Galway - Home to the student species

Heeeyyoooo!

In my last blog I spoke of the dramatic price difference between the trains and buses around Ireland. For travellers like ourselves, this price difference leaves buses as our only realistic mode of transport. Unfortunately, the bus service is a little crappy. This can be demonstrated through multiple examples, but I'll just give you one. It seems that 'float' system, which is very effective and popular in the home country, isn't used here. At least not the bus service. Almost every time we've used the bus, the driver has never had the correct change. In this situation, he simply says "Oh, I'll just have to owe you 10 euro, get it off me when you get off the bus". You must buy the ticket on the bus as half of the ticket machines are broken. I could go on all day, but maybe for now I'll just stick to talking about the trip.

I'm currently in a hostel in Belfast rather than a bus where I usually write my blogs. The bus we caught was great for once. The seats were spacious, there was a toilet, it was an ok temperature and above all, it has free WIFI! On a bus! I was stoked. The only problem was that I only had like 17% battery remaining, so it was kind of useless. After both checking our emails and facebook, it turned off, so I couldn't do any blogging.

Soooo! We made it to Galway. 25% of the city is populated by students says the Lonely Planet guide. When Benjamine and myself arrived, we could sworn it underestimated. It seemed that everyone was a student with the very occasional old bird who'd lost her marbles. Young people everywhere ranging from 13-25, this is the 'in' place to be.

Shortly after getting off the bus, we decided it was food time and set out on a mission to find us some mean-ass hot chicken rolls (The Irish know the secret to making a lot of things mean-ass). We'd been undertaking the mission for nearly a whole minute when we spotted two chaps sitting in a park having a monster-mamma-feed. One had dreadlocks halfway down his back and had a wee beard, and the other had insanely long curlyish hair and sported a lovely thick face forest. It dawned on us that in 10 years time, we're going to look exactly like these men. It was scary that we both realised at the same moment that we knew exactly what our future holds. How I wish we got a picture of them. I do apologise for that.

After bargaining our hostel price down from 20 to 17 euro (which is still far too expensive, we'd never paid that much, and don't intend to ever pay that much again) we settled in and went for a walk. Galway definitely isn't a historic site. There isn't that much touristy stuff to see, so we just ended up at a bar, had a few quiet drinks and were in bed by 9pm.

People go to Galway to see the Cliffs of Moher, which is about an hour away from Galway, and is said to be absolutely gorgeous. Just off the coast of Galway are three islands, I can't even remember the names, but while in Galway, most people see those as well. Because of our sheer stupidity, we saw neither of these magestics. Our plan was to go and see the cliffs and islands by ourselves, rather than book a crappy tour. However, a full day tour of the cliffs would have set us back about $30 which is kind of expensive on our budget, but it's for a whole day, with information, with a guide, and we'll probably never get to go back. We thought by going ourselves, we'd save a few $'s, but a return bus trip to the cliff's was about $60. We only found this out the next day, and so we should have booked a tour on arrival in Galway. Stupid.

This is Ben overlooking the cliffs...Actually that's a lie. Because we didn't actually go I just stole this picture off a website to show you what we missed.

Sooooo, for the whole day, we walked around listening to the buskers, drinking coffee, watching the people until we found ourselves listening to two chaps with guitars. Somehow the music reminded me of Lord of the Rings, and I remembered how cool the clothes of the hobbits looked. It was decided that we were to find a pair of suspenders (or braces, whatever you'd like to call them) and wear them that night. We spent the remainder of the day going to every clothes shop to find the cheapest and coolest suspenders known to man, and we achieved that goal.

We got changed and found a Californian girl who agreed that I looked like a lumberjack and Ben looked classy. We hit the pubs and got many stares, and it was beautiful. After watching a grand game of rugby between Munster and Glasgow, three Irish girls found us by our suspenders. Apparently the Californian girl told the Irish girls about two Australian dudes that looked like champions in suspenders. On that description, they managed to find us in a pub, in a city where there is a pub every 1 minute walking. We spent the night with the girls drinking 0.5% alcohol shots, Smith-icks as they call it (rather than SmithWicks, the Irish are lazier than Australians when it comes to speech) and dancing to awful music. They took us to a nightclub called Cuba (The first nightclub we've seen in Ireland) and it's much like an Australian one, but they still sell beer off tap and it takes an hour to buy a drink. All in all it was an enjoyable night out. We got our photo taken for some website too! Oh, and the same nightclub has an upper floor where some metal band was playing. The place was crazy.

Basically Galway was everything you would expect in a city full of students. Very good nightlife and heaps of shops around. 'Tis a large shame we didn't get to see the cliffs or islands, but these things happen.

Next morning we left, got on a bus to Dublin, then a bus to Belfast and here we are.

I promise the next blog will be more interesting.