Kicking the Crack in Galway

Before you get worried, "kicking the crack" is slang here for having a good time. But it's not just any good time, or so I've been told. It's referring to the BEST kind of good time, the uniquely Irish kind, that you can only have when you're in Ireland. Or at least that's how the Irish explained the phrase to me.

So, I spent my first couple days here pretty much asleep in bed, but since then I've started to get some time to explore the town! It's pretty wonderful. Shop St is a few blocks away from where I'm living and it's pretty much the city center as far as I can tell. There's this whole series of walking roads with loads of cute little stores and sandwich shops and pubs. One of my friends commented that it looked like what Disneyland is trying to be like, haha. But I guess it's kind of true. It's just so... quaint! I haven't explored the entire city as much as some of my friends, but I've got a pretty good handle of the four block radius or so around Shop St because I've spent a lot of hours walking up and down around there. I'm sure the bay is really pretty but it's so exciting to walk around where the people are. There are street performers a lot of the time and I love them. There were african drums and one guy slumped against a building playing Bad Romance in a thick accent. There was a full band playing original music on the street yesterday. The band consisted of a guitar, a double bass and a banjo and they were awesome, I hope to run into them again. Also there are bands in all the pubs like every night. There are so many musicians! My favorite band so far plays at the Spanish Arch twice a week. I think they're called Alale and they played like pretty traditional Irish music, I liked it so much.

I've been trying to try out a lot of places because there are SO MANY places and I want to see which ones are good! Although the atmosphere seems pretty good to me everywhere here. Also the Guinness is good, hee hee. Some of my friends don't like it but they are obviously not MEN'S MEN like I am, hahahaha.

Speaking of my friends, I have been making friends! So far I have not made any Irish friends, I have only made other American friends. Obviously I've been hanging out with the other people from Canisius and we're all having a good time. But one of our roommates is from St. Joes in Philly so I've been hanging out with the group of girls from St. Joe's too and they are really fun.

So I'm pretty pleased to spend time with them, but I'm hoping to meet some Irish people soon! I mean, I've talked to Irish people at pubs and stuff and so far everyone seems really friendly, but I'm hoping once school starts I will make some good Irish friends who will want to go out and do stuff with me. I had a few orientation things this week but school starts for us and the local students next week. So I'm more or less looking forward to it starting. The campus is really nice, though I don't have as much of a grasp over the sense of direction within it as city square. But I can get there and back effectively. It's not too far and the walk is nice.

Took that on my morning walk to school. I decided to take Irish language and I'm pretty psyched about it. It's more bilingual here than I expected, actually. And the professor who teaches the beginners Irish seems really amazing. Here's a story about him. I've been welcomed to Galway about a billion times, but when this professor started to welcome me, he stopped and asked me if I was Irish, if my family was from here. I told him yes and he said, "Well in that case, welcome home." (b'awwwww) There's still stuff to get used to, obviously, but I'm starting to feel kind of at home. A bartender last night told me it seemed like I'd been here a while. I thought that was a pretty good compliment actually.

Now it's time to see what a weekend in Galway is like!