Last night, Chris played with the band so to speak. The
night time session was full of both professional and amateur musicians and when
someone started a song he knew, he put bow to the strings. It was a late night
for him, so we eased into today. Now that we don’t have to fit ourselves into
Anne and Eugene’s breakfast schedule, that’s a bit easier.
From breakfast until lunch, we walked. We visited the Galway
Cathedral which is a much newer church than those we’ve been to here so far,
but it is majestic. In fact, it is the most recently built of all European
cathedrals, dedicated in 1965. The altar sits in the center and is surrounded
by bas relief stations of the cross, rose windows and twinkling mosaics. It’s
quite stunning. Like the cathedral, Galway itself seems newer than the rest of
Ireland we’ve seen. It is a bustling, modern city full of workers and tourists
and shops and taxis and buses and street performers. Our neighborhood has
restaurants outside of which people wait in line for tables and pub and clubs,
small theaters, tea shops and boutiques. We’re close to the city center and
today walked the perimeter of Eyre Square and then walked through it, as well.
It’s close to the bus station so many of the people sitting in the square have
their luggage with them and you hear words and phrases in every language as you
move through them. We window shopped wool for me and instruments for Chris and were just wandering about when we
ran into an old family friend—someone I haven’t seen in person in twenty years.
We passed him and his family completely before his face triggered something in
my brain and I called out his name as I was turning around to catch sight of
him again. We chatted briefly and discovered that he and his family have been
in Ireland the same amount of time we have and that they were in Donegal last
week, too. Small world and all that.
We came back to Crescent Close for lunch and then went to
the Salthill Prom, a place made famous by Steve Earle in his lyrics to Galway Girl and walked along the ocean
endlessly. There are both rock and sand beaches and even though the city is at
your back, you feel you’re in the wild. One of the things that captivates about
this country is that instead of capitalizing, they seem to trust that their assets
will speak for themselves. There are no signs for the promenade. It doesn’t
begin and end in something reminiscent of Pigeon Forge. It is just a windy,
salty, wonderful walk along the coast.
We took a break to map our route to Connemara tomorrow and
then had dinner at Monroe’s. Everyone should go there and everyone should order
the Irish stew. Actually, only one person needs to order it because a serving
will feed the table. The waitress said when she was clearing my plate that in
order to eat the whole serving one must make a day of the pub and have a little
for lunch and a little more for dinner. We were getting ready to leave the pub
when in walked the same old friend again and this time we sat and spent time
catching up. It’s a gift to have time to do so. I suppose it’s unlikely that we’ll
run into anyone else we know here in Ireland, but now I’ll be wondering as we
turn each corner who we might find around the bend, or at least if we’ll see
Michael and his family again.
We excused ourselves so Chris could get to the session, and he
played more this night than he did last night. I stayed in and read my book when
I discovered that while we have lots of channels here, most of them are airing Knots Landing and other American exports
that accurately reflect the richness and intellectual sophistication of our culture
today. In any case, it’s growing late and it doesn’t look like we’re going to
get any earlier of a start tomorrow than we did today. It’s a good thing Anne
isn’t waiting with a fry pan full of eggs for us to wake…
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