Pic Update
I think that I forgot to mention the thing that shocked me the most about Clonmacnoise, and that is the fact that the name is prounounced pretty much just the way it is spelled. I was going to guess “Clomanock” or “Lomanock” or perhaps “Raymond Luxury Yacht”, but I was wrong on all three counts. It’s actually pronounced “Clonmacnoise”. See, just when you think you’ve got Irish Gaelic beat, it throws a curve ball at you. “An Meath” is pronounced “Ahn Wah”. Yet the “Meath” in Meath County is pronounced “Meeth”. Those ancient Celts had it in for us, I’m sure of it. I can just imagine them, sitting around, coming up with ways to pronounce things. “Hey, Bob, why don’t we pronounce that word it a sound that’s kind of a cross between a W, an F, and a Q. That’ll screw with them Romans.” And then, when someone was first transcribing the Irish language, they decided to confuse the matters even more. “Hm, that sounds kind of like a W, kind of like an F, and kind of like a Q. I’d better transcribe it with a capital B after a lowercase M. Just because I can.”
I’m right, you know. I’m sure of it.
Anyway, we finished posting the pictures from Clonmacnoise and Connemara. There are more from the strangely pronounced Clonmacnoise than I had originally thought, mainly because we took many pictures of grave slabs. And my camera decided to behave enough to take at least one good picture of the Nuns’ Church.
There’s only one picture from Corlea, primarily because there’s only one thing worth taking a picture of. We thought of taking pictures of the interesting plants and insects that make their homes in the bog, but we figured our readers would look at them and say, “Meh. More mud.”
We’re in Dublin now. We passed through Newgrange and Knowth on the way, and stopped by the Hill of Tara, where the ancient kings of Ireland ruled and where St. Patrick used a shamrock to convert Ireland to Christianity. I was more impressed by that than Jennifer was, I think. The King of Tara Hill was once considered to be the King of Ireland, and when you’re standing on top of the Hill, you can see why; the tour guide estimated that from that vantage point you can see approximately 20% of the entire country.
More on all that later. For now, I’d better log off before our money runs out in this Internet Cafe.