Adventures Abroad

*A very long blog post now ensues.

The first weekend in October marked the date of our IFSA-Butler-funded trip to the Killary Adventure Centre. We Cork students met the bus at 11:30 on Friday morning and headed off toward the northwest, picking up the University of Limerick students along the way.

Our bus ride was about five hours long and delivered us to some of the most beautiful, rugged country I have seen in Ireland. We left behind the trees

and gently rolling hills to wind and bump our way beneath rocky slopes and across the peat. That peat, or turf, is

cut, stacked, and burned in fireplaces around the area. Mountainside farms and stone fences abounded, yet, strangely, none of the sheep were within those fences. Instead, the flocks roamed across open range, giving right of way to nothing, including our bus.

The Adventure Centre sits right beside Ireland’s only fjord, home of multiple salmon and mussel farms, and offers all sorts of activities, from kayaking to rock climbing to zip-lining to laser tag. We arrived too late in the day to partake of any such fun on Friday. Instead, we were greeted with a hot meal, during which we met IFSA students studying at institutes around the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. After dinner, we all participated in an Adventure Centre-sponsored game of trivia (well…er…stimulated by Bulmer’s and Heineken, I might add).

Saturday was fun day! I started my day off with a bit of kayaking on the fjord, although figuring out how to get into a wet suit – and watching other

people do the same – was half the joy. Our instructors had us race a couple of times before leading us around the point for some kayak games. First, we had to scoot forward so that we were sitting on the kayak logos (these were sit-on-top kayaks, rather than trusty whitewater vehicles). Our

legs were dangling off the sides into the water, and the rears of the kayaks were tipped up. We were to paddle around and tip others’ kayaks in an attempt to dump them in the water. If we appeared a bit too reluctant to get in the middle of the fray, the instructors patrolling on the outside came up to send us to a watery doom. I succeeded in falling in without anybody’s help at all, thank you very much! The next game was rock-paper-scissors. If you lost, you had to stand up and play somebody else. If you lost twice in a row, you had to jump in the fjord. So, long story short, we were all a bit soggy when we made it back to shore.

We next got to jump off of a platform into the fjord. It was about a twenty foot drop, and I got up to the edge, started to jump, and ended up thinking about how cold the water was, instead. I had to back off and let a few others go before I, in my turn, took the plunge. We swam around and all had a second go at it before making our way to the base of the gorge. The swim had the pleasant effect of making me go numb, so I didn’t realize just how cold I was. It also meant that, as we started pulling ourselves up the waterfalls in the gorge, courtesy of the ropes laid out for us, I couldn’t tell what I was walking on. We emerged dripping, icy, and muddy but laughing at the end and made a mad dash for the hot showers.

After lunch, I took part in the high ropes/zip-line course. First, our instructor tied four of us onto ropes, and we proceeded, one by one, to climb

a twenty-foot pole with a foot-wide platform on top. The goal was to get all four of us up, and each of the three groups of four succeeded! We all huddled up there, teetering at the top, and, as instructed, linked arms, leaned back a bit, linked elbows, leaned back a bit more, linked hands, and fell off to dangle in mid-air, counter-weighted by four of the people remaining on the ground. Each group had a chance to try the formation twice before we repelled back to earth.

The zip-line was much more straightforward. We went in pairs, hauling the harnesses up the line to the top

tower, where we were hooked in. We jumped off the ledge and went whizzing over the boggy terrain to the end of the course, where we repelled to the ground.

We enjoyed a well-earned dinner. I have to say, the entertainment value went up when the servers brought out one of the starter courses: chicken pate. The poor, unfortunate souls who had signed up for it, rather than the hummus, got quite a surprise! The Irish stew and cheese cake were sublime, particularly since they contained no chicken livers!

The dance started at about 9:30 that evening and went on long into the wee hours of the morning. I was in bed by about 2:00 a.m., and, boy, did I crash! I don’t recall hearing either the music or the dancing going on over my head after that point.

We had time for one more activity on Sunday morning, but, since all of my preferred offerings filled up too quickly, I chose to go for a walk instead,

heading first down the road toward the mouth of the fjord and then back up it until I found the family trail I had been directed too. The trail meandered toward the nearby sheep farms and beyond, along the coast. I didn’t make it very far before I had to turn around and head back for lunch and to catch the bus back to Cork.

As I’m sure you can imagine, it was a quiet ride home, with all of us sleeping as the bus left the beautiful highlands behind and headed on toward more familiar territory. All in all, it was a fantastic weekend, and I would love to do it all over again. It was a prime opportunity to get to know new people, explore rugged and unfamiliar country, and just have some good old Irish craic!

