On Monday March 21st, we began our day with a lovely breakfast. Like this breakfast had all sorts of things involved unlike my breakfasts in Spain. There was meat and cereal and yogurt and oatmeal, everything I could possibly have wanted to eat for breakfast basically. Then we packed up all our stuff and headed to Mercy Center International. Since I was on a school's trip, they obviously had to go see their founding peoples or whatever. So Sister Mary Catherine was the one that started the sisters of Mercy but before she became a sister she started this house place that is now the Mercy Center International. She was all about helping the poor and seemed very social workery, using her inheritance to help those in need. Then she was basically forced into becoming a sister but went with it because it was a way to help those in need still and keep truthful to her religion or whatever. While it was interestingish, I wasn't too interested so I won't bore you with the details of that, but there were blood stains on the floor that hadn't been replaced from back in the day in that place just so everyone is aware. I obviously had too much time on my hands to stare at the old infirmary floor while everyone else was listening to something or other.
Once we were done with that we began our journey to Clonmacnoise. On our way out of Dublin, our amazing tour guide, Tony, told us about the Easter Rising of 1916 and made sure we saw the bullet holes that were left over from the rising on the statues we drove past. It was pretty cool if you ask me. Tony was a wealth of information and I quite enjoyed all the stories that he had to tell, though I cannot say that I will remember all of them.
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Photo Cred: Mildred
Clonmacnoise |
So Clonmacnoise was a monastery or something that kept getting attacked by vikings. Everyone time it was attacked it would be rebuilt and so there were a bunch of different century things there. The cemetery was pretty cool to check out I suppose.
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Photo Cred: Mildred
Clonmacnoise |
Well after our tour/visit to Clonmacnoise we headed to our second hotel, Menlo Park. After dinner my mum, second mom and I went on an adventure around Galway. We listened to some music and ate some gelato. At one point we entered a pub but couldn't get in very far because there was people dancing to the musicians playing a guitar, drum, and some sort of flute. I ended up standing in this awkward alcove where there were two guys just sitting there. It was very small and just the three of us were chilling there watching the dancers. I don't actually know what the guys were doing because I decided to not look at them after awkwardly intruding on their alcove. It was extremely awkward though I cannot stress that enough.
As the evening wore down, we began our journey back towards the hotel. At first we were just walking on some random road because I didn't feel like retracing the bus's steps from when Tony dropped us off in town. Then my mum decided we should probably actually go to the hotel because we were getting a cranky second mom. She was being a complete bitch let me tell ya. I was pretty sure on the way we needed to go to get back to the hotel when we did retrace steps but neither my mum nor my second mom believed me so my mum kept asking for directions. I would like to point out that I was completely correct on the directions. My second mom was just bitching about it and tried calling the hotel for directions when we were perfectly fine. Her attitude kept up for the whole trip and let me tell you, it was very grating to the nerves. If you're going to travel, you better be open to getting lost because that's half the fun....
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Photo Cred: Mum
Knock: Mosaic in the Basilica |
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Photo Cred: Mum
Knock |
The next day, Tuesday March 22nd, we had another breakfast of anything I could possibly want before heading off to the Marian Shrine at Knock. I wasn't too impressed, but then again I'm not religious and basically just decided that people probably came together and made an elaborate story in order to bring in tourists later on in life. I'm sure they probably thought they saw something but I still wasn't impressed. I did sort of enjoy learning about life back in the day though. There used to be taxes on stuff, I don't remember what the tax actually was now that it comes to writing about it but I know it was a ridiculous tax. We did eventually learn about there being a window tax so some of church windows and such were made smaller so that they didn't have to pay as much when they put glass windows in. It was actually the glass that was taxed. For the most part I was pretty bored at Knock though. The mosaic in the basilica at Knock was pretty cool though. I want to know how long it took them to make it because it's huge...
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Photo Cred: Mum
One of the Stations of the Cross |
Once we were done at Knock, we headed off to Ballilntubber Abbey. This Abbey is known as "the Abbey that refused to die" because back in the day Catholicism was very much so illegal in Ireland, but people still practiced. I believe this is the Abbey that was built because someone important grew up there and he wanted to repay the people. The only thing was that he accidentally repaid the wrong people because his stonemasons went to the wrong village, so he repaid them twice technically speaking when he did end up building the Abbey after all. So in this Abbey there was no roof for a long while because it was burned by an army in 1653 (yes I'm reading the itinerary that has all this great information about places). Even though the Abbey didn't have a roof, they still had mass there. The children and older adults would get to be under the one section that had a roof but everyone else would just stand under the open sky in rain or shine. I'm sure it rained a lot too. The Abbey has stations of the cross and something else set up outside on the beautiful grounds that are made in a Celtic fashion so we got to see the Celtic version of the stations of the cross and such. It was pretty cool even for us nonreligious people like myself.
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Photo Cred: Mum
Ballilntubber Abbey |
On our way back to Menlo Park Hotel after Ballilntubber Abbey, we saw Ashford Castle. Tony basically tricked the guy that was guarding the entrance, telling him we were just going to a gold store to buy some stuff because we were golfers. We literally just took some pictures and didn't do anything else. We weren't allowed anywhere near the castle without paying, which we didn't. All we wanted were the pictures after all.
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Photo Cred: Mildred
Ashford Castle: All those cars and we ain't allowed over |
After that we headed back to Menlo Park Hotel with only some minor car sickness problems because damn was the road not okay. The view was marvelous though, if only I had been able to keep my eyes open without getting motion sick.... Once we got back, mum and I went on another adventure in Galway, just walking around and chatting. The river they got in Galway is pretty cool. When Tony drove us into Galway, he played us some music to get us "in the mood" for going to pubs, because that's what everyone else was doing on the bus. Mum and I made it back to the hotel that night without any problems.
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