Hoth, Coruscant, Florin and Gallifrey

The other day we went on a bus tour as a means of seeing a bit more of Ireland with our limited time - we went to Limerick, the Burren, Bunratty Castle and the Cliffs of Insanity.
This meant a lot of time on the bus listening to Irish radio. Here is a great insight into Irish radio: after reporting on the heavy snow across the country, they announced all the babies born in the county that week. Then, they played "Ice Ice Baby". Irish DJs are out of control!

Over the course of the day I also got really excited about the impending announcement of the World Cup bid winners, which they were counting down to. Hooray to World Cup in Russia (particularly as while I was there they had all their flags out for the World Cup bid)! Boo to no World Cup in Australia!

Ireland is a great country which I have loved immensely! It has proved everyone wrong: I didn't get rained on once! Heavily snowed on, yes, but no real rain and in Cork we had three days of blue skies.
Ireland has felt like a string of drinking stouts and crazy occurences.

These occurences include:

- using my voucher for a free pub crawl on a pub crawl in Dublin in which there ended up being only 4 other people (including the guide). Jenny and I were the oldest people there (including the guide) and we definitely felt it. It was a strange but pretty good time, but when we got to the last pub things went nuts! Within the space of what felt like a very short amount of time: two of pub crawl attendees started making out and then went off together, our guide mysteriously disappeared, the other pub crawl member had locals get into a fist fight over her and then they got kicked out the pub, and I found myself partying harder than I ever thought possible to "Chelsea Dagger" and "Killing In The Name Of" played by a cover band. I woke up mildly hungover and ate a full Irish breakfast, including black pudding! I have concluded that Dublin is a good time.

- going to the Great Jedi Library! Or, the building that George Lucas somewhat sneakily "adopted" for the Jedi Library. I think this could be the first Star Wars location I've ever visited and it was insane, it was just like stepping into the movie. I was exceptionally excited. Then, once I got over that, I was also excited about what a cool library it was!


(this is a photo found on google because they don't let you take photos in the Jedi Academy!)

- In Cork, Jenny and I shared wine with a completely crazy Frenchman known as "French Adrien Brody". We never found out his real name but he looked a lot like Adrien Brody. Twice we saw him cooking, and getting very excited about, potatoes.

- We went to the Cork gaol where, after doing a tour of the old prison cells which are filled with creepily life-like wax dummies, we were going to look in the little shop. When we got in a guy told us to come with him so we could watch a film. He led us down a corridor and into a big circular room and told us to sit "near the fire" (heater). We were the only ones there in this big room - except for some more wax dummies with their backs to us - and he left and turned off the lights. Instead of a movie, the wax dummies were lit up by this weird blue light and we heard choir singing for probably a good two minutes. It was completely crazy. Eventually a film did start, projected onto the walls, but for those two minutes where wax dummies that appeared to be singing in a dark and otherwise empty prison chamber, we were genuinely completely spooked.

- the place we stayed in in Cork was above a pub and we went to a battle of the bands there. We saw a wild girl with gas masks on her shoes who made mermaid sounds whilst she was singing and at one point had a guy lift her above his head. Sometimes she did punk songs with lines like "pussy make the world go round" which were not quite my thing but then sometimes she did reggae songs where her voice sounded really good. If this girl ever becomes famous I guess we can say, hey, we saw her in the Cork Bru Bar Battle of the Bands!

- Whilst down in the bar we saw a Fake Moriarty. This guy bore a very spooky resemblance to me, particularly from the side, which was also helped by the fact that we wore pretty similar clothes. Jenny and I theorised that he could be a distant Moriarty relative, and then joked that he might be the new roommate we knew we had in our dorm. Surprise! He was. We then concocted elaborate plans to find out if his name was Moriarty (which basically consisted of Jenny saying "hey, Moriarty" when we were both around). We never found out. Either way, I think he must have been the wacky Irish version of myself! He wouldn't believe me when I told him the time in the morning - for some reason never established, his phone was set half an hour earlier than the actual time.
Other than this candidate I didn't meet any other Moriartys in Ireland (to my knowledge), though I did hear a request for "Family Moriarty" when I was listening to the radio on my bus trip (it was for Billy Joel)!

Here is another classic Jenny quote from one night in Cork:
"This is the worst dinner ever. I'm having beer and two mushrooms."

After Cork we returned to Dublin for two more nights, where we decided to take a night off and ate junk food and went to see Megamind. It was good times! Today we finally made it to the Guinness Storehouse and tomorrow morning we're hopefully finally flying out to England - flying into Manchester and then heading straight for the Lake District. We're waking up at 4am so fingers crossed we're not thwarted by further snow!

My photos from the week are all up: here

They played songs by The Jam in both the first Irish pub we went to and the last. Ireland is excellent!