Corks? - Cork, Ireland

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Driving in Ireland is different kind of rush. Thoughts start spinning around your brain like, "How hard can a right turn be?" to "How the hell do I get around this round-about thing?" to "A couple inches and I would have taken off that guys mirror!". Sadly, I only survived a grand total of 20 minutes driving into Cork the next day and had to relinquish the job to my sister, who actually had experience driving in Europe. So we shifted the seats around in our little CRV and I became the unofficial navigator. Turns out I'm actually pretty good at it.

Bring a good map and always be 1 step ahead of your driver when you navigate in Ireland or anywhere that you're not used to driving. When you drive into a city like Cork though, all bets are off if you show up during rush hour traffic. The conversation in the car went a lot like this:

"Where do I go?"
"You need to get to blahblahblah St"
"And how do I get there?"
"Go 2 blocks and take a right"
"Oh crap, we just passed it"
"Can we turn around up here?"
"No, it's a one way street"

Needless to say, I saw a lot of Cork before we ended up finding out B&B, which ended up being right across the street from Cork University and towards the other end of town then the way that you come in. My poor sister probably wanted to shoot me by the time we pulled into the parking lot.

After getting our stuff into the top floor room in another building at the B&B my sister and I headed out for a walk around town and a search for an Irish baby name book. Cork is really easy city to walk around in. The downtown area is one long street that's lined with international and Irish chains, while the little side streets have the smaller mom and pop place. There are tiny jewelry shops everywhere just waiting for you to walk in and buy a claddagh ring.

My sister and I ended up walking around for a while. We headed into the main shopping way and then across the water where we found steeper streets and a lot of smaller shops. Including the baby names book. Cork is a city with a very distinctive Irish feel. All the shops were around little waterways and there was green everywhere. Around the university there were huge parks that students can enjoy and hangout in. These two combined gave Cork a very stereotypical "Irish" feel to it and it's no wonder why it's on the tourist trail.

After our wonder around the city, my sister and I found yet another chip shop, but this time we could order pizza along with our fish and chips. We are some cheap food lovers and the shop was ever so conveniently located right next door to our B&B.

The next morning we were up and ready for a good B&B breakfast. And our B&B delivered. There was a true Irish breakfast, pancakes, pastries, eggs cooked every which way, and so much tea my eyeballs started to turn brown. My busting stomach was a welcome discomfort. I will be singing praises about that breakfast for the rest of my life.

We hit the road for maybe 10 minutes out of Cork to go and see the beautiful and famous Blarney Castle. It's reputation proceeds it and I believe that just about anybody who's been to Ireland has walked around it's grounds. Blarney is a stately castle that is slowly falling to ruin in the most aristocratic of ways. It's a slow crumble that brings back memories of ladies, kings, and peasants. Climbing up to the top of the castle itself is something that is fun and leads you to a beautiful view. You can see the surrounding farmland, rollings hills and the beautiful that is County Cork.

The castle also leads you to the Blarney stone. The stone that has gotten more action than Casanova did in his infamous lifetime. I did not kiss the store. I refused to kiss the stone. My sister, on the other hand, did. She went over, paid the man to get her picture taken while she was upside down and kissed it. She later told me she could see the spit that other people had left as a rather disgusting stamp of their time at Blarney. I told her to disinfect her whole mouth for good measure.

Walking around the grounds of Blarney was a welcome and very surprising good time. There were kilometers of trails that took you all around the property or took you to specific gardens. You can even walk around to the current property owners house and take of tour of it, during the proper season and while they aren't in residence. The grounds of Blarney Castle are covered with trees and hidden statues that would make a perfect location for an epic treasure hunt. There are old homes for the gardeners and little secret areas that visitors aren't allowed to go, but half the fun of walking around is actually finding them.

We ate dinner along the tourist pubs and restaurants that surround the castle and then headed back to Cork for the rest of the evening. I believe we all sat around the B&B and relaxed over a rather large pot of hot chocolate.

Before heading out to Dingle, my Mom and I headed out to the English market in downtown. The market, while not a huge space, is big enough to house some very wonderful and fresh stalls that range from kimchi, to fresh cheeses, to the heads of any animal you could possibly want for dinner. We picked up some meats and cheese for a picnic lunch and then I headed out on a mission of epic proportions.

I had been given a mission from a friend back to the US to buy a claddagh. She had printed out a picture of what she wanted and sent me over with 40 Euros to pay for it. She said she found it in Cork, so I made Cork my search point. I went into a lot of those tiny jewelry stores looking for this claddagh and all of them said they didn't have it. I was starting to give up on finding it when I decided to head into 1 last store before I gave up. It was a tiny shop, the show room no bigger than a large janitors closet, with 1 man sitting at the register. I went in, showed him the paper, and he looked at it and said he had 1 left and that they had been really popular earlier that summer. I was so happy to find it that I paid the man and the different for it. It was a huge copper ring. I was thinking that it was way too big for a women, but the man said that it was the same thing that I had on my paper and I believed him. I was just happy that I had actually found it and didn't have to go home with a failed mission on my conscious.

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