This week I feel like we really got settled in to our daily life at the cottages! Monday-Thursday we have classes from 10am-1pm. The classes are Irish History, Gaelic Culture & Language, Irish Literature, and the course our UNK professor teaches that varies week to week. We eat leftovers, sandwiches, quesadillas, and other simple meals for lunches and we’ve worked out a rotation for dinners. Nicole, Kylee, Dan, Ron, and I each make about one dinner a week, and I’ve been using these meals as an excuse to try out new recipes! For my first meal I stayed pretty basic with chicken quesadillas, but the next week I made my boyfriends Taco Soup recipe, and this week I tried to be a little more adventurous with bacon wrapped jalapeño popper stuffed chicken and rice!
My view while blogging in Galway! 
I try and go on a long walk at least once a day, sometimes twice when I walk down to the rock shoreline for sunset. There is no shortage of beauty within walking distance: rock walls lining property lines, the rock beach, cattle, sheep, donkeys, ponies, and a nearby cemetery. When I heard that there was a cemetery near by we could walk to, I wasn’t particularly intrigued. However, visiting the spot really stood out to me. The cemetery is basically a large garden, instead of cut flowers in vases decorating the headstones there are actual soil plots with flowers and vegetables growing.
I spend the rest of my free time reading, crocheting, watching Netflix, watching movies, face timing my people back home, hanging out with my friends here, and doing homework for the classes we’re taking here and my online class. This week in our culture class we started learning how to play the tin whistle, which for me turned out to be a daunting task. Anything musical for me is apparently out of my comfort zone.
This weekend, we went on a field trip through Connemara National Park and up Croagh Patrick mountain. The weather was not on our side, and we almost canceled the trip. Luckily, we toughed it out! We made our first stop at Patrick Pearse’s cottage. Patrick Pearse was was of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. While this rebellion was ultimately unsuccessful, historians look on it as one of the necessary stepping stones for Ireland’s fight for independence. Pearse was executed at Kilmainham jail. At this stop we learned more about the man and his role in Gaelic education. He was also a prominent author of Gaelic poetry and short stories. He believe Irish children had the right to be educated in their own language.
After the cottage we decided to put our other plans on hold and race the weather. We went straight to our hostel to check in and start hiking Croagh Patrick. Hiking this mountain has become a pilgrimage. The mountain was named after St. Patrick, who apparently fasted and prayed there for 40 days in the year 441. Thousands of catholics climb the mountain every year in the last Sunday of July and there is a mass held on the summit. Some individuals still climb the mountain barefoot as an act of penance, ouch! It is likely the pilgrimage predates Christianity and began as a ritual celebrating Lughnasadh, the start of harvest.
We found the hike to be quite difficult, especially the last leg at a 35 degree incline over loose rock. Only 5 of us made it to the summit. The summit itself was a little anticlimactic because the cloud cover blocked our view. This apparently is pretty common, my friend Claire told me that she’s climbed the mountain 4 times and the clouds have never cleared for her. We were pretty lucky because on the way down the clouds cleared for about 2 minutes and rewarded our efforts with a beautiful view. We had to get back to the cottages quickly the next day, because a storm blew in that made travel unsafe. We only had enough time to make a brief stop at the National Museum of Country Life. This museum preserves the life of the average rural Irish person from 1850-1950.
Traveling Rays 