Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?

Hello,

I'm home again from London and while I had a great time there is no place like home, especially when you leave someone rather important behind...

Anyway I got to London and successfully caught the tube to South Woodford where I caught the bus to Neil and Ellie's to stay with Ema-Joy. It was pouring with rain but at least it was rain in a new place so I was tired but happy. Friday the sun came out and stayed out for the rest of my week in London, it was a real summer holiday and an amazing piece of good luck.

Mostly I hung out with EJ and sometimes with Simon (her boyfriend) also. We did some classic summer stuff, sat and watched cricket in singlets and shorts while drinking beer, went to a bbq and even to the Notting Hill Carnival. I did one tourist day in London and lots of shopping.



Big Ben, just to prove I've been there.



Parliament buildings, these are much bigger and more ornate than pictures show and are so worth seeing if you're in town.



This is how many tourists are around parliament buildings if you get up and catch the tube when EJ goes to work.



Cool sculptures outside the Tate Britain, which doesn't open until 10! As it was only 9 I decided to wander down the thames to the London eye and see if it was open and how much it cost.



Me at the top of the London eye, it costs 15 pounds to take a "flight" as they are called and one flight takes half an hour. Well worth it especially if it's a good day as it was for me. The eye moves really slowly and smoothly so it's not scary at all and the view is amazing.



Big Ben and Parliament from the London eye.



Wednesday I hung out with EJ and her nannying charge Bella, we went to Regent park and walked past the place where the Beatles recorded their music on the way. We even went across the crossing from the album cover, and there were people there walking across it taking pictures as we went past!

After work we went out to dinner with Paula and Alex who have just landed in London. It was great to see them and they seemed really relaxed and in good shape for newbies to the other side of the world.

I know it's not the most action packed blog but really what I did most was relax so it wasn't the most action packed holiday. London as always was busy and exciting, I spent about 3 hours in the Tate Britain looking at amazing art, I wandered up and down the Thames, I shopped Oxford street and went to a carnival attended by 1.5 million people, and that was a quiet week. What can I say, I love London... but I'm glad to live in sleepy old Galway.

Love ya, miss ya,
Aimee

News times three.

Just some quick news from Galway times three.

1. Emmett's job has been extended by a month and may be extended further still but we must wait and see.

2. We can drink the water! The boil notice has been lifted our taps are no longer dangerous to our health.

3. This adds to yesterdays blog.

Recent news in Ireland reports that a Canadian tourist was turned away by a Northern Irish bus company because she asked for a ticket to Derry and not to LondonDerry. She was simply told that no buses went there. She could have been gently corrected I'm sure she'd just as happily gone to LondonDerry as it's the same place.

Aimee Geoghegan, Ireland News.

The three day Northern

Hello,

Well we just did the Paddywagon three day Northern Ireland tour and it was so action packed it's hard to know where to begin. The tour was the idea of our friend Jess who came with us. The tour started in Dublin so we caught the bus from Galway to Dublin on Thursday night and stayed with friends of Jess on Thursday with the tour starting Friday morning.



Looking a bit tired and wired in the back of our Belfast taxi tour cab.

The tour had a really good balance of very sober historic experiences as well as plenty of time to unwind from the busy days. The main thing I think we got from the tour was a better understanding of "the troubles" that is the conflict in Northern Ireland in the last 40 years mostly ending with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. You'll be pleased to know I've no intentions of giving you a history lesson but the history is fascinating and I really recommend coming and seeing the north if you're over here.

There were lots of little stops on the tour that broke up the days like seeing the preserved head of Saint Anthony Plunkett and visiting monastery sites. One cool site was the place where Saint Patrick lit a fire on a hilltop (which was illegal) so he would be dragged in front of the king of Ireland in order to preach to him. The king decided not to convert himself but gave Patrick the right to convert his people, Patrick used the shamrock to explain the holy trinity and thus it became the symbol of Ireland.



Climbing ruins, my new favourite passtime.



