Happy Cows, No Showers, and a Sunburn

This will be a bit long because I have been away from a computer since Friday afternoon.
We spent the weekend touring many places in the lower half of Ireland. Saturday was spent crossing the country (in just about 2 and a half hours) by going to Dublin via train. It was a beautiful trip across the countryside, and I think the best part was just seeing vast expanses of land that haven't been touched except for the clearing of stones from the land and the resulting low walls that divide the pasture. There are very few fields plowed for farming, and even fewer plots that have actual crops growing on them, and it is refreshing. In the midwest when you travel by train, it is just cornfield or soybean field after the other, and the wilderness is just obliterated, oftentimes for the sake of a ridiculous surplus harvest of GMO crops.
The other main difference when traveling through the gorgeous land was that the animals (cows, horses, and sheep) are all HUGE, and healthy, and active. They seem so free, with the occasional marking or ear-tag, but the herds are small, and they have so much room to roam about, grazing when they want, and relaxing in the shade at will. There are no massive feedlots filled with antibiotic-tainted mass bred pitiful looking animals. Yet the fresh meat is in no short supply and priced affordable.
Dublin itself is overrated, though, at least without a large amount of planning and spending money. We arrived around 10, walked around, figured out where the Guinness factory was, and then hit the streets looking for interesting tourist spots and neighborhoods along the way. Not so easy, though, because it is a big city, that is almost generic. I kept forgetting that we were actually in a foreign country. The accents there aren't even that strong.
After walking around town for a bit and seeing a few old churches (St. Audoen, a medival church was free and really cool), we made it to Guinness to get in a LONG line for the tour.
The line (queue) goes quickly, and once you get in, you get to pay €14 (€9.50 for students) to give yourself a tour of the majorly commercialized and Americanized old factory. Never do you see actual Guinness being made, but rather videos played on fancy flat screen monitors with displays of the brewing machinery and advertising paraphanalia throughout. At the end, you go to the top, redeem your free pint, and stand in a crowded bar in the highest point in the city, the Gravity Bar. It's a round room, that is all windows, so you can see the whole city, but it still didn't feel like Ireland. The pint was good, cold, and fresh, but the atmosphere leaves much to be desired.
Most everything else interesting closed at 5pm on Saturday, so we hit the train station pub and cafe for some dinner, and got on an earlier train back to Galway. We walked to a wine shop in town and picked up a few bottles to drink, and then read up a bit on the islands for our trip the next morning.
Another early morning on Sunday to meet the class at school for the bus to the ferry to the Islands. It's another gorgeous trip though, along the Connemara Coastline and through a few quaint towns, and some pretty developed, like suburbs.
The ferry took off for the Islands around 10, and shortly after getting out to the bay, a coast guard helicopter began following us. Turns out, they were doing a training exercise where a guy sends down a rope, then himself, to the back of our ferry, and then has a stretcher sent down to him, and then both her and the stretcher, after being secured, get pulled back up to the hovering helicopter. It was pretty cool to watch, and quite unexpected and loud. But that was completely off the subject of the actual Islands themselves.
So we get to Inismoor, the largest of the Islands, and it was quaint, but you could tell that it subsists on mostly tourism for economic growth. They only got electricity out to these islands about 30 years ago, and the people speak Irish, but know English, probably from dealing with tourists every day.
We rented bikes and rode across the coast of the Island to a small restaurant for lunch, and then walked to begin a tour of the main ruin on the Island, a fort that is at the very top and dates back to the Iron Age. It was a long hike, over really rocky terrain, but worth it for such a cool view of the Island from the top. You could lay at the edge of the cliff, and the drop was just terrifying. At least 200 feet straight down to the water.
There were a bunch of other tourist groups, plus our whole group of over 100 students (many of whom are still kind of being stupid Americans when we are all out somewhere), so my group waited around and walked back later after everyone. We got back on our bikes and had a slower ride back down the Island into town. We stopped at a pub for a pint (Bulmer's cider was delish after riding all day), and listened to a few locals play the guitar and sing traditional songs, mixed with some Beatles.
Once we made it back to the pier to catch our ferry, I realized that I was burnt. I even brought sunscreen, but no one was expecting such a beautiful, warm day, so I didn't put it on. Plus, the sun is out for a really long time in the summer, so I don't think it starts to burn you until it is later in the day. I was just too distracted by all of the cool things we were seeing, not to mention riding a bike, to remember putting it on. It's not bad, but just not what I expected to happen in Ireland!
Finally, we got home, and all we wanted was to shower and make a quick dinner. Now, the shower in my bathroom that I share with my roommate Laine is already broken. We had a work request in for it on Friday, but I didn't expect anything to happen until this afternoon. Fine because there is another shower in the apartment that we could use. WELL, we go to turn this one on, and it just didn't do anything. I know that may sound weird, how could the showers just not turn on, but they are controlled with an electric faucet/shower head thing. So...it's possible that we blew them out somehow, from overuse or something, or that they just suck. Regardless, we didn't get to shower last night. Fine, though, because we could go next door in the morning and use theirs since we had later classes.
Morning comes, and our downstairs roomie comes up to let us know that the shower did indeed work for her this morning. Excellent, another hour to sleep in! So we got up around 10, and went to turn the shower on, craving a hot soak to wash off two days of sweat and dirt and soreness. Not so lucky. Nothing happened. We had to get to class, so Laine and I are now going on way too many days since a shower. Saturday morning was the last one. I am gross. So I am off now to the apartment and HOPEFULLY it is fixed. If not, there is always the neighbors, but seriously, what is wrong with having a normal plumbing shower head? For real.
Ah well, I will write more tomorrow. Longer day of classes then, but it is really exciting to be in school and not have to go to work. That is still the best feeling ever!