Cork
Tea, Travels, and all the Craic in Ireland
Ashes for Ash Wednesday—the chapel on UCC’s campus was so crowded that we actually couldn’t get in for the 5:00 mass and had to wait until 6, and even then there were people literally pushing their way into the church.
Maddy and I traveled to Italy this weekend to tour Florence with our Art History class, where our professor gave us guided tours of incredible museums and churches—we got to see so many of the works we’ve been studying!
We spent Thursday night in Rome and took a late walking tour of the city, hitting everything from the Pantheon to the Trevi Fountain to the Colosseum.
One of the many beautiful frescoes that decorate the churches in Florence.
Orsanmichele! The outside of the building is covered in niches that hold exquisite statues—each statue and niche was commissioned and paid for by a different guild. Everything in Florence is so much closer than I expected—we were walking back to the apartment when we accidentally stumbled upon this church.
This is the view from the apartment in Florence we stayed in—that’s their roof garden, and right behind it is a view of Il Duomo and the Bell Tower! The cathedral was unbelievably close.
Drying laundry has taken over my room.
The Aran Islands are known for their stone walls and the wool sweaters that are made there—we biked around the island and saw lots of stone (the walls are EVERYWHERE, and they divide the land up into lots of smaller square fields) but no sheep—just lots of cows like these two.
Biking along the coast—the Aran islands are so small that you could see the water from just about everywhere.
Don Angus is a stone fort from 2,000 BC on the edge of Inis Moor; you pay a Euro and get to walk casually up a stone path past cows and walk right into the middle of the ring of stone walls. The fort is facing a cliff, and there are no sigs warning of possible death or barriers or anything—you can walk right up to the edge of the cliff and look down at the ocean. This is a view down the edge of the cliff, taken as I was laying down on my stomach so that I wouldn’t fall off.
We stopped at the Cliffs of Moher on the way up to Galway—it was foggy but beautiful.
One of the lakes we hiked around
I made it to the top of the mountain alive!
View of Killarney at the end of the day
