Friday, November 18, 2011

Day Four: Ennis

The next morning, I awoke too tired to even feel angry anymore. It only took four days to break my spirit. You win, bus tour. You win. We actually managed to get downstairs to breakfast early, only to find half the old people from our tour were already milling about the lobby, getting cranky that the hotel hasn’t opened their breakfast buffet yet. Probably because they all went to bed the previous night at 7am.

Our first stop of the day is a little town called Knock. There wasn’t much in Knock, other than a rather large shrine to the Virgin Mary and a surplus of religious themed gift shops. Apparently, back in 1879, an apparition of the Virgin Mary, Saint John and Saint Joseph appeared to about seventy people in this very spot. This made me think of when I was little, and my catholic nanny would tell me all sorts of miracle stories about holy statues coming to life and saving kids from fires. The statues in Knock, however, did not do any of this while I was there, but maybe that’s because I’m not a Catholic. It was all a little awkward to watch people trying to go to church when you‘re just a tourist who wants to snap a few pics and then use the bathroom.

Previous in the trip, we’d experienced a bit of rain, but nothing that made me regret the absence of a Disneyworld poncho. Then we got to Galway for lunch. My mom and I took refuge in a delightful little crepe restaurant where we drank tea and gorged on sugar and dough.

The rain did not stop, and in fact, seemed to intensify, almost as if it knew where we were going next. The Cliffs of Moher. (Which, by the way, is pronounced like ‘more’ not like ‘mo-hair’…I think) Our guide made a point of telling us how many people either jumped to their deaths or accidentally fell off every year. This would not be the last time we received such a warning. I’m not sure if this is a statement about the stupidity of tourists or the dangerous quality of Irish national landmarks.

Even with the rain and the cold and the hail that eventually stabbed us in the eyes, I think this was another of my favorite places of the tour. I know there are beautiful landscapes in California, but so far, Ireland repeatedly beat any coastline I had ever seen in the states. We hiked as far as we could along the path, thankful for the large stone barricade that stood between us and a long plummet into the ocean. I think I could have wandered back and forth along the cliffs all day, but unfortunately, the rain had managed to permeate every layer of clothing I was currently wearing, which was a lot. We hopped back on the bus and over to our hotel, where we could blow dry my coat for our fancy castle dinner.

Fancy castle dinner?! Say what? Have you ever been to Medieval Times, or even a renaissance festival? Well, going to Bunratty Castle was sort of like that, only about a million times better because you were in an actual castle with authentic Irish people. We even had to climb an authentic super creepy and narrow spiral staircase. They really ought to have let us climb the staircase before they started dishing out the mead, or honey wine for you non fantasy nerds out there. As I sat on our long bench, trying to get my mom drunk on white wine, I pondered what would ye olde lord of Bunratty think if he knew back then what would become of his home hundreds of years later? And will we eventually suffer the same fate? Will our boring modern houses one day be visited by moon children of the future? Will they sit in mock-Ikea furniture and try to imagine what it was really like to live in the 2010s, back before they had eyelid TVs and colleges on Mars? Keep in mind, I pretty much consumed an entire pitcher of red wine myself, not to mention the mead. I think I remember at one point yelling at my mom, taunting her that one of our new friends was cool because she was drinking more than my mom. Needless to say, we all had a really good time.

Before each course, a chap in what looked like Shakespeare pumpkin pants would present a dish before an old couple they’d chosen to be the lord and lady of the house, so they could deem it worthy or not. The traditional singers and musicians were all quite skillful, even if their costumes looked like something from a Halloween shop. And because you can’t go anywhere as a tourist without audience participation, one of the lads from our tour was thrown into a dungeon and made to sing in a comical fashion for the amusement of young and old, but mostly old. The evening ended with me attempting to go to the bathroom in the disgusting, toilet-paperless bus toilet, giggling to myself that I could add “castle” to the list of historical places I’d gotten drunk in.

END OF DAY FOUR

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