You don't get to sit down in church?

Last night, Chris had a concert and went on to the last Blas session at Scholar’s Pub, where he played a number of songs and had, by all accounts, a good time. He stopped back to the room between the one event and the other and left for the pub at about 10:45. I was reminded that while anyone who looks at a map can tell that Ireland is in the north, until you’re actually here and the sun doesn’t set until after 10 p.m. you don’t really understand just how far north it is. The sun rises here by 5 a.m. and it wasn’t fully dark last night until about 11. Several days this week, it was overcast or actually rained throughout the day and it wasn’t until after dinner that the sun came out for several hours shining brightly.

Today, however, it was lovely the whole day through. Chris had an early morning rehearsal for the final concert and I sat in the sunshine before attending said concert, where I learned—among other things—that 17 different countries were represented by Blas students this year. The concert program revealed both things students had learned while here and the talent they brought with them—there was a bit of everything: songs in Irish, songs in English, solos, duets, small groups of tin whistles, harp, drums, guitar, mandolin, fiddles, piano, concertinas, all manner of Irish dance. The concert brought Blas to a close and after a brief certificate ceremony, people went their separate ways.

Chris and I headed into the Limerick city center via bus and wandered up and down big streets and small alleyways. We settled on a place called The Yellow Lemon for lunch based on its proximity to where we stood when we decided we were hungry only to discover it was a Polish place and had a menu similar to so many small places in our neighborhood at home and similar décor, too. We didn’t spend too much time there, but moved on to see what we could see in the limited time we had. We found a tourism office on the river and a lovely woman there pointed out two different directions we might head: one was toward a castle and the other toward an art gallery. Chris suggested that since we have lots of art in our own town and no castles, we might opt to head that way. I agreed.

We actually never made it inside the castle proper because we stopped in the Cathedral Church of St Mary the Virgin and spent so very much time there. Chris and I have been in a lot of churches over the years, but this one gave pause. It was built in the 12^th century on the site where the Vikings landed several hundred years before that and is the oldest building in Limerick which is still in daily use. There are placards in the church putting its existence in perspective of world history and so many things that seem ancient have occurred since the church opened its doors originally—Ghengis Khan died, the Canterbury Tales were written, the Magna Carta was signed. The original pre-Reformation altar is the largest of its type in this part of the world and is a 13 foot long piece of single stone that weighs more than three tons.

The church has Ireland’s only collection of  misericords from the 1400s, wooden stalls in which the priests stood—before sitting was allowed during mass—with hidden lips that were designed to take their weight as the hours passed during worship, so called misericords because the chairs themselves were considered to be acts of mercy.

There was also a leper’s squint. Lepers were not allowed to worship inside the church but were allowed to congregate outside at the back, where a narrow slit of a window afforded them the opportunity to hear and possibly see the mass. The slit was large enough for the arm of the leper to reach in for the Eucharist. Again, we’ve been to a lot of churches but have not seen that before.

There was a choir rehearsing for a concert to take place this evening in the church (the same concert the accordion-player was here to perform in) and they were singing nearly the entire time we were touring the church which added to our experience and prolonged our stay as we listened.  

When we left St. Mary’s, we walked around King John’s Castle and back along the river to the city center, reading placards about Irish history and the battles between King William of Orange and King James II which ultimately resulted in centuries of unrest between Ireland and England. When we got back to the center, we did a bit of map shopping in preparation for our road adventure that begins tomorrow. We have a rental car reserved and a route picked out… kind of. Chris will drive and he seems relatively calm about driving in the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road and even seems like he’ll be victorious dealing with the roundabouts. I, on the other hand, am freaked out about navigating from the passenger seat, particularly since I can’t see anything smaller than my thumbs anymore, but we picked the map with the largest print we could find and will pour over it a bit before we set out tomorrow afternoon. Whatever happens, it can’t be any worse than the unmapped dirt road we got stuck on in rural Mexico looking for the finca, but that’s a story from long ago. At least the signs here are in English… mostly.