weekend in Cork

I went to Cork for less than 24 hours, due to various factors. Here are some pictures - certainly not the best I've ever taken, but I guess they'll get the job done.

First, how I travel:

The tiny room in the hostel. This is how boring I am: I was completely exhausted after having spent the week alone with the kids, so I ended up going to bed at 7:30 and falling asleep by 8. I'm sure my roommates were unimpressed, but then again I didn't really talk to them since I was catching up on some much-needed sleep.

View of Cork

I toured the old Cork city gaol, which took forever to find because the Irish don't believe in decent signage - quite frustrating, in fact - I've noticed it in Dublin and Galway as well, signs are sort of arbitrary and you only get them if you're lucky. So some streets won't be marked and you just have to hope for the best, and other times you come across a signpost with literally 10 different signs pointing to different sites and such. This is the jail:

The tour is kind of cool, you get a headset and listen to an audio as you walk through the rooms. There are figures in different places and the narrators tell you their stories, why they are in the jail, what they did, and also giving you some information on conditions during this time (mid 1800's to early 1900's). It's a good tour, but very weird and grim.

This is to show how thick the walls are - that's my foot:

Apparently during this time people believed that criminality was communicable, so most prisoners were held in solitary confinement. As a result some people went insane. The most common crime, as my tape was fond of saying, was that of poverty.

Jail or castle?

Obama is everywhere! The button reads "YES YOU CAN" - it's an Aer Lingus ad (which I see EVERYWHERE) for cheap rates to the US.





Well I guess that doesn't say much about my time in Cork. I didn't do much, just eating, wandering, getting lost - I did walk through the University campus, but being a Sunday morning, not a lot of people were out and about.

As of FRIDAY, 13 March, I'm finished at Mountainstown! I'm traveling with my parents for a week and then I'll be heading back to the fifty nifty United States.