Eurotrip - Featuring The Heff

Hello again!

What a surprise, I'm on a bus again.The bus is the only way to travel around in Ireland. To give you a good example of why we're on a bus, I'll explain the price difference between getting from Kilkenny to Cork by bus or by train. Our bus fare was 18 euro (Roughly $30), which is pretty expensive on a budget like ours. That will mean we can't go out that night. If we were to make the same trip by train, we'd be looking at 40 euro ($60+). Even by car is probably not worth it. The price of fuel in euro would be the same of what we pay in dollars. The price never seems to change, no matter where we go, what day it is or what servo it is. Every station we've seen sells Unleaded fuel at about 129.9 euro. That's like $2 for a litre of bloody petrol! Ahh well, lucky we can't drive eh? That gives us the freedom to have a beer at any time of the day.

After arriving in Cork on Monday, the Canadian couple we met in Kilkenny seemed to vanish once we left the bus station. Two of the Australian girls we met in Kilkenny (Ash and Nat) were hanging around, and since we had no idea what was at Cork, or where we were even going to be sleeping that night, we decided to stalk them to the hostel they were staying at. This hostel wasn't in our little book, but was definitely one of the cheaper one's compared to the pricing we saw elsewhere. After walking around the city for a couple of hours and visited the toursit information centre (Yes Sonja, we actually went to one, I thought you'd be proud), we bought some food for dinner and just spent the rest of the day lazing about the hostel.

Benjamin and myself felt like steak and vegies, but such a feat was far too expensive after our bus trip, and we found that pork was much cheaper. These Irish folk seem to absolutely love their pork. 80% of their sausage section is pork sausage. Their pork chops are cheap. Their pork burgers are cheap. Their pork chicken would be cheap if it existed. Pork pork pork. I'm kind of sick of the word pork now, it sounds weird when I say it. Anyway, we got to the deli section and asked old boy behind the counter for two pork chops. Those porky little bastards were going to set us back 4.5 euro, but that was fine, we just needed some real meat. Shortly after, we found a pre-packeted pack of four pork chops that were marinated, and were pretty big too, bigger than out 4.5 euro porks. These were only 6 euro. We didn't know what to do, but we knew we had to have these marinated porks. Are you supposed to give the plain porks back to the deli man? Do you just put it somewhere and hope no-one see's you do it? We went for the latter, or rather I went for the latter, as Benjamin decided to leave me stranded and bitched off somewhere! I spent almost a good three minutes debating if it was in my ethics to do such a thing, and I came to the conclusion that I wasn't stealing the stuff...Even though they probably would have had to throw it away. In the end, we made away with our four 6 euro marinated pork chops and felt guilty for it. They were worth it though...Mmm I wish I was eating them now.

I should have taken a photo, but the shower in the hostel was like any other I've seen. Instead of having hot and cold taps that control pressure and temperature, there was simply a button. A single button. This button controlled how much and how hot this water would be. Also, the button only works for seven seconds before you have to press it again. When you're the first person to use it for a couple hours, the pipes are freezing, therefore the water is like ice. It's kind of like at home when you turn the water on and wait for the hot water to come through, but because of this button mechanism, you find yourself pushing the button like 8 times before ANY sign of warmness turns up. I guess I'm just having a bitch, but that's the 'in' thing here.


About 30 minutes bus ride from Cork is a little village sort of thing called Blarney, home to the Blarney Estate, which is home to the Blarney Gardens, which is home to the Blarney Castle, which is home to the Blarney Stone, which is home to the Gift of the Gab. Gazillions of magic-searchers come to Blarney to kiss this stone every year since the 1700's. I won't go into too much detail concerning the story, but basically, you kiss this chunk of rock which is on the top of this castle and you are then blessed with the Gift of the Gab - meaning you can tell grand tales for the rest of time. You try not to think of how many before you have kissed it. To describe it...It's cold and smooth. To kiss it, you are dangled halfway down a hole that's about a five floor drop to the ground. By far, the best thing about kissing this bad-boy is the walk you must under-take to get there through the Blarney Gardens. It's a magestic, magic and mysterious patch of earth that I would come all the way back to Ireland just to see again. I've never seen anything so green in my life. Everything was covered in a beautiful moss or overtaken by some kind of leeching plant. I can't express how much I loved my time at the Blarney Estate, but if anyone ever goes to Ireland, they have to visit this place, even if it costs about $15 to get in to!

On our return from Blarney, Beefy Ben thought it would be cool to check out some of this famous Cork music. Unfortunantely Tuesday's are the worst night to see music, but we went anyway. Fred Zeppelin's is the name. As soon as you walk into this place, you feel like a rockstar at a rockstar party, only for rockstars. Such a small bar, but so many different genre's. You had the corner of the bar dominated by a gothic group - like the real old school gothic kind, another group were like the indie people, another group of bearded bastards, a couple metal heads, and the bar attendant was like a punk/hippie girl, if there is a such a thing? Anyway, apart from having INSANELY cheap beer, the upstairs section, which could fit maybe 20 people if you squashed them in, had a little stage where they were having an open mic night. There weren't many people, and so when there was no-one left to perform, most people left, except for four blokes who could all played guitar. Without mic's, they just jammed for a couple hours and we were able to sit there and listen and have a little sing-a-long with them. It was quite intimate indeed and we could have stayed there for another six hours if we all didn't get kicked out.

Next morning we hit up all the touristy stuff, taking pictures of Gaol's, castle's, cathedrals and the like. They were all pretty standard - huge, cool, awesome, expensive etc...But nothing worth talking about. As boring as it sounds, the highlight of my day was probably our dinner. I felt like Bangers and Mash, and by crickey that's what we were going to eat. In this kind of cold, constantly drizzly weather, there seems to be nothing better than a big fat pie, or something like Bangers and Mash. Mmm...Peas with a fat dollop of creamy potato, then sausages, then onion and beefy gravy over it all. Maybe we'll have it again tonight...Ughhhhhh.

-I'll put a picture up later, Ben's sleeping and I need to get the picture off his camera, which he is sleeping on-

We ended up going out again that night and ended up at a traditional Irish bar, where they were playing traditional Irish music, and everything was in the local language, Gaelic. Probably never in my life had I needed to pee so bad when we arrived here and so when I located the facilities I made a mad effing dash! I was faced with perhaps the biggest decision of my life at the most innapropriate time. There were two doors. One said Fir, and the other Maer. Because everything else in the bar is in the traditional language, why make the toilet names any different? They didn't even have a bloody diagram, each door had a big red star. One million thoughts were going through my mind, and so I just decided on Fir. After opening the door and smelling the typical awful smell of a male urinal, I knew I was in the correct room. Thank Christ! I've never, ever been so happy to see that stainless steel wall in my life.

There's been a couple Gaelic words I've picked up along the way, because on all the street signs they have both the English and Gaelic words, but no-one has ever bothered to do that with a toilet.

This has been the longest bus trip we've done, but neither of us are feeling sick yet, so touch wood the rest of the trip continues this well. We're on our way to Galway where apparently I can get my locks fixed. Fingers crossed.

Talk soon!