Flour Power

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…

I’ve been here for almost one month and I only have a couple of posts about pubs… That’s not right! People might think I spend every day and night at home at the computer, and that’s very far from the truth

There are a few pubs around here that have live music almost every day, and last Friday I went to one of them – the Róisín Dubh (pronouced as “russian dove”, such is the weirdness of the Irish language). For starters, I was amazed at the quality of the pub’s website. For such a small place, I was surprised to know that I could book tickets online (and with a small discount for doing it online). So I bought a ticket for €11.50 (the bloodsuckers from the bank took a €1.50 fee) and Friday at 9pm I had a Guinness in my hand and was ready for a dose of alternative rock.

The first band was called The Butterfly Explosion. I had never heard of them, and in fact the small concert area was about halfway to its capacity, which demonstrated the “unknown-ness” of this band. I managed to record one of their songs, and surprisingly the movie turned out decent, even though it was quite dark. Enjoy “Closer”, by The Butterfly Explosion:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laNknaKyouo

All in all, the concert was pretty good, and a nice warm-up for the main attraction.

After a few minute’s break to prepare the stage, in came God is an Astronaut, and now the room was almost completely full. I had heard some of their songs after I saw a comment in some blog (to which I lost the link) saying that their concert was better than watching Radiohead (a HUGE overstatement). Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the concert and will keep an eye on any new music they release. Here are some pictures (also did some movies but they turned out too dark):

Basically, we (2 of my housemates joined me in the meantime) had a great time. Of course, with some more drinks after the concert, and going to bed at 5 or 6 am.