Woa! Just barely made it on the train from Galway to Dublin. Galway was a lot of fun and I got majorly silly. One Tuesday I arrived in Galway at about 2:00pm. I was really hungry so I had made my way down to a store for some bread, yogurt, cheese, tomatoes and bananas. After eating I did a little walking around to figure out what the town was like and to see what I could do. I spent some time at the train station trying to figure out how I was going to get to the Cliffs of Moher. So with the help of the kind lady at the information desk I managed to figure it out. As I was also walking around the various info centers to get a map of Galway I picked up a crude, hard drawn map of Galway from this hostel near the train station. On their map they had drawn the location of this pub called the Crane Bar across town, nowhere near the hostel. I figured it must be worth checking out since it was so far out of the way.
At about 5:00 or 6:00pm I made my way down to the Crane, which turned out to be a very cool place! I had a beer and talked to this nice French lady before I bailed for a little, to eat dinner and check e-mail. Afterwards I headed back down to the Crane and hung out until about 9:30pm when they were having live music upstairs. When I was there enjoying the music and talking to people, a few people from the hostel walked in. There were these two guys from Spain, one of them with a video camera, and this guy from Italy. They also had a female friend who is living here in Galway studying English. They were very cool people to hang with and we were harassing each other in Italian and Spanish. It was really a good time. The music was also really very good and not too loud so you could listen to the music or talk to people, no problem. I also talked to this Irish guy who spends 8 or 9 months in Thailand. He was pretty cool and invited me to his house in Thailand if I ever make it that far! After the bar closed down I made it back to the hostel and crashed.
Wednesday morning I got up early and made my way to the bus station by 8:40am to head out to the Cliffs of Moher. The bus ride out there was like a Disney World ride. I sat next to two East Germans who were traveling around Ireland for a week. One of them lives in Dublin and is working. I spent most of the day hanging out with the Cliffs and walking around. It is really nice out there and it was exciting to stand on the Atlantic and look out as far as I could see. The area is protected by a wall to discourage people from walking along some of the cliffs, off the marked trail. People in general do not follow the signage and walk around anyway. I did not go off the beaten track. While I was out there I did some reading and just basically hung out, it was really nice. The bus left at about 2:00pm and while I was waiting for it to let us on some lady working for Bailey's had me fill out a questionnaire for two mini bottles of their liquor, way cool! The ride back was another Disney World trip and I got back into Galway at about 4:30pm.
I went to the store and bought some supplemental food and headed back to the hostel to eat, shave an relax a little. Afterwards I found my buddies playing in the street so I joined them, playing some percussion while the rest sang or played some instrument. It was pretty incredible, making over 30 pounds after being there for a few hours. After we had collected everyone we made our way to get some fish and chips which were very good, and a pint of Guinness. While we were sitting there, were harassed each other some more and that's when the Spanish guys were calling me Presidente Guinness, it was really funny. We were really having a good time and one of the Spanish guys was filming again so I was really hamming it up. We were talking and the Italians share the same idea I do, that Spanish and Italian are reasonably similar in their basics. That was great to hear since I was a witness to their communication, they didn't have any problems talking to each other. We stayed out until midnight or 1:00am until we crashed back in the dorm. The Italian was trying to knock me over when I was getting really for bed. He must have thought I was really drunk, but I wasn't so it really didn't work, haha!
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