STO: Galway

The third largest city in the Republic of Ireland boasting the controllable population of 72,000 inhabitants, Galway lies on the western coast of Ireland. It's much more of a traditional Irish town than Dublin, with cobblestoned streets, ubiquitous pubs that aren't packed with tourists, significantly more Irish spoken and a leprechaun every other corner who never gets caught no matter how hard we pursue. There seem to be less non-Irish denizens overall, although we met a fair amount of Americans and Canadians working at restaurants. I arrived there Friday afternoon traveling with my housemates Jason and Matt along with the girls next door Diane and Thuy, groggy from a night out and wearing glasses after forgetting my contact case on a kitchen table. We stayed at a 22 euro/night hostel that was surprisingly comfortable, complete with a kitchen, a French staff, multiple bathrooms and carpeting. We had a room for 6, with the extra bed unclaimed during our entire stay.

While we did have a nice night out on Friday, the highlight of the trip was definitely a Saturday visit to the Aran Islands. The Aran Islands are a group of 3 islands in Galway bay, a 45 minute bus ride and 45 minute ferry from Galway city. We went to the biggest island, Inis Mor, at 10:30 and planned to bike until our ferry's 5:00 departure. The weather was just superb with extremely blue skies and I prepared for a nice leisurely ride around a pretty old island. There were a few sights around that we'd get to see and all and it'd be a generally pleasant day of biking. And it started out that way as we biked past cows, sheep, animal pens made out of stone, a fat donkey and a Jesus on a crucifux. But the day was totally transformed when we stopped biking and walked to the edge of these cliffs. Now cliffs are usually pretty mundane things - I'm sure we've all seen cliffs in some form or the other and we get kinda scared about falling down them. Some TV shows like to hang off them, and some college students like to take notes from them. But these cliffs were flatout drop-dead gorgeous. My facebook has an album of it that kinda captures it, and this picture is pretty sweet, but being there was really something special. The edge just drops off straight - you could roll a penny off the cliff and it'd hit nothing but water. We were all terrified looking over the edge, but I was the only one who stepped onto this ledge out off the cliff a bit and took a picture where it looks like I'm just hanging on. The water was also really pretty, the edges of the cliffs were beautiful, the grass was green, the sky was blue; you get the idea.

So that was the highlight of the trip. We got back to Galway exhausted and I actually got a bit sick and didn't end up going out.

I'll come back tomorrow with updates from this week.