50 Shades of Green: Day 4

Today we had to get up early and be ready to go at 7am. With our luggage all packed up, we hopped onto our coach buses and headed to Tralee for an outdoor concert. We set up in the middle of an square in the tow,n with the last two rows of winds up on a platform.

Tralee is definitely very quiet compared to Dublin and you could tell from a peek inside one of the malls, from all the closed shops and empty rooms, that Tralee is more rundown.

The streets were lovely and it was a sunny day (so sunny that it was such a relief for our eyes to wear sunglasses during our performance...and some of us got sunburned). The outdoor buildings were painted different colors, mostly pastel, and Tralee was definitely a town worth visiting.

Jazz band played first and we stood there watching and other townspeople came to watch. One Irish man to the right of me was bobbing his head and tapping his foot to the beat, and during the break between songs, he turns to me, points at the jazz ensemble, and says "very good, very good" in a thick Irish accent that I could barely understand. Oh yes, Irish accents are lovely but they are a bit hard to understand, and it's impossible when the speaker is talking fast. The jazz combo played "Mercy Mercy Mercy" and the tenor sax (Damien) and Neil (the new jazz director) almost had this battle with music because they basically played a duet that was all improv, and it was so cool not only because they were talented and the riffs they cranked out were crazy cool, but also because they just got so into it, and you could also see that they were really feeling it, and it's that sincerity that really sold everyone on their performance. It was so fun to watch them play and though jazz can be boring, that certainly was anything but dull!

You can find a recording here (the beginning was cut off, sorry!): https://archive.org/details/IMG5254

It was a 4.5 hour trip to Tralee, which I had entertained myself by taking photos, staring out the window at all the road signs and the incredible mountainside/countryside scenery (most of the people on the bus was fast asleep but I can't sleep when the sun is out), and moving up to sit next to Sara and talk to her a bit because up front had better vantage points for taking photos and it was cooler so it would be less likely that I got lulled into drowsiness. Also on this leg of the journey, I became very comfortable with converting between km per hour and miles per hour, using 5k is approximately 3.1miles as my conversion factor...my halfmarathon training (and thus frequent exposure to 3 miles / 5 km / 6 miles / 10 km ) has done some good!

After we played in Tralee, we hit the road for a 2.5 hour bus ride to Cork. We'll be staying three nights in Cork at the University College Cork. The housing is exceedingly nice; the rooms are apartment-style with 4-6 people sharing an apartment. Each person has their own room and bathroom, and there's a common lounge area that is shared that includes a balcony, kitchen, and couches. Comfortable indeed.

We had dinner right when we got there and then had freetime until 10pm which was curfew. 10pm may have been curfew and may have been on the earlier side, but we have all just been so exhausted (lots of people just sleep on all the bus rides), no one is complaining about the 10pm curfew and if anything, we're probably going to sleep even earlier than that.