure.

Today we drove around Connemara, enjoying more of the limestone scenery, and having a good time. More details and pics to come.

And after we made it back to our B&B, I decided to go back into Galway to look for more music. I found it in the same pub I went to on Saturday, but this time the musicians were in the front of the pub instead of relegated to the rear, and I could actually hear the music playing. One guy stood in the doorway and danced to the music, lifting his beer in salute to anyone who glanced at him. Me, I sat at the bar with my pints of Guinness and got into a word game with some of the locals (and a young dark-haired woman from London who kept asking me if I was married, and who couldn’t quite grasp that my marital status simply did not change from moment to moment). I’m not positive what the point of the game was, but it had something to do with euphemisms, and finding the most bizarre general use euphemism. I think we agreed that I won with “Braiding the monkey“, when I explained how the term had come about and what it meant (which is, basically, whatever you want it to mean when you use it). Who knows? Perhaps it will become part of the Irish vernacular now. But somehow, I doubt it.

At any rate, it’s shortly after midnight now, and the two pints of Guinness that I had this evening have apparently impacted me far more than I thought they would. So I’ll leave you with this final bit of wisdom: Braid your own monkey, because in this wacky world of ours, no one else is going to braid it for you. That, and you can never have too much Guinness.