Our feet are so tired.
Amazingly, the flight to Dublin from Boston is only about 6
hours—and since there’s a 4 hour time difference, that means … well, it means
our bodies were hopelessly confused when we arrived here at 5:30am local
time.
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University College Cork
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We took a bus with a gaggle of college-age people who looked
like they’d been out celebrating St. Patrick’s Day all night and got to Cork
around 10am. At our B&B, we were
ushered in to the dining room to enjoy a bit of breakfast, first thing—such delicious
porridge!—then we were handed a key, told to leave our bags, and pretty much
pushed out the door. That’s what we get
for arriving early.
Fortunately, the University College Cork campus is right nearby,
and that seemed a nice area to walk through.
First unexpected discovery was a collection of stones carved with Ogam,
the ancient writing system of Ireland.
How strange to learn about yet another way of writing.
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| University College Cork, Ogam Stones |
A nice walk along the River Lee (Emma stopping
occasionally to take photos of orange things on the ground, a photo project …) led us to the next unexpected discovery when we found the ruined house of
George Boole, the mathematician who invented Boolean algebra (hence, Boolean
search operators).
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| River Lee |
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| By the house of George Boole |
When you hear a place has a museum devoted to butter, how
can you not visit it? In addition to finding out about origins of the Kerrygold
brand in the 1970s, we learned all sorts of gruesome and interesting things
about the production of butter and the importance of cattle raiding to the
ancient Irish. “The people of medieval
Ireland elevated cattle raiding to the level of a national pastime. Almost as much time appears to have been
spent in tending the cattle as in conducting expeditions to steal them.”
What an amazingly generous town! There’s a church tower
where you can not only climb the bell tower, but ring the bells. We thought
that surely they must restrict people to hitting a button at a predetermined
moment, but as we approached and heard random bells sounding at a random time,
we realized they’ll just let you ring out whatever you want. Emma and I serenaded the town to a rousing
rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Just as cool was being able to see the innards of
the clock and the mechanism for the automated ringing of the bells to mark the
time. Every quarter of an hour, a spiked
cylinder turns and causes the bells to sound, essentially an enormous version
of the familiar mechanism inside of music boxes.
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| Emma serenading Cork |
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| Mechanism for ringing the bells on the quarter hour |
After watching a great magician/comedian/sword swallower in the street fair (last gasp of the national holiday) and visiting the historic gaol, we returned to our B&B to find that they’d given our room to someone else—so we got an even nicer one. Naps, baths, supper … and now to bed.
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| Cork Gaol |
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| Cork Gaol |
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