This 3-part post is going to chronicle the Ring of Kerry Heritage Weekend that 9 members of our CSBSJU group went on. Day 1 is Friday, Feb 4th.
I knew it was going to be a rainy weekend, as I had been religiously checking the forecasts every single day like twice a day. We walked to UCC, got to the bus and loaded our stuff. I had brought a backpack full of clothes, camera, and ibuprofen. I figured I was kind of sick already, and this rainy weekend was not going to help the cause. Little did I know that the pills were going to be a lifesaver. We got on the bus and I sat next to Andy. We had very little leg room, and my legs were cramped by the time we got to the hotel. But along the way Marian taught us some gaelic phrases, and Go Rev Maha Gut was the most important. It means thank you, but literally "May God wish you well" or something like that. We were actually going to be going into some Gaeltacht villages, where they do not speak English, so Marian said that it would be important to know a few phrases. We drove and drove and hit killarney in about an hour and half, even through it is only 53 miles away. Then we went to our first stop, the Kerry Bog Villiage. They had thatched roof houses that were historical replicas, filled with the actual furnishings of the people that would have inhabited them. The guy there said that each house would have slept 12 to 14 people, and the houses were the size of a one stall garage! They also talked about the importance of peat turf. Murain said that the turf was cut up, wrung out, and laid out to dry in a special stacked arrangement to be burned for food and heat. Kerry is full of these bog lands that produce peat. She even said that people steal peat and sell it, because of the recession and the fact that Americans love the taste of peat cooked meat. There were also these two Irish wolfhounds there, they are the tallest dog breed in the world. They also had these Irish ponies, but I didn’t care about them as much. We went and sat in the Red Fox pub and this old guy sang the song “The Horse and Plow” unaccompanied. It was cool. On the whole, the bog museum was not my favorite stop.
While drving towards town we passed this island in a bay. Apparently a few decades ago there were lots of people on it, but then they all moved away so there was only one family. It had a young boy, and a journalist wrote an article entitled “the loneliest boy in the world, who has only gulls as playmates”. Apparently people felt so sorry for him that they sent him loads of presents. Murian said “The only person who wasn’t happy would have been the postman, who had to row the mail to the island every day”. We pulled into the hotel in Carhesiveen and it was a windy, foggy, and rainy mess. We got to our rooms, and I was rooming with this guy named Dan from the east coast. All of the other people on the trip were from the east coast, with a few expections: Nynka from Holland, the two Germans and an Austrian, an Italian girl, and Mila and Chin from Singapore. I really noticed a difference between the polite and respectful people from Europe and the Midwest and the loud and brash new Englanders. We sat down for dinner, and I had ordered salmon. It was so damn good. They brought it out with these fresh rolls, and mashed potatoes and mashed carrots, which they called a “veg”. I talked to Chin at dinner. Chin is a chemistry major and he wants to be a chemistry teacher. I have not met much for science folk in Ireland so far. We also talked to Murian, about Dingle peninsula and cooking ox tongue. She said that she loved ox tongue as a kid, and to ask the butchers how to prepare it. She said boiled is the best. After dinner we went and listened to a farmer named Morish. He talked about growing up in Ireland in the 50’s and how the kids would all walk to school barefoot, and about how farmers didn’t have hours, they worked until the job was done. He talked about how Irish kids were the best educated in Europe, because they had to know how to sing and dance to entertain people during the long nights. Then he said that farming in Ireland is dying, because nobody wants to work on the farms anymore, and they are being sold out to large corporations. Sounds kind of like America. He said that there is no industry left in county Kerry, and “the primary industry in Kerry is social welfare!”. He rambled on a long time about special needs and stuff and then Murian told him that we had to ceili dance. Also, Hannah asked him if his parents were alive during the famine, and it was extremely funny. Only off by about 80 years.
So then we all lined up to dance. We did a lame dance first, where we learned how to do the steps and swings, but then we did “the walls of limerick” and finally the “siege of ennis”. They were the exact same ones we did in Minneapolis last year ceili dancing with Mattie. I had to swing around with a few really short girls , in which I had to bend over incredibly far to hold onto their hips. We danced for a long time, and were all sweaty by the end. After the dance we walked toward town a little bit, but i was exhausted, so i went to bed. It was a decently fun day, but at this point, i was not sure that the cost of the trip was worth it.
