Monday, October 20, 2003
More Tidbits
Deanna and I have basically stayed home the past two weekends so she could 'work' on her papers (six to go in the next two months) and we could save a little money. However, we have done some interesting things...
1. Cahir Castle
We made an afternoon trip to this castle yesterday, it's only about an hour away from Limerick. The locals of Cahir are verrrrry proud of this castle, apparently it's one of the best preserved in the whole country. it was built on the site of an old monastery in the 13th century and then the owners (the Butler Family - poor cousins to the Butlers who owned Kilkenny Castle) renovated and expanded it in the 15th century.
We had a lovely guided tour all to ourselves and Jenny (our guide) told us how they deliberately made all steps and door frames different sizes to fool the enemy. She pointed out all types of holes for sticking bows and arrows through and there were even spots above the doors through which to pour hot sand, hot animal fat and boiling water over the baddies. If they still got through the door, there was then a type of foyer with another door and a false roof. Once they were stuck in this foyer, the Butlers would throw big rocks on the roof so it would collapse and then they'd light the roof on fire. Not a very nice welcome.
Despite all of these defensive mechanisms, the Earl of Essex in the 1600s brought over gunfire and managed to take the castle in about two days. However, this was his only victory in his Irish campaign and his lover, Queen Elizabeth, wasn't very impressed and so brought him back and cut off his head.
Other interesting things to note about the castle include the method of washing clothes. Apparently people in the 15th century didn't bathe and so the way they cleaned their clothes was by hanging them over the toilet. All of the waste built up in the toilet created ammonia and this gas rose up and killed all of the bugs and lice living in the people's clothes. Of course, this privilege was only given to the Butlers, I can only assume the peasants weren't allowed to wash thier clothes in this fashion. We were allowed to go into the 'garderobe' - or toilet tower - but were warned not to stay long as the walls are covered in green mould. thankfully, the smell had not lingered after several hundred years.
After the castle we walked two kilometres to the Swiss Cottage. this was built in 1810 by Emily and Richard Butler (the castle owners) as their 'entertaining' cottage. it's quite a lovely little place, with a curvy thatched roof, mismatched windows and a oak-posted veranda. In the 1980s we were told a canadian woman bought the cottage but let it fall into disrepair. In 1985 the state bought it from her, fixed it up and voila, another tourist attraction.
2. Visitors!
Yes, we hosted our very first visitor to our Limerick abode. Peter Drake, a friend from law school currently on exchange at Utrecht near Amsterdam, came to stay for a few days. As he came bearing a large block of Dutch cheese, he was very very welcome. We went out to a pub the first night he was here and witnessed some very bad Irish karaoke. the pub was on campus and i was quickly recognized as the "pizza slice girl" by a bunch of the boys. i chatted with them for a while and it turns out one of them knows a friend of mine from ubc - what a small world! Peter left on Friday and we sent him off with a belly full of irish breakfast and black pudding.
3. Debate Club
Last Monday night Deanna and I went a meeting of the UL debate club. Sounds geeky, I know, but it was at a pub so it had a redeeming quality. the debaters were actually quite entertaining and we've now taken up the habit of yelling "sit down sir, no thank you sir, sit down sir" at spontaneous intervals. after the serious debating was finished we all sat around and listened to stories of the massive amounts of drinking the irish do on Christmas day.
4. David Blaine
Okay, this isn't very interesting but, have you heard of this guy sitting in the glass box above the Thames in London? He came down yesterday after 44 days so we watched it on television. I actually saw him when I was in London last month but I didn't know who he was or what he was doing so i just assumed he was kind of a random freak. Well, after seeing the television special of his 'exit', my initial impression of him being a freak was confirmed. Very bizarre, and I think it's more bizarre that Londoners paid so much attention to him. That's all.
Deanna and I have basically stayed home the past two weekends so she could 'work' on her papers (six to go in the next two months) and we could save a little money. However, we have done some interesting things...
1. Cahir Castle
We made an afternoon trip to this castle yesterday, it's only about an hour away from Limerick. The locals of Cahir are verrrrry proud of this castle, apparently it's one of the best preserved in the whole country. it was built on the site of an old monastery in the 13th century and then the owners (the Butler Family - poor cousins to the Butlers who owned Kilkenny Castle) renovated and expanded it in the 15th century.
We had a lovely guided tour all to ourselves and Jenny (our guide) told us how they deliberately made all steps and door frames different sizes to fool the enemy. She pointed out all types of holes for sticking bows and arrows through and there were even spots above the doors through which to pour hot sand, hot animal fat and boiling water over the baddies. If they still got through the door, there was then a type of foyer with another door and a false roof. Once they were stuck in this foyer, the Butlers would throw big rocks on the roof so it would collapse and then they'd light the roof on fire. Not a very nice welcome.
Despite all of these defensive mechanisms, the Earl of Essex in the 1600s brought over gunfire and managed to take the castle in about two days. However, this was his only victory in his Irish campaign and his lover, Queen Elizabeth, wasn't very impressed and so brought him back and cut off his head.
Other interesting things to note about the castle include the method of washing clothes. Apparently people in the 15th century didn't bathe and so the way they cleaned their clothes was by hanging them over the toilet. All of the waste built up in the toilet created ammonia and this gas rose up and killed all of the bugs and lice living in the people's clothes. Of course, this privilege was only given to the Butlers, I can only assume the peasants weren't allowed to wash thier clothes in this fashion. We were allowed to go into the 'garderobe' - or toilet tower - but were warned not to stay long as the walls are covered in green mould. thankfully, the smell had not lingered after several hundred years.
After the castle we walked two kilometres to the Swiss Cottage. this was built in 1810 by Emily and Richard Butler (the castle owners) as their 'entertaining' cottage. it's quite a lovely little place, with a curvy thatched roof, mismatched windows and a oak-posted veranda. In the 1980s we were told a canadian woman bought the cottage but let it fall into disrepair. In 1985 the state bought it from her, fixed it up and voila, another tourist attraction.
2. Visitors!
Yes, we hosted our very first visitor to our Limerick abode. Peter Drake, a friend from law school currently on exchange at Utrecht near Amsterdam, came to stay for a few days. As he came bearing a large block of Dutch cheese, he was very very welcome. We went out to a pub the first night he was here and witnessed some very bad Irish karaoke. the pub was on campus and i was quickly recognized as the "pizza slice girl" by a bunch of the boys. i chatted with them for a while and it turns out one of them knows a friend of mine from ubc - what a small world! Peter left on Friday and we sent him off with a belly full of irish breakfast and black pudding.
3. Debate Club
Last Monday night Deanna and I went a meeting of the UL debate club. Sounds geeky, I know, but it was at a pub so it had a redeeming quality. the debaters were actually quite entertaining and we've now taken up the habit of yelling "sit down sir, no thank you sir, sit down sir" at spontaneous intervals. after the serious debating was finished we all sat around and listened to stories of the massive amounts of drinking the irish do on Christmas day.
4. David Blaine
Okay, this isn't very interesting but, have you heard of this guy sitting in the glass box above the Thames in London? He came down yesterday after 44 days so we watched it on television. I actually saw him when I was in London last month but I didn't know who he was or what he was doing so i just assumed he was kind of a random freak. Well, after seeing the television special of his 'exit', my initial impression of him being a freak was confirmed. Very bizarre, and I think it's more bizarre that Londoners paid so much attention to him. That's all.
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Pictures
Want to see some? We've posted some photos to Deanna's online photo album. If you'd like a peek, click on the following address, the link to the Ireland pics is right on the front page.
http://groups.msn.com/DeasDigitalAdventures
Want to see some? We've posted some photos to Deanna's online photo album. If you'd like a peek, click on the following address, the link to the Ireland pics is right on the front page.
http://groups.msn.com/DeasDigitalAdventures
Monday, October 06, 2003
Cork City and Clonakilty
This past weekend our travels took us to county Cork. We hopped on a bus to Cork city Saturday morning and arrived around noon. And thanks to Deanna's great planning and map-reading abilities, we found a fabulous market of cheese, bread, meat, olives and everything else one need to have a good lunch. After wandering around the culinary delights for a while (and running away from not-so-delightful food products such as sheep tongues) we bought our lunch and headed out to find a park. Again, Dea's map-reading led us straight to yet another Irish, walled-in green space and we settled onto the grass to feast.
It may appear that I've done nothing so far but follow Dea around and eat, and that's actually quite true.
Anyway, after freezing our rears off sitting outside and eating, we got up and headed straight for the shoe stores. Ireland has an amazing array of shoes and shoe stores. It's fabulous! Of course, everything is so wildly expensive because of the exchange rate there's no danger of us buying anything. But that doesn't stop us from ogling the stillettos and dreaming of boxing boots.
Once we tired of this we visited a lovely cathedral called St. Fin Barre. It's Protestant now, but was the site of a Catholic Church until Oliver Cromwell's 'visit' in the 1640s. Pretty much every Protestant church has the same story - it used to be Catholic until Ollie came calling. Anyway, this Church was beautiful. I chatted up the little old overseer named Gus and he pointed out the lovely workmanship and let me stand on the lectern and read the New Testament that was perched atop a gorgeous brass swivel stand.
That's actually my contribution to the Deanna-Sarah partnership: she gets us places, and I chat up the people once we're there.
Anyway, after the Church we hopped on another bus to a wee town called Clonakilty. It is renowned for its black pudding (made almost entirely from pig's blood) but we managed to avoid the stuff. We went out for a lovely Indian meal served by a Russian woman (!?!) who knew very little english. After this we ventured into a small pub that had signs outside stipulating no large groups allowed and you had to be quite once inside.
The pub itself was really sweet - very small, low ceilings, crackling fire, upturned barrels serving as tables and a shy bartender. Three musicians were playing traditional music in a corner (hence the need to remain 'quiet') and we enjoyed our half-pints of beamish. Two American women were sitting behind us and lived up to their stereotype well, proclaiming that Heineken beer was American (yikes!) and the UK stood for the United Kingdon (thank you captain obvious). At that point I told Deanna that if they could rent a car and drive around Ireland, certainly we could too!
Next, a large hand set down a pint of beer between us and a male voice said "so, are you ladies local?" And we thought "here we go". For the next hour we were entertained by a middle-aged man named Christy who told us how much he loved Canada and how he thought Canadian women were just beautiful. The whole time his friends across the bar from us were laughing and heckling him and telling him his wife was on the phone.
finally they were all leaving so after we assured them that yes, we would meet them at the next pub in just a few minutes, out the door they went. Don't worry dad, we didn't follow. But we did have a good laugh on the walk back to our hostel.
Sunday morning we woke up and went for a walk to find the ocean. Unfortunately, the tide was out at the time so the ocean was nowhere to be seen in the little bay of Clonkilty. As we weren't attending Mass this Sunday, we caught an earlier bus back to Limerick and got home around 4pm to pouring rain. A cozy evening of tea-drinking and movie watching followed.
Another weekend adventure successfully completed.
This past weekend our travels took us to county Cork. We hopped on a bus to Cork city Saturday morning and arrived around noon. And thanks to Deanna's great planning and map-reading abilities, we found a fabulous market of cheese, bread, meat, olives and everything else one need to have a good lunch. After wandering around the culinary delights for a while (and running away from not-so-delightful food products such as sheep tongues) we bought our lunch and headed out to find a park. Again, Dea's map-reading led us straight to yet another Irish, walled-in green space and we settled onto the grass to feast.
It may appear that I've done nothing so far but follow Dea around and eat, and that's actually quite true.
Anyway, after freezing our rears off sitting outside and eating, we got up and headed straight for the shoe stores. Ireland has an amazing array of shoes and shoe stores. It's fabulous! Of course, everything is so wildly expensive because of the exchange rate there's no danger of us buying anything. But that doesn't stop us from ogling the stillettos and dreaming of boxing boots.
Once we tired of this we visited a lovely cathedral called St. Fin Barre. It's Protestant now, but was the site of a Catholic Church until Oliver Cromwell's 'visit' in the 1640s. Pretty much every Protestant church has the same story - it used to be Catholic until Ollie came calling. Anyway, this Church was beautiful. I chatted up the little old overseer named Gus and he pointed out the lovely workmanship and let me stand on the lectern and read the New Testament that was perched atop a gorgeous brass swivel stand.
That's actually my contribution to the Deanna-Sarah partnership: she gets us places, and I chat up the people once we're there.
Anyway, after the Church we hopped on another bus to a wee town called Clonakilty. It is renowned for its black pudding (made almost entirely from pig's blood) but we managed to avoid the stuff. We went out for a lovely Indian meal served by a Russian woman (!?!) who knew very little english. After this we ventured into a small pub that had signs outside stipulating no large groups allowed and you had to be quite once inside.
The pub itself was really sweet - very small, low ceilings, crackling fire, upturned barrels serving as tables and a shy bartender. Three musicians were playing traditional music in a corner (hence the need to remain 'quiet') and we enjoyed our half-pints of beamish. Two American women were sitting behind us and lived up to their stereotype well, proclaiming that Heineken beer was American (yikes!) and the UK stood for the United Kingdon (thank you captain obvious). At that point I told Deanna that if they could rent a car and drive around Ireland, certainly we could too!
Next, a large hand set down a pint of beer between us and a male voice said "so, are you ladies local?" And we thought "here we go". For the next hour we were entertained by a middle-aged man named Christy who told us how much he loved Canada and how he thought Canadian women were just beautiful. The whole time his friends across the bar from us were laughing and heckling him and telling him his wife was on the phone.
finally they were all leaving so after we assured them that yes, we would meet them at the next pub in just a few minutes, out the door they went. Don't worry dad, we didn't follow. But we did have a good laugh on the walk back to our hostel.
Sunday morning we woke up and went for a walk to find the ocean. Unfortunately, the tide was out at the time so the ocean was nowhere to be seen in the little bay of Clonkilty. As we weren't attending Mass this Sunday, we caught an earlier bus back to Limerick and got home around 4pm to pouring rain. A cozy evening of tea-drinking and movie watching followed.
Another weekend adventure successfully completed.
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Tidbits
1. I've caught a bad bad cold - which people here call the flu so i'm getting lots of sympathy :-)
2. Married women in Ireland were not allowed to work until 1973. This changed only because Ireland joined the European Union and thus had to allow women to become 'persons'.
3. Ireland has nomads. They're referred to as tinkers, or other less polite names. I originally thought they were called 'thinkers' (which is kind of cool) because many people here don't pronounce the 'th' sound - it comes out only as a 't'. So, when our roommate Evelyn's boyfriend John said they were 'tinkers' I thought he meant 'thinkers'. But no, they're really tinkers. Anyway, the main tinker family in Limerick are the Caseys. Tinkers trace their origin to the Irish who were dispossessed of their land by the English 800 years ago.
We saw some tinkers on the side of the road the other night as we were driving home from a movie. Deanna and I thought perhaps they were retired folk because they live in RVs but this first impression was quickly corrected. And then we were told to stay away from them. Very interesting.
4. I went to Mass for the first time on Sunday (not being Catholic and all). It was very enjoyable. And, perhaps best of all, it was only half an hour long. We ended up going to the speedy one at 10am. Evidently the 10am Mass is so short in order to allow people to get going to sporting events that happen on Sunday. I thought that was very nice.
We spoke with the Priest after the service, a lovely fellow who usually lives in Japan. He was in Kilkenny on a visit home and only happened to do the Mass we attended because the regular Priest had left earlier that morning to attend a football match in Dublin. He talked to us for quite a long time and told us all about his motorcycle trips across western Canada (he'd been to both Victoria and Saskatoon).
5. We have two new roommates, one fellow named Tom Collins who speaks so fast we have yet to understand a sentence he utters, and another named Jules who doesn't really talk at all. He says 'ye' instead of 'you' and would like all of us to track our consumption of the electricity, heat and hot water. Yeah right.
1. I've caught a bad bad cold - which people here call the flu so i'm getting lots of sympathy :-)
2. Married women in Ireland were not allowed to work until 1973. This changed only because Ireland joined the European Union and thus had to allow women to become 'persons'.
3. Ireland has nomads. They're referred to as tinkers, or other less polite names. I originally thought they were called 'thinkers' (which is kind of cool) because many people here don't pronounce the 'th' sound - it comes out only as a 't'. So, when our roommate Evelyn's boyfriend John said they were 'tinkers' I thought he meant 'thinkers'. But no, they're really tinkers. Anyway, the main tinker family in Limerick are the Caseys. Tinkers trace their origin to the Irish who were dispossessed of their land by the English 800 years ago.
We saw some tinkers on the side of the road the other night as we were driving home from a movie. Deanna and I thought perhaps they were retired folk because they live in RVs but this first impression was quickly corrected. And then we were told to stay away from them. Very interesting.
4. I went to Mass for the first time on Sunday (not being Catholic and all). It was very enjoyable. And, perhaps best of all, it was only half an hour long. We ended up going to the speedy one at 10am. Evidently the 10am Mass is so short in order to allow people to get going to sporting events that happen on Sunday. I thought that was very nice.
We spoke with the Priest after the service, a lovely fellow who usually lives in Japan. He was in Kilkenny on a visit home and only happened to do the Mass we attended because the regular Priest had left earlier that morning to attend a football match in Dublin. He talked to us for quite a long time and told us all about his motorcycle trips across western Canada (he'd been to both Victoria and Saskatoon).
5. We have two new roommates, one fellow named Tom Collins who speaks so fast we have yet to understand a sentence he utters, and another named Jules who doesn't really talk at all. He says 'ye' instead of 'you' and would like all of us to track our consumption of the electricity, heat and hot water. Yeah right.
