I made cooooooooooooookies! Tesco has a line of cookies where you just add water and butter and BAM delicious cookies in like 10 min. Fantastic! Though definitely not as good as the cookies I make at home. I also wanted to make brownies, but I can’t find the Ghirardelli mix anywhere and I just don’t think I could settle for a lesser type haha. Watched “P.S. I Love You” while cooking and cried like a baby. That movie is too darn sad. Though it was gonna be a comedy when I first saw it and boy oh boy was I surprised. Good, but depressing.
Friday I went to Irish and learned more phrases…now I can talk more specifically about the weather and also put sentences in verb, subject, object, pronoun order. We’re learning real grammar! And guess what, it makes a little more sense than the spelling of the damn words. Other than the class, though, I just sat at home and watched TV (Leverage reruns ftw) and rested for my early wakeup for my Archaeology field trip on Saturday.
Well, speaking of Archaeology, this field trip was a wonderful combo of old structures and walking through cow pastures. Very exciting. I really did have a good time, though, and got to see a bunch of things that I totally never would have gone to visit. It’s funny…in Ireland there are bunches of ruins just dotted around, so it’s very possible to life on a farm where in one of the corners is an ancient ring fort, or to graze your cattle around a 16thth century A.D. The structure no longer exists but the outline is very clear. It was pretty cool because this wasn’t a typical castle like one might picture—they were circular and the “moats” were actually two giant ditches (9m or more) dug all the way around the ringfort THROUGH the rock. Craziness! There were actually many kings in Ireland at that point, though most of them only controlled a small amount of land; the Éoganacht Raithleann were in turn ruled by a provincial king. Next was the 15th century Ballinacarriga tower house. The tower house was the most common form of building in that time as it was more vertical than horizontal. We got to go inside this one and explore all of the rooms. It was a lot smaller than Blarney, though there were a lot of similarities. We got lunch in Clonakilty, a small town where almost nothing was open. So unfortunate. But we walked around a bit, saw the church (even the smallest towns have beautiful churches), and ended up hanging out at the hotel restaurant. Well, luckily, I brought my own food. Except I meant to make a sandwich the night before but surprise! I didn’t have any bread. Failblog. So I just ate chicken and melted cheese haha. Awesome. Thankfully the gracious Rebecca kindly shared half of her delicious sandwich. After my delicious lunch we moved on to Coppinger’s Court, a 17th century semi-fortified manor house literally in the middle of cow pastures. The bus couldn’t take us up the road, so we walked a bit and were soon joined by two adorable yet random dogs, who insisted we pay them lots of attention. They followed us all the way to the pasture, where we had to wait for the cows to be herded to another field before going in. The dogs kept running in and chasing the cattle, which was hilarious because they were about the size of Coconut and watching them drive huge cows around was unexpected. At one point though the cows started running at the dogs and they scampered right back to us on the other side of the fence. Then the cows just stood in a line and watched us. Seriously, they were staring us down. Then they started walking slowly towards us, still in a line. Freaky! Once the field was safe we jumped over an electric fence. Yeah, my life flashed before my eyes. Aka not at all dangerous as long as our skin didn’t touch it, and since it was like 30º out I was completely covered. Rebecca couldn’t quite make it over without touching the wire (geez what a midget! :-P), and since she’s still alive I guess it wasn’t really that bad. So we did survive the cows and the wire, but we weren’t allowed to go inside the manor house cause apparently it could fall on us. Faaaaantastic. Finally we hiked up a freaking mountain to the Drombeg stone circle from the Bronze Age, which is apparently rather famous. Picture Stonehege, but a lot smaller. Essentially the same idea—this circle was aligned with the winter equinox (November 21) and some sort of ritual was conducted there. Obviously we took pictures with the gorgeous landscape that we could see from the mountaintop and a lot of people did the always-popular “picture on a sacrificial stone” haha. Our professor is SO COOL! He really knows his stuff and plus we weren’t looking just at tombs and such—this was a deviation from what we’d been studying in class and so so much more interesting. He gave us awesome tours through all of the sites and told us lots about how life would have been back then. All I can say is, thank goodness I didn’t live then! There’s this thing called a garderobe which is essentially a toilet that empties onto the grounds below. Garderobeserious ew. Imagine that horrific smell! century manor house. Craziness. We started out by hiking through a frost-covered field to Garranes Ringfort, which was the royal seat of the Éoganacht Raithleann who were provincial kings around the 5 means “clothes guard,” which might seem like an odd name for a toilet except for the fact that people would hang their clothes above the hole as the sulfur and other fumes would kill lice and other bugs. Ew. Like serious ew.
That night Rafa and I went to a birthday party for one of the girls on the team out in Thurles (pronounced Ter-les). It was in a pub and we had the whole space to ourselves, plus we had rooms right above the pub that we could sleep in. It was really really fun and I got to bond with the girls on the team more than I had before. They’re all awesome people. Plus I got to cuddle with Rafa that night…what a win! :-P (There weren’t enough beds so people were all squishing or sleeping on the floor.) I slept late and got back to Cork around 4 and spent the rest of the day in bed cause I was tired. Don’t worry, Mom, I finished my hw before I went out on Saturday :-)
Slán go fóill!
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