Anyways so today we head out to the Cork Mid-Summer Festival. It is raining, a steady drizzle that occasionally strengthens to rain, but remains fairly constant. The sky is an icky sad grey and thankfully there's a shell that the orchestra can huddle under, very tight cover from the rain, but the turnout isn't so great...more like 30 people (at max) came to watch us play. The security guards said that normally this festival is so packed, that they have to turn people away. Perhaps it was the combination of rain, it being Father's Day today, and it being a Sunday morning in a country where Catholicism is huge and Mass is a big deal, that caused the low turnout.
Regardless, it was still fun. There were these two guys dressed as birds (storks perhaps?) who were goofing off and cawing at everyone (pictures on facebook album). There were still food stalls and so of course we all ate delicious food that was also not expensive, win win all around! The park we were at had a playground that is by far the best playground I've ever seen and even us teenagers were goofing off and having fun. The park had a pond and near the edge was a sign with a life buoy and the sign read "A stolen buoy is a stolen life." Ireland is actually really safe. At the beginning of our first concert (the one with Paul Byrom), the concert began with a quick reminder of where all the exits were. I don't know if this is made even more important by the Orlando and Berlin shootings, along with all the crazy things that have been happening, or if it's usually this safety-conscious, but yes, I've been noticing and really appreciating how safety-conscious everything is. It's so well-thought-out and it always surprises me in a good way.
Also Ireland is way cleaner than the US. Just...the streets aren't dirty, the bathrooms are fine...I don't know. The portapotties at this park were cleaner than the ones I've seen at the US and all the streets I've seen in Ireland are cleaner than those of the US. I'm really liking what I've seen of Ireland so far.
Jazz combo performs and in this empty lawn, we play ninja and clap loud to make up for literally no audience.
After that, we are dropped off in downtown Cork where we walk around and visit some shops. We go into Penney's, which is a department store. It has raincoats for those of us who didn't bring one, and other clothes and shoes and household items. We stop at a sports outlet for some people to look at sports jerseys (cause Euro Cup is happening right now), and also walk into a candy store, where I find Willy Wonka chocolate bars! But they cost 3.5 euros and I'm not paying that much for a bar of chocolate. Oh yes, and we pass this park that's called Bishop Lucey Park which is funny because it's almost my name...but the park looks pretty. I didn't get a very good picture of it because Eric kept photobombing. My picturetaking has definitely calmed down (I took 780 photos the first two days, but have brought my daily photo count down to around 300 or less. A lot of the photos are pictures of other people that I take for them and then privately send to them, and of each scene, I take two or three to make sure I have a few to choose from. So I'm really not taking that many photos at all.)
We then head back to the University and we have 45 minutes until we go eat dinner. Everyone basically chills, I go out and run around and try to explore a bit, and I do see some nice small streets, but I didn't run very far because I'm out of shape and I had little time to run, and so I ended up running the way to the dining hall, taking a left, running in campus and then out of campus, and then running outside of the campus, and then basically looping back to this arch that I've already seen at least 5 times from our walks to and from the dining hall for dinner.
After dinner was again on our own time, and so we just crashed someone's apartment and hung out until curfew at 10pm. Curfew is always very early, but none of us want to stay up and out of our dorms past then because we're all just so exhausted. Despite most of us sleeping well (I am the exception along with select others), and despite the fact that most of us nap on all the bus rides (again I'm excluded from this category), we are a tired bunch and none of us protest the early curfew.
June 19, 2016
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