8. week
On Monday we had a St. Patrick’s party at school. There was coffee and tea on offer, free of charge, as well as various kinds of pastries and cake. The cake was decorated with colors of the Irish flag and it was apparently delicious. We couldn’t tell, as we had eaten ourselves full with the pastries. At the background there were some teachers playing some traditional Irish instruments as flute and drum. There weren’t many students attending the classes, probably as the following day would be a day off from school. Our teacher told us about an opportunity to volunteer in the next days’ St. Patrick’s parade and as we were going to stay in Sligo and we didn’t have any plans, we decided to go for it.
In the morning we went to the Sligo Glasshouse as advised to volunteer in the parade. There was some coffee and tea for those who wanted to drink something warm before going outside. We were assigned in crowd managing near the Ulster Bank that is in the route of the parade, near the Yeats’ statue. We waited for an hour for the parade to start and in the meanwhile took some pictures with the statue of Yeats and some police officers (garda), who agreed with joy when Siru asked them. The parade was pretty relaxed – nothing big but all things communal. Afterwards we were awarded with a voucher to the hotel’s restaurant, where we had chicken with whiskey sauce, some dessert and tea. Later that night we went to our classmates’ place for a drinks. After a little while everybody decided to continue to Swagman, but Noora bailed out and went home because she was a bit sleepy already. Siru, however, was the brave one of us and went there with our Irish classmates. After Swagman they didn’t want to end their evening so they went to T&C to drink some more beer and talk about great things.
On Wednesday we went hillwalking with our Adventure Tourism class. We were late over an hour and by the time we got to Aghacashel, Leitrim, our guide told us we couldn’t actually climb the hill we were supposed to, as we wouldn’t see too much because of the clouds. To us the weather seemed nice and the hillwalking would have still been better than the loop we did. We were expecting some nature and peace from a national walking loop, but we were walking beside a asphalted road most of the time and there were a pile of tires dumped at the middle of woods. We stopped by the wonder for what seemed like an eternity and then had to walk really fast rest of the loop – no chance we would stop by the scenic places. In the evening we picked up Siru’s roommates from the bus station, offered them food and hit the beds.
On Thursday morning we went to school as usual and Siru’s friends went to Strandhill by themselves. Noora had her presentation about Lapland – everybody was amazed by it and the magical nature of Finland and as Nooras pleasure the teacher was amazed by the lack of her notes to look in during the presentation. After school Noora had interview for a summer job via Skype and got the job. As Siru’s friends came back from Strandhill and we went together to Donaghy’s to eat the best hamburgers “ever”. The portions were huge as we had already known and most of us couldn’t finish it. After eating in the pub we were tired and just headed back home to get some sleep.
On Friday we wanted to go somewhere together with the girls and ordered a cab before going to school. After one hour of school the taxi took us to the Glencar Waterfalls. We had actually planned on going to the Devil’s Chimney, but the taxi driver didn’t quite know where that was. As we noticed we should have gotten off in Sligo but we were in Leitrim instead, we decided to walk there. The walk was not too long and we still had the strength to climb to the actual spot. We could see from the road that there wasn’t any water coming out because there had been so dry weather, but we still decided to have the walk. Our lovely taxi driver Paul took us back to Sligo from the waterfalls. As the day of walking hadn’t been enough we went to the city center – Noora went crazy and bought two pairs of shoes and a handbag. We stayed up late as Siru’s friends were leaving at 1 in the morning – it was easier that way than trying to sleep a bit before.
There should have been water right here
Instead, it was just cloudy and humid
Upside down
On Saturday we went to Doorly Park again – we kept going from the bird feeding point and had our packed lunch sitting in the sun. On our way back we discovered the outdoor gym. We spent total of 3 hours of walking and exercising and afterwards we kept going to do our groceries in two shops. The final count for the day was 5 hours of activity and we were proud.
On Sunday we decided to go to Strandhill People’s Market because the weather was nice and also because Paul had told us there was only two left for the spring. We walked to the market place (hangar at the airport) and there were some interesting booths of different kind of craftsmanship. We were enthusiastic when we saw a booth were a man was selling cheeses. We asked for tasters and ended up buying two different pieces of cheese that we liked – only small pieces so we could eat them right away. We went outside of the market place and sat down in the grass to eat our cheese. After our cheesy picnic we decided to have a walk along the beach.
We walked for several hours and thought we could take a shortcut back with a nice scenery. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The walk over hairy hills was exhausting and we didn’t really know when we would see something else than the long grass. Finally after an hour of walking in the hills (and a few mental and physical meltdowns) we found some people. There were also thousands of seashells in the sand. We picked up a few of them for Siru’s collection. After finding our way back to civilization we went to Mammy Johnston’s where we decided to eat some crepes. The girl that took our order was actually Finnish and confused by the sudden mutual language and the dehydration ordering something so simple was a bit complicated. In the end we got a tasty crepes with banana, strawberries, chocolate and ice cream of our choice.
Low tide
Holy Trinity of Siru
Knocknarea over the hairy hills