Flour Power

It's now more than a month late, but I need to get this one out of the way: on the 15th of January, my Guinness counter hit number 500. It has come a long way since number one, when I first arrived to Ireland.

And since this was more than just another pint, I made sure I drank it in the same pub I had the first one in. And more: I was sitting at the same table. And this took place exactly (give or take a couple of hours) one year after Guinness Pint Number One. Historic, eh?!

"And now what?", you might ask. Well, now I stop counting. It was fun as a topic of conversation, but the fun was gone when people insisted on telling me how much money I had spent on Guinness.

Now that I'm done with the counting, I also got rid of the counter in the sidebar. I just felt the need to point this out, otherwise people might think I stopped drinking Guinness altogether, which is not the case at all. Rest assured, Guinness people, I'll keep sending money your way...

This Halloween, Galway's streets will be taken over by fancy dress parties, traditional games, Trick or Treating, and a re-enactment of Michael Jackson’s Thriller dance routine.

On Friday 30, the streets and pubs of the Latin Quarter will be the venue for a massive fancy dress party. And for those who like to compete, there are rumours that a €5000 prize will be awarded to the best costume will be prizes to the best costumes: 1st place €1000, 2nd place €500 and 3rd place €250.

Saturday 31 will have quite a few "Halloweeny" activities. In the afternoon: a kid's fancy dress party where the costumes have to be environment friendly, and Trick or Treating and traditional games along the Latin Quarter streets. At 4pm comes the big event of the weekend - a re-enactment of Michael Jackson’s Thriller dance routine and video in The Fishmarket at the Spanish Arch. The Galway Abooo Festival reaches its finale with the Saturday Night ‘Spooktacular Street Show’ - street performances will take place across the streets of the Latin Quarter from 8pm, leading to a display at 8.40pm at St. Nicholas’ Church.

To help bring as many people as possible to Galway, Irish Rail is providing a few "Ghost Trains" from Dublin at a special rate of €10.

More info can be found at the festival's official page.

This all looks promising indeed.

2 months, 18 days, 5 hours and some minutes after I arrived in Galway, I drank my one hundreth pint of Guinness!

What? Don't give me that look! It's not like I was binge drinking a lot to get to that number. It's just that Guinness goes down so easily that most of the nights out I get to number 4 without even noticing it. For me, it's much easier to drink than the lager I always had before coming here, which is much more common in Portugal.

And the big One Oh Oh was drank on the 2nd of April, which is also my birthday. Makes it a historic pint, doesn't it? Well, maybe not, but whatever. Here's the (very artistic) photo of Pint Number 100:

I only regret not being able to keep Glass Number 100 (it was gone from the poor hiding place by the time I was on the way back home). It would go right next to Glass Number 50 and Glass Number 69 (yeah, I know... typical... but I had to keep it...).

Next milestone will happen in roughly 30 pints, but I'll have to do some math to get the exact number

I “promised” a detailed report of the small trip I did to Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day, right? So I invoke the “a picture is worth a thousand words” rule, and here are roughly 17 thousand words about my trip. Is that detailed enough?

The 16th of March, having dinner and then going out:

On St. Patrick’s Day morning afternoon, a taste of the parade and all the festive mood around the city:

And also a few shots of buildings and suchlike:

And for the more distracted, in the last few days I have been posting a few funny pictures shot during Paddy’s Day.

This past weekend I had the first of what I hope to be many visitors while I’m in this rainy land full of beer and short skirts. Said visitor was my neighbor and childhood friend, Ricardo, who can actually confirm the existence of lots of beer and short skirts. He can’t testify about the rainy part though, as he was lucky enough to find a fairly mild weather (although if you ask him he’ll say it was really cold and quite unpleasant…).

As the visit was quite short (just the weekend, plus Monday), the initial plan was staying in Galway and doing a couple of those tourist trips to the main attractions this side of Ireland has to offer, namely the Cliffs of Moher, the Aran Islands and Connemara. And the nights would be spent in the numerous pubs and nightclubs around here. Sounds like a good plan, right?

I now realize that the plan had a flaw: not a lot of time to sleep was scheduled… Add that to the fact that the trips start at 10am, and what you get is 2 missed trips, Saturday and Sunday.

Friday night we started with The King’s Head (for some live music) and then headed to Halo (which is supposed to be the fancier nightclub around here) and that made it impossible to wake up early.

