Weekend 7 - Google take the Wheel
After my brush with fame aka watching Gordon Ramsey interact with his family from across a crowded room, it was time to move on to bigger and brighter things. Like spending a fun weekend with my friends!
We started with me forcing them on a tour of Ballymaloe including the cows, chickens, pigs, green houses, tennis court, and two of the three kitchens. They acted suitably impressed, me thinks!
Then we went to Sea Church for lunch in Ballycotton which is a cool old church right on the water that has been converted into a restaurant. The waitress immediately clocked our accents and asked us how we felt about the results of the election. Not good lady!! Bad enough to flee the country even!
Molly once again braved the wrong side of the road to drive us to Midleton for a tour of the Jameson Whiskey Distillery which essentially counted as a religious pilgrimage considering my lifelong commitment to Jameson and ginger ales. Our tour guide was great and Julia was able to get a Christmas gift for her dad. Mr. O’Keefe if you are reading this please act surprised!
We then made our way to our final destination for the weekend - Cork! Despite being quite close, I’ve only made it there twice so I was excited to explore the city more. We stayed at the River Lee Hotel which was walkable from all of the things we wanted to check out and fit our needs quite nicely. We walked around the neighborhood until we found a place for dinner - little did we know we would be sitting down directly in front of a TV just as the Ireland vs. New Zealand rugby match was about to begin! Despite having a sister who has lived in new Zealand for almost 20 years I really do not know the rules of rugby so it required a lot of googling, but was still very entertaining. More men should be rugby shaped. It is a good shape!
After the match (Ireland lost unfortunately) we found ourselves at Dwyers pub listening to an extremely entertaining band. At first they were playing a lot of seemingly traditional Irish pub songs that we didn’t know but every person between the ages of 18 and 65 there did. Easy enough to pick up on the choruses though! Then they broke out the American country songs and we went feral. It was all fun and games until they sang Travelin’ Soldier by the Dixie Chicks…an amazing song to be sure but a real tear jerker? Happy to know The Chicks have a committed international following though.
Even considering we were having the absolute time of our lives, we couldn’t remember the name of this amazing band. In our defense, it was a bad name. We spent the rest of the weekend butchering the name - Jake the Flounder? Flapjack the Dragon? Fork the Glander? Turns out it was Flake the Gander which is worse than any of those guesses.
Saturday we woke up and got coffee and pastries at Dulce Bun House. This fueled us to walk around, bopping into shops and exploring the downtown area which I’m sure is the equivalent of someone going to Boston and only walking up and down Newbury Street all weekend, but I digress. At a used book store I got Lord of the Rings. Have you heard of this book? Deep cut, I know. We then partook in our big event of the weekend - going to the Butter Museum! It was basically only two rooms and showed us the history of butter making in Ireland and while I cannot confirm it, I can almost guarantee the whole thing is bank rolled by Kerrygold. We watched a butter making demonstration and then got to eat the butter! I of course devoured that as if Ballymaloe isn’t keeping me up to my neck in butter every day.
We walked off our butter through the English Market before googling “best snugs in Cork” because as previously mentioned the two things America should be adopting en masse from Ireland are widely available sausage rolls and snugs in bars. We posted up in one such snug and I made us get half pints of Guinness, Murphy’s and Beamish to conduct our own stout tasting. Very fun!
Our goal for the night was to find more live music so we once again turned to google and asked “best bars for live music in Cork tonight.” Thank god above for this wonderful search engine. Our first stop was Canty’s where a nice guitar man sang us great covers and a group of middle aged men had the times of their lives next to us. Afterwards we walked to Sin É for traditional Irish music - fiddle, mandolin, etc. Every person in this