Even if I had to leave Cobh, last port of call of the Titanic, behind. My day in Cobh made for my first off-campus adventure since arriving in Cork. I took the bus to the city centre, walked to the Kent train station, and got a ticket for €7. The train ride was barely half an hour, and it took me

past the industrial part of Cork and on toward the coast, stopping at several small stations along the way. The Cobh station was the end of the line, and it was decked out in Titanic-era décor – from brickwork to “First Class Area” signs.

Cobh (pronounced “Cove”) is a small town, and it is definitely intended as a hotspot for tourists. The city centre is the first and easiest destination for any such tourist, since it is the first and most accessible street from the train station! The Cobh museum stands on one end and restaurants, boutiques, and candy shoppes fill the rest, drawing the eye with brightly painted walls and flowers. On the backstreets, the colors fade to a more traditional grey, and the shops give way to houses.

St. Colman’s Cathedral dominates the horizon of the town with its graceful architecture and

statues. Erected in the mid-1800s, it is quite a labyrinth of carvings! As I stood gawking at the front door, the faithful began arriving for what I presume was evening mass (though I don’t know, not being a good Catholic myself). I wasn’t quite brave enough to go inside, alone, at a busy time of day.

Instead, I ate dinner at the Commodore Hotel Restaurant, a meal of vegetable harvest soup, fresh soda bread, and lamb

roast over mashed potatoes, with a side, of course, of the ubiquitous baked potatoes, not to mention a glass of Guinness. Yum!

Since it was getting dark and I had a sore throat heralding my impending bout of Fresher’s Flu, I headed back to the train station. At half seven in the evening, it was mostly deserted and very quiet. The station master had gone home, so no one charged me for a ticket. I got a free ride home, a perfect ending to a perfect day.

The lesson of the trip? If you want to survive a boat ride, don’t leave from Cobh! The town has connections with not only the Titanic but the Lusitania,

which – for those, like me, who know more ancient than modern history – was a British ocean liner torpedoed by the Germans in 1915, an act that helped draw the U.S. into World War I. Personally, I recommend leaving from Galway if you must go by sea!

Yes, it was a wonderful relief to arrive in Ireland after a brutal summer in Montana – a summer of no rain. When I left, the air was practically solid with forest fire smoke. So the green of my chosen country was a sight for sore eyes, literally!

Anyway, I have just finished out my first week here. I landed in Dublin on Monday morning at the ungodly hour of 6:30. All of the IFSA-Butler group was abuzz with the thrill of arriving, but as we stood and waited for our bus the energy level went straight downhill. Some of us had enough determination (or caffeine) to go out to the pub, but I know I wasn’t the only one who crawled in bed for a nap once we reached O’Callaghan’s Hotel. We all had five hours to get our bearings before we headed out on a Viking Splash tour of the city.  You know those amphibious tour buses in Seattle? Same name, same game. We climbed in and put on our Viking helmets to indicate our conquering intent as we gave pedestrians our best rrrrrrrrroooooooooooooaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrssssss!

Our DUKW bus took us around some historic parts of Dublin – Georgian houses, cathedrals, you name it – before heading down into the river for a troll around the water front. My lasting impression of Dublin is the contrasts: those old, Georgian houses side by side with post-modern architecture; battered fishing boats moored in front of glass condominiums.

We didn’t eat any haggis for dinner, but we did have Chinese. My first experience with real Irish food was at breakfast on Tuesday morning. The eggs were soggy, the tomatoes were grilled (I think), and the black and white pudding was…odd. ‘Nuff said.

By Tuesday evening we University College Cork students had arrived at our final destination for a three-day orientation before the start of classes. We are about twenty minutes’ walk from the city center, where multi-story shopping centers offer wrack upon wrack of bargain clothes, shoes, and other necessities. Do I really need to say that I’ve already spent a lot of money there?

But my week of relaxation is over. Classes start tomorrow, and I will spend my days on the lovely UCC campus, chock full of old stone buildings and coffee shops (not to mention the campus-run distillery). Registration is much more relaxed here, which is to say, you find the classes you want, stick them on a timetable, and email them to the right person. Classes, too, are more like two-a-week lectures, with three hundred students attending. To make up for large classes, we have awesome apartments – about four bedrooms per flat with a full kitchen and lounge attached to each flat and a separate bathroom for every bedroom. I’m up for an imitation of that in American student housing. Anybody with me?

Apart from the fact that I can’t get my heater to run, I am ready to get this school year off and running. I intend to have something wild and crazy to post about next time, but here’s the introduction. Cheers, mate!