The Streets of Irelandy (second installment of the Irelandy saga)

On day two of my trip to Ireland. I ate crepes filled with chocolate and brown sugar for breakfast (it was ALMOST like being at Paulette's...minus all the psychos that HAVE to have brunch out on Easter so BAD that they'd be willing to eat it before they go to church just to get a table...oh...and minus the slightly more bland food...oh AND minus being miserable and overworked) I also ate chocolate eggs.

We walked in the bright sunlight of the first official day of spring through the streets of Cork. Mieke took us to her lovely university campus where she studied rocks or something like that. Then over the river on a shaky bridge and into fancier part of town. I actually had to strip my coat, scarf, and hat off for the first time. It was fabulous. I don't expect this to ever happen again.

Along the way, I took some pictures....well...A picture with a view of the lightly sprawling city behind us...and by "I took some pictures" I mean.. .Mieke took this picture of Liam and me...Liam is eating my face.




This happened right before taking my jacket off and basking in the sunlight.



We then made our way to a pub that was holding a beer festival where we sat in the sun and drank samples of lovely Irish beers and ate hamburgers that...despite their cheap looking appearance, actually tasted quite nice.

The beer also tasted nice. This, my friends, was not festival for those that wanted to drink as much beer as they could and impress their friends with their incredible ability to belch the alphabet.

No, this was the type of beer that you had to smell before tasting...like a fine wine. Different shades, aromas, flavors...alcohol percentages. I stuck with the low percentage beers so that I might able to enjoy them more fully. My favorites were the flowery flavored wheat-y beers. Like these.

After we exhausted ourselves at the festival of beers, we made our way home to watch a few minutes of television in Gaelic. On the way home I discovered this

on the pavement. I don't know why, but for some reason I really wanted to take a picture of this...an entire jar of jam that someone had wasted on the side of the road. Perhaps whoever dropped it, was coming back with an empty jar, salvaged from a garbage can.

Our flight back that evening was delayed about an hour because it was snowing in London...there always HAS to be some form of precipitation in that darn country. It lives under a perpetual cloud. We watched the first ten minutes of the England/New Zealand cricket match in an airport bar. Which leads me to this question: How can a country that experiences such insane amounts of rain...be so crazy about a sport that is completely impossible to play in any sort of wet condition...even if it isn't raining...not cricket on a wet pitch. Is it the tea? Is it the lunch breaks? I might up for playing a sport that offered lunch breaks...but then again...I'd have to want to play it long enough to merit a lunch break. I'd also have dress like a robot and yell at the umpire as a rule. I'd also have care.

So I leave you with this picture of the lovely ocean...well...an inlet of the ocean at least. The ocean that divides us, my loves.