Day 15: June 28, 2016
Today was a whole day of traveling. We wake up bright and early to grab breakfast and then we drive from Edinburgh to Stranraer to board the ferry back across the North Channel back to Northern Ireland.
The ferry ride was more rocky than the ride to Scotland and I felt unsteady on my feet. The ferry has nice amenities: movie theatre (free), arcade, restaurants, massage services...it was very comfortable. However, on the deck, the motion of the boat was less noticeable, so I did spend a considerable amount of time outside, despite how cold and windy it was, just because I felt less nauseous leaning on the railing. It probably has something to do with the fresh air.
Other than going on deck, we spend most of our time playing card games. We’ve finally managed to play enough Euchre matches and tournaments to the point where none of us really want to play anymore. Well, none of us except for Eric, who plays Euchre on his phone when there isn’t an actual Euchre game going on.
After the ferry, we get on the bus for another 2 hours to Dublin, where we stop at Taylors Three Rock for our last supper. Here, we’re served delicious Irish food and treated to a show of an Irish band and 6 Irish dancers.
Irish people, from what I’ve noticed, really love clapping (whenever we play Irish tunes at concerts, the audience claps to the beat), and we clapped often to the beat of the tunes played by the Irish band. The dancers pulled some MYA people to dance with them and it was fun to see Joelle get spun around and for Natalie to show us some twirls.
The band is comprised of three members: one guitarist who also sings, one percussionist (term is used loosely) who also sings, and a “wind” player, who played the bagpipes and the penny whistle for us tonight. We also find out that he makes his own bagpipes…how cool is that?
The band asks for song requests and Neil yells out “Whiskey in a Jar.” They also play “Bang, Bang Rosie” and other traditional Irish tunes. They also find out that we’re musicians and ask us if any of us want to play with them. None of us brought our instruments into the restaurant, except for Alex, who was paranoid that the changing temperature and humidity in the bus (that it would get hot) would hurt his clarinet. We made fun of him for bringing it in, but all of us were cheering and clapping and telling him to go onstage to play.
So Alex has a jam session with the band and it’s supercool. They perform U2’s “With or Without You” and they give Alex three or so opportunities to solo. Then they ask Alex to play an excerpt of something and then Chris yells out Yiddish Dances, so Alex plays a few lines from Yiddish Dances.
After the really fun dinner, we return to DCU and it feels like we’ve only just started our tour, since this was the first place we stayed at…which is a little sad because it was the last day and it’s still shocking to think that these 2 weeks have flown by so fast.
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