Flour Power

@ the Cliffs of Moher, Ireland

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.