Galway, The Cliffs of Moher and The Burren

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We arrived in Galway on Wednesday and it's been great so far. Maybe my favourite Irish city yet. We spent yesterday walking around the city and seeing a few sights. Galway is quite small for a major city, but it's got great atmosphere. We're staying right in the heart of town and everything is within easy walking distance. The Galway Arts Festival has been on for the past two weeks and ends tomorrow. It's really a good time to be here. There are street performers all along the major streets, and yesterday we went to a photography exhibition at NUIG (National University of Ireland - Galway). The highlight for me was seeing 'Translations' last night, an Irish play about being colonized by the English and the effects on language and Irish names. It was set in a small castle on the ocean about 15 minutes outside of Galway, and intermission was right at sunset. It was pretty cool.

Today we did a sight-seeing tour of the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren. Unlike the last sight-seeing tour, however, this one didn't suck. We had a good guide who was very entertaining, and we didn't stop at that many tourist traps. The one that we did stop at (the Ailwee Caves) we took a pass on and our guide told us where we could go walking at find a good short trail. The Burren is pretty interesting. It's a huge expanse of land in Ireland (our tour today was mostly spend circling it) and it mostly consists of massive limestone hills that sprawl on and on forever. What's interesting though is that, unlike Connemara, which is slate, the limestone of the Burren allows plant-life to flourish. So while there's an endless expanse of limestone rocks, there's all kinds of bushes, shrubs and trees growing in between them. Very interesting.

The most spectacular visit of the day was the Cliffs of Moher. The cliffs are 650ft tall at their highest point, and stand straight up on the west coast of Ireland. I remember visiting here with my family 5 years ago, but since then they've built massive walls all around it and a 30-million euro visitors centre. I was a little disappointed at first, until we found the out of bounds area. It's not especially dangerous, they just don't have a massive wall surrounding it. Just a whole bunch of signs saying "No entry beyond this point" in a billion languages. The funny part about it was that the number of tourists beyond that point didn't seem to thin at all.

Overall it was a good tour and we saw some stunning sights. We also met a donkey and fed him our apple cores, which was fine, though I'm not really a fan of large farm animals. Tonight we're going to go to the banks of the River Corrib, which is packed every night with young people just sitting and strumming guitars, playing the bongos, having a few drinks and making some new friends. It seems chill and fun, so it should be good times. A bientot!

Carly

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Photos

Me, Nina and Sophie at the Cliffs
That darn haze! It's a little hard to make them out, but they're there.

The 5 of us at the Cliffs
This is in the "off-limits zone" past where the safety wall ends. We asked a german man to take this, who (jokingly) told us that we needed to back up to fit us all in the picture. Very funny.

The Cliffs of Moher
FACT: 650ft at their highest point. Impressive, no?

At the Burren
The Burren looks like bare limestone hills set above your standard Irish countryside. When you get there though, you find dozens of strange plant species growing in the limestone. Sweet.

Sophie, Nina and Heather Seaside
at the "Baby Cliffs", which are a puny 100ft high