Saturday was then spent basically by sleeping in the morning, then going for a stroll around town for an hour or two (enough to see most of it), and heading for the pub at 5pm to watch Ireland’s match for the 6 Nations tournament, which ended with an historic win for Ireland. Dinner at home and then another nightclub, CP.

Sunday: waking up late. Again! Crap! Just had time to wander around the house like a zombie for some time and then starting to prepare the Portuguese dinner. For dinner the other Portuguese people I know in Galway were invited and we enjoyed a few delicacies brought by Ricardo from Portugal. After dinner? Pubs, of course. This time we decided to do a bit of a pub-crawling: The Quays, Busker Brownes, Front Door and Róisín Dubh. No more, because Monday was the last chance to go for a trip, and we really didn’t want to miss it.

The chosen trip was the one to the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren. A 10am-to-5pm tour that took us through a few nice places, and also managed to irreversibly damage our backs, due to all the bumping around the crappy countryside roads. But more details and pictures will come in another post. At night, and despite Ricardo’s complaints that he was very tired, I insisted we visited some more pubs. So we went to Taaffe’s for some live Irish music and the night ended at The King’s Head, where we listened to the same guys I saw there some time ago.

That was about it. A quite intense weekend, that was balanced by the fact that there’s not a lot to see in Galway city and so we could just stay at home and sleep on those days that we missed the tours.

I’m now waiting for the next visitors.

After going to The King's Head two days in a row, yesterday I decided to go somewhere else for a change. After all, the idea is getting to know as many pubs as possible, and not going to the same ones every time.

The destination of choice was Coyotes, a place I had been curious about since I passed in front of it a few weeks ago and liked what I saw at the door. And Wednesday the drinks are cheaper - only €3.5! A bargain, I say!

Upon arrival we (two of my housemates decided to come with) were greeted with a queue - they were asking for everyone's ID. This didn't sound very good, because it probably meant that the crowd inside would be very young... so young that they really needed to check everyone trying to enter, to make sure no under-18s would be able to slip inside unnoticed. And my suspicions were right. We were probably the oldest people there (apart from the staff), and I felt like I was someone's older brother, there to keep an eye on my sibling. And to make matters even worse, the music was terrible! So after one Guinness (in a plastic cup!!), we headed off to the next stop - The Living Room.

The Living Room is a pub with a small dance floor, that becomes somewhat nightclub-ish later at night. It's a good alternative to the "pure" nightclubs, and the crowd is usually on my age range. The problem yesterday was that, apparently, it isn't very nightclub-ish on Wednesdays, and since the gals insisted on getting some dancing done, we immediately left to our final, and longest, stop of the evening.

Which was Róisin Dubh. I had already been there a few times, and knew that at around 11pm (after the live performance of the day), a DJ goes on stage and the concert area turns into a dance floor. Yesterday was no exception, and after some time I was jumping around like crazy. The music there is not the mainstream stuff you find in nightclubs. It's more of a rock genre, and yesterday's playlist included Pixies, Franz Ferdinand, Beirut, Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, Gomez, Nirvana and Blur. Great stuff! When I got home at 3am (yes, I had to get up at 7am to go to work...) my ears were still buzzing...

This episode helps proving that here in Galway there's no such thing as only going out on the weekend. There's plenty of animation every single day of the week (I didn't even mention the queues to the nightclubs, but maybe that was Rag Week's fault). The only problem is that I have to sleep every once in a while, and having to wake up every morning to go to work doesn't help...

On my attempt to really get to know Galway's nightlife, I took upon myself the task of not staying at home a single night during this this week. Only two days have passed and the tiredness is already building up, but so far it has been worth it.

On Monday the destination was The King's Head. It's one of Galway's oldest pubs, and well known for it's nightly live music gigs. I have to say that there is a good reason for it to be known for the live music gigs. A two-man band was playing a nice selection of covers, including some Jack Johnson, The Beatles and Counting Crows. The crowd (mostly foreigners, a lot of them Americans) was always very involved, especially in everyone's favorite Galway Girl (with a few improvised, and much more interesting, verses).

I was too lazy to record any videos, but I did take a couple of pictures:

On Tuesday the idea was going to some other pub, but after checking out a few of them, all of which were either too crowded or too empty and with no music, I ended up at The King's Head again. And I was again greeted with a two-man band (a different one), playing great covers. A special reference to the awesomely performed Hotel California and, of course, Galway Girl. And this time not only did I take pictures but I also recorded a couple of songs. The problem is, they turned out pretty dark, but at least the sound is decent. So, here's Galway Girl (a few seconds missing at the beginning, but the more interesting verses are still there):

Update: Did some editing on the video to try and make it less dark. The result is embedded above.