The site of Saint Patrick's fire, above: me climbing in the ruins of the monastery built on the sight.

Stories like the one above were all explained by our tour guide Joe. Joe would be about 45 or 50 and has recently had a stroke. Paddywagon bought Joe a special automatic bus so he could keep working, he's been with Paddywagon for 10 years and his experience really showed around the subjects that required much diplomacy.

Crossing the border into the north is painless, there are no checks and no stamps in passports. You do go onto the Brittish pound from the Euro and all the speed signs go from km to miles. All the irish language disappears from place name signs; there is no such thing as cultural sensitivity in the north.

So our first main stop was Belfast, we stopped for lunch on the Friday and even managed some shopping (new shoes!). As we drove into Belfast Joe taught us how to tell a catholic area from a protestant one. Catholic areas fly the tri-colour Irish Republic flag (green for Ireland, white for peace, orange for the protestant community) and Protestant areas fly the union jack, the king george with the red hand of Ulster and the Scottish flag. At first this appeared to be a natural showing of pride in history and political view but it soon became obvious that it was more of a warning system. Where one flag flew the other knew not to tread, simple yet threatening. Not all of Belfast is divided and the central city is neutral, but where a flag flies the area is serious about which side they're on. The northern police force is 96% protestant so they are not called to the catholic areas, instead the IRA act as an enforcement group for the catholic community. Within staunch areas the divide is clear and complete, you cannot live in these areas without taking the side of your neighbourhood. The divide begins early with segregated schooling from age 4 and continues for life.

In Belfast we took a black taxi tour, we needed to do this because there are some places in Belfast where you just can't drive a big green bus. The taxi tours are famous and very very good, they take you to see the murals in the trouble spots. In the protestant area you are guided by a protestant cabbie and in the catholic area the opposite. The murals differ in tone from the protestant to the catholic. The protestant murals are much more fight, fight, fight and the catholic are much more remembrance and resistance. This makes the Protestants appear the aggressors but war is never that simple. It was unsettling to walk past peoples homes with murals on the side promoting the crushing of the catholic church however.



This mural is in the protestant housing area, it's about how in the Good Friday Agreement all political prisoners had to be set free by 2000. This means that many people who did really awful things are now back on the streets, however they will be detained without trial if they are involved in anything ever again. Note the unionist flags on the houses in the row.



This is the Mona Lisa mural, wherever you go in the estate the gun appears to be trained on you. It's a simple but very creepy visual trick.



This guy is also protestant and actually died in a motorcycle accident. He's remembered here because he was a top gun, presumably a sniper.



Dividing the two neighbourhoods in Belfast is the Peace wall, 42 feet of peace to be exact. This massive wall is graffitied along one side. Every night at 6pm the gates close and they re-open at 6am the next day, except on weekends when they remain closed until Monday morning. One gate is always open but it is watched very closely for any signs of trouble. Generally there is no trouble but the feeling is that without the wall things could escalate very quickly.



Bobby Sands famous freedom fighter, hunger striker and member of parliament. This is a catholic mural, note the birds breaking the chains of oppression, the phoenix rising from the ashes. The quote to the right says "our revenge will be the laughter of our children". It's much easier to like the catholic murals.



Panoramic of catholic murals, many are murals of support for other countries or peoples living with foreign rule or at civil war. Like Palestine below.



The Belfast hostel was full so we stayed in a little coastal town called Ballintoy. Ballintoy is a divided community that live in peace, while the two communities know which side they are on they see no need to fight about it. Our group was 15 people so most of us went to the pub together and talked over the day. We had mainly girls on the tour with lots of Aussies and Americans in the group. We got up in the morning and walked the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge before getting back on the bus to head to the giants causeway.



Me at a little harbour we stopped at for some photos just outside of Ballintoy



Emmett on the rope bridge.



The giants causeway, an amazing rock formation that goes underwater all the way to Scotland where it resurfaces.

