Today we took a tour of Londonderry and explored the city a little bit. Derry (also known as Londonderry) is also called the Walled City and so naturally, we explored the walls and all the historical landmarks. On the wall, sometimes the ladies in the past would wear their new clothes (their “Sunday best”) and walk around in them on this part of the walls on Sunday, and then outside the walls, fishermen would put out fishing nets to dry against the wall, and therefore this part of the wall was known as the catwalk. I kind of ruined the joke because I commented “it’s a legit catwalk” to some friends right before the punchline was revealed. Whoops. It was still clever, regardless.
Derry does have a lot of history to it. There is the Peace Bridge and the Peace Flame (which we saw lit up after our concert in GuildHall). Additionally, there is a statue of two hands and given the current state of things, there is a rainbow flag (LGBT flag) waving between the two hands. Our tour guide ended the tour at GuildHall and she sang a few verses of Danny Boy for us in the Cathedral and her singing was pretty good and Dr. D got teary-eyed.
We then had time to explore ourselves and so we went to an authentic Irish restaurant and ordered some food, then we roamed, found an ice cream store because you can’t not have dairy in Derry, and then walked around some more, I took lots of pictures, and then everyone met back up to go back to the hotel, change into concert clothes, eat dinner, and drive back to Guildhall for a soundcheck/rehearsal/warmup and then our performance.
This was probably the best performance we’ve given. Things were in tune and played right. Also, the acoustics were so wonderful in the hall. I still can’t get over how the audience always claps when we play Irish tunes (Like “Irish Washerwoman” and “Wearing of the Green”) and I still laugh and smile each time, as I’m playing the flute, which is a little difficult to do.
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