Last Saturday Paulo (a portuguese lad), Pat (his housemate) and I went to the other side of the river, to Salthill, a suburb of Galway city. The destination? O'Connor's Famous Pub, a typical Irish pub which bills itself as the first singing pub in Ireland. The decoration is exquisite, to say the least, and includes old gaslights, farm implements, crockery, photos, weighing scales and a near life size statue of John Wayne. There was live music (as is customary there) and even a singalong comprising most of the pub took place. One thing I've noticed was the wide amplitude of ages inside the pub: there were people from my age (24) up until people in their 60s. That was kind of cool, seeing the oldsters downing pints, but I would have prefered more young people.

Lots of lamps and all possible kinds of crap hanging from the ceiling and walls.

Curious tidbit: the bar is cleaned only once or twice per year, and it takes a couple of days to clean it all (source: Pat).

After O'Connor's we headed to The Warwick Nightclub, just a few meters down the road, despite signs of disapproval from Paulo. We went anyway both because it was nearby and also because Pat's friends who were at O'Connor's (including the band members) would go there as well.

Anyway, the nightclub is not bad per se. Quite the opposite, actually. The space is very pleasant, with a big dance floor, and an area with tables that manages to be both big and cozy, due to the fireplace. The real problem is that it was, to put it simply, almost empty. For a nightclub that size, there had to be at least 10 times more people there to be any fun. Oh well, the not-so-bad thing is that the drinks were not more expensive than in the pub (which seems to be standard here in Galway), so we just hanged around the fireplace drinking Guinness.

There was a funny episode though, just after we arrived. Apparently there was a hen party going on and we were invited to bite some sweets from a girl's belly. Even though the girl was a bit huge, we didn't want to be rude and did it anyway.

Yesterday was the end of my first week here in Galway, and I think a brief summary is in order. I'll jump to the fun part in a moment because I don't want to bore you with the work details. I just want to mention that I've been very well received by my boss and all the co-workers, and that the work is running smoothly.

Now for the fun part, some numbers:

• 10+ street musicians, including: a saxophone player, a guy playing acoustic guitar under a shop's door frame, a guy playing Green Day's "Basket Case" on an electric guitar (with some kind of portable amplifier), and some blokes with a drumset!
• 6 pints of Guinness (I plan on keeping a counter on these);
• 6 pubs visited;
• 0 zebra crossings spoted;
• 100+ girls with short skirts spoted, even though it's always about 5ºC and raining most of the time;
• 5 minutes of sun exposure;
• (X - 5) * 0,9 minutes of rain exposure (approximately), where X is the total number of minutes I spent on the street;
• 0 square centimeters of dry asphalt seen;
• 6 Portuguese people met;
• 6 trips to the supermarket (that's what happens when you don't have a car to carry everything in one go).

And since I like statistics, I started using Buxfer to register all the money I spend and get reports that will help me understand where all the money is going, because otherwise I may go bankrupt from all the money spent on vegetables and fruit... I'll post some results of this experiment when I have some more data.

I'm also promising to share some of the hundreds of short skirts with you all, as a special "gift" to those living in countries much warmer than Ireland and still the girls have more clothes on than an Eskimo (yes, Portugal is in that group).

Over and out!

After 2h30m in an airplane to cross more than 1600Km and another 3h40m to cross the 200Km that separate Dublin from Galway (hooray for Irish buses!), I finally arrived at my destination. And what's the best way to celebrate the fact that I arrived safe besides the fact that these folks drive on the wrong side of the road? With a pint of Guinness, of course.

But only after dinner! Never have a drink on an empty stomach...

Dinner was at the Charcoal Grill, a kebab place that I'll probably be visiting a lot in the next few months, since it's one of the few places that stays open until late (perfect for a snack on the way back home). The meal was very nice, but I have the feeling I missed something.

After dinner, the tasting of a proper Guinness, in a proper Irish pub, in Ireland, took place in The Dáil Bar. And I have to say this will be the first of many... Even though it might take a while to get used to the price... €4.20...

That was the first day. Nothing too exciting, because I was a bit tired from the trip. There will be plenty of time to explore Galway's nightlife in the next few months. I could sense some... let's say... potential for lots of fun...