After the causeway we headed to Derry, now in the north it's called LondonDerry but in the south it's called Derry. It was called Derry long before the London was added and many of the roadsigns with LondonDerry on them are vandilised so the London is removed. Only the queen can change the name and she has not despite being asked by the Derry city council who dropped the "london" from their name a while back. It's a petty point of rivalry between the two sides, it was one of the only things Joe put his foot down on, he said "it's Derry."

Derry was our main night out as a group, we ate out and went to a catholic pub to hear traditional irish music, including it turned out a bunch of out war/resistance songs. The guy I sat next to was called Seamus O'Neill, he was great. He was at the pub with his family, they had just been to mass for the second anniversary of a family death and it was basically a wake style night out drinking for the clann. He was a local taxi driver and he told me about the songs that were being sung and we joked and drank for ages, I think he was happy to have his mind off the meaning of the outing.

We rolled home and fell out of bed the next morning for our walking tour with John.

John was quite open about the fact that he was hung over and so were we, never the less you don't go to Derry without seeing the murals and learning a thing or two about the troubles. The conflict in Derry was different to the conflict in Belfast, Derry was about land and civil rights, it was a fight against the authorities not the protestants. Yes the authorities were protestant but there was no fighting people who just happened to be protestant, no burning houses down, it was all rallies and riots against the police and the army. John was there, he was the perfect guide. He told us how the catholic community were treated and why they were fighting and unlike Belfast Derry are at peace, they don't fight there anymore. The murals are very emotional and again have a different tone to any of the Belfast ones. John finished the tour by explaining peace to us, he told us we probably take it for granted but for him it was the greatest feeling of his life the day he got to live in peace. He declared that the peace would last in Derry because he wouldn't give this feeling up for anything and neither would his children or grandchildren.



The Bogside, the catholic area of Derry where all the troubles were, also known as "free Derry", you can see the murals on some of the buildings.



One of the more famous murals, the death of innocence. Annette was 14 when shot by British troops, they say she was about to throw a bomb but this is not widely believed. She was on her way home from school when she stopped to watch a disturbance in the street, she represents all children killed in the conflict. The butterfly used to lay at her feet in dull colours but this was changed when Derry got peace.



John in front of the final mural, a peace dove in the oak leaf, the symbol of the Bogside area.

It was on the bus and home to Dublin with a couple of little stops on the way after the walking tour.



Us at a lookout outside of Derry on the way back to Dublin, cold and tired.

I really enjoyed the tour, there is so much I haven't written about here that I learnt and experienced in three days. This is recent history and it's worth going to see it while it's fresh, when people like John die no one will ever be able to tell you exactly what Sunday Bloody Sunday was like again. It was amazing.

Aimee

Inish Mor

Hello,

So we spent the weekend over on Inish Mor, the largest of the three Aran Islands. The Aran Islands are just off the coast so it was an hour on the bus and a very manageable 40 minutes on a ferry and we were there. We left Galway at 9.30 on Sunday morning and were back at 7.30 Sunday night.



The Galway hooker is the local traditional boat, we were lucky as we left on the ferry to see a bunch of them racing. The ferry was packed with tourists, many of whom were just on a day trip. The islands take tourism seriously, you land and rows of tour buses and horse drawn carts are waiting at the dock to offer you a tour of the island. The tours are really cheap, 20 euro for the carts and between 10 and 20 euro for the buses. One really good reason to avoid the tours is that there are lots of cool spots on the islands that no roads go to and therefore you won't see if you take the tours. However on a rainy day if you're only on a day trip they probably give you a good overview of the islands main attractions. We walked past the tour guides and on to our hostel, we tried sleeping in dorms for the first time as it's much cheaper than having your own room and we needed to know if we liked it enough to save ourselves some money when travelling around Europe. We were in a 4 bed dorm with 2 Spainish guys, the hostel was really clean and relaxed and run by an Australian. The only real downside of the dorm was that one of the Spanish guys snored like a trucker but I guess that's just the luck of the draw.

The islands are somehow famous for their woolen crafts, so sweater shops line the main town front. It wasn't until Sunday afternoon that Emmett and I realised that we'd been around nearly the entire island and not seen a single sheep...



Ok so after a quick look in the sweater shops we headed out to find Black fort. It was wet but if there's one thing a couple of months in Ireland will teach you it's that you can't let a bit of rain stop you. To get to the fort we needed to follow the coast for a bit. The east side of the island has beaches, the west cliffs.



The beach had a whole path in the sand made of these tiny shells, from a distance they looked like those coloured pebbled pavers that used to be popular.



After heading along the beach we had to go up and over the island to the west coast, on the way we passed through farmland. There is very little dirt on the islands, they are basically rocks. There is just enough dirt to grow grass, so here you can see there is lots of space with lovely stone fences but very little stock on the island. Maybe all the farmers have traded in their tractors for tour buses, I don't know.



Emmett loved these snails, they were everywhere and he would point them out so I didn't stand on them. They are really pretty and they came in different colours as well, like green and yellow.



Up on the west coast of the island it is much more rock than grass, the rock layers give little flowers a place to grow. There are no real paths across the island so we simply had to cross the rocky countryside to get to Black fort. There are no warning signs, no fences along the cliff edges and no DOC walkways to protect the plant life. You really get to explore unwatched and because Black fort is not on the road route we only saw one other group at the site and we hung out there for about 15minutes and didn't see another soul.



Emmett outside Black fort.



Me climbing on Blackfort, well there wasn't a sign to say not to.



The fort has the cliffs on one side so it is basically a wall to stop anyone coming over land from invading. It is pretty big and what's truely immpressive is the idea that it was all made by guys picking up rocks and stacking them up. You can climb up to the top of it and the views of the rocky landscape and cliffs are awe inspiring.





So after Blackfort we called it a day and went back to the dorm for a nap before dinner. We went for an evening walk after dinner and found this Mary shrine. There are lots of shrines on the island, most of Mary but some of Jesus as well.



Sunday we hired bikes and set off to see the sites, the first was the lighthouse. It turned out to be modern and not that interesting but just down from it was another stone fort. this one was perfectly circular with a couple of levels like the Black forts and a round platform in the middle of it. The above photo is taken from the top of it.



We got back to our bikes, after hiding from a nasty downpour in the fort, and found this idealic scene. Horses grazing under a rainbow in stonewalled fields, it's cheesy postcard heaven.



The water is amazingly clear and clean on the island and it has some fantastic beaches, shame it wasn't warmer or we could have gone for a swim.



One of the must do's on the island is get up close and personal with the cliffs. Up at Dun Aonghasa fort (believed to be as old as 800BC ) is the perfect place to do this because it's on of the islands highest points. Dun Aonghasa is an impressive fort but it's on the road route so it's covered in tourists, it has a "no climbing" sign (spoil sports!) and you have to pay a couple of euro entry fee. It is a must see but the other forts were quite frankly more fun.





Me at Dun Aonghasa.



Ok so after the fort we went to find the wormhole, it's a perfect rectangle cut into the stone floor of the island and the sea crashes up into it, or so they say - we never found it. We did find an amazing rock coastline and we jumped over boulders and did some minor rock climbing. It was great fun and again we pretty much had the place to ourselves which is more our style than the waves of tourists.



This is a stream that runs from the island to the ocean through the rocks on the coast we found when looking for the wormhole.

Ok it's been a long one but in my defence the Island was amazing. If any of you get as far as Ireland you should at least make a day trip because it will blow your mind with history and natural beauty. We had a ball and it is one of the cheapest weekends away you can do in this area.

There, done, see you later,

Aimee

Rain and birds.

Hi there folks,

I thought I'd post a short update for the week as we will be away this weekend.

It's raining again, we had a good 6 days without any real rain but today it is definitely (http://www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com just for you Bee) back to the wet stuff. We're really hoping for good weekend weather for our trip to the Aran Islands so if it needs to rain now then so be it. The Islands are supposed to be an impressive place of natural beauty so we'll be sure to take lots of photos.

We were lucky enough to be woken by the dawn chorus here a few days ago. Unfortunately it wasn't the sweet sounding titter of birds that you get back home but the deafening cawing of crows. Big black crows that look like the ones in Hitchcock films are plentiful around here and are really quite creepy. We'd never heard them in such large numbers or so early in the morning before and haven't heard them since. They woke us up at about 6am and "sang" until 6.30am, we weren't impressed.

We've booked a Paddywagon tour to see Belfast and Derry for next weekend so there should soon be plenty of more interesting things than rain for us to share with you.

Love to all,
Aimee

Our first visitor and our second ( and our third)

This week has been race week in Galway. This involves 8 days of race meets at the Ballybrit racecourse and at least 10 nights of drunken madness in town. All beds are booked and drink prices become inflated!

I (Emmett) have the pleasure of working for the City Council which means that I got 1 and a half days off just for race week.

Emmett (supposibly the wordy one) has run out of steam so rather dangerously I get to tell you the rest. Well as Emmett mentioned he had time off, paid by the way how ridiculous is that? Anyway it was perfect because the stunning Mel got into town on Tuesday night and Emmett had Wednesday totally free.

So we showed Mel the sights, that took about 20 minutes, see Galway is a great place to live but it's really not that exciting when a couple of weeks ago you were in Rome. I think the highlight was bread in a can (see below). Anyway it was great to have a friend over and we caught up on some of the goss over a pint or two.

It was a good thing Mel tried out the couch because our friend Jess needed a pad in town for Thursday night. Emmett had arranged for us to go out with Paula, a friend from Macnas, and her friend Anne. Unbeknowns to us Paula had a cunning plan to beat the in town bar prices, it was called "bushing'. Bushing is a term derived from the popular Irish passtime of drinking in bushes but now it simply refers to any type of outdoor public drinking. With the term comes the traditional bushing drink, Buckfast. Buckfast is a dark sticky wine that tastes like cough syrip and clocks in at an impressive 14% alcohol, it's made by monks and costs less that 5 euro a bottle.

Buckfast in hand we headed to the Spanish arch where half of Galway was already bushing, and Buckfast bottles were everywhere. Buckfast is an unsual drink, most forms of alcohol wait until the next day to make you feel ill...

After about 3 hours of bushing (much more than we'd expected but our hosts had a stamina to be feared and respected) we finally headed back into town where we ran into Galway's inner city liquor ban. Most cities ban the alcohol, Galway only bans glass, and this is despite the fact that drinking in public is illegal. The worst part of the getting through the glass ban barriers was that they make you pour any remaining glass encased alcohol into a plastic cup, you really don't want to know what "bucky" actually looks like.

We hit one pub, danced a bit and then Emmett went a funny colour so I took him home. All through the city other couples were repeating the ritual, for some the men were past it for others the woman. On the way home we found guest number 3 for the week, she was sleeping on the fourth floor landing in a summer dress, no shoes and no handbag. Her name was Michelle and while not intially thrilled that I'd woken her up she was soon tucked up in the lounge armchairs fast asleep. Emmett took the distraction Michelle created and acted upon the nasty colour he had turned in the pub.

And that was our big night out for race week over, Emmett worked the whole next day like a real trooper.



Mel and I as we wait for her train in sunny Galway.

The next section is entitled "Weird Food we have found in Ireland" by E.P. Geoghegan.

Hidden in a can that is like a sealed up Pringles can we found bread rolls.



They actually go "pop" with the pressure! Once cooked they make good hot bread to go with soup.




And next the product Aimee found most exciting (Emmett found it odd tasting).



Yes spaghetti shaped like Superman ( in flight, standing etc) and also the Superman "S".

Well we love you,
Stay safe,
Aimee and Emmett.