Twisting Cork(s)

This weekend, my roommates and I adventured on a shotgun trip to County Cork. We left Saturday morning at 9am and pulled up to the city center around 1pm. A couple of obstacles later, we figured out where University College Cork (UCC) was so we could drop off our stuff at our friend's apartment. The weather was perfect there. Then it was off to Blarney...

You're full of Blarney!

Blarney, Co. Cork

It tasted quite good... yum!

After kissing what's considered the world's most unhygienic tourist attraction, we explored the grounds of the Castle for a while. The flora and fauna was really amazing. We saw a druid circle, palm trees, and (you guessed it!) cows. We parted ways with our new cattle friends and returned to Cork city for some exploring. The city seemed to be crawling with 14-15 y.o. hoodlums wearing the same hair cut and sporting the same tacky track jackets. We found this very amusing. Anyway, we stopped in a cathedral, trekked through a food market (in an "arcade"), and grabbed some dinner in the food capital of Ireland. Quite naturally, I ordered fish and chips with Guinness on my never-ending quest to find the best of both.

That night, we hit the town on a pretty lengthy pub crawl. Some of the places we stopped in were called "The Wash" and "The Brog" (pronounced"brogue"). They were really authentic; consisting of limited lighting, awesome old wooden furniture and paneling, and Irish men fighting. We had ourselves some great craic (means "fun" in Irish) but exhaustion hit us like a freight train on our trek back to UCC.

We left around noon to head back to Dublin. That was Cork in 24 hours.

Also, I heard a funny Irish joke while I was there: Ireland would sink to the bottom of the Atlantic if it weren't for Cork.

Backtracking a bit and pulling a Joyce-ian retroactive arrangment on you guys, I paid a visit to the Dublin Writers Museum in Parnell Square on Friday. The place was crawling with history. I saw countless first editions, signed copies of books, notes and letters, and personal items of all the authors. The exhibit started with Jonathan Swift and took me on a journey through Irish literary history through Beckett. There were sections on Moore, Stoker, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory, The Abbey Theatre, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Heaney, O'Casey, Kavanagh, and many more. One of the highlights for me was listening to a recording of Joyce reading an excerpt from "Ulysses." Man, did that dude have a brogue. I got to touch Joyce's piano too. A pleasant surprise in the museum was George Handel's chair from the premier of "The Messiah" (which was in Dublin in case you guys didn't know that). There was a rope to prevent people from sitting on it but I totally did anyway. So legit. Also, I wasn't supposed to take pictures but managed to covertly snap some low quality non-flash shots of the Joyce first editions:

Ulysses, signed first edition published 1922

That's all I got for now. Back to Ulysses, Portrait, and The Tempest (gonna be an awesome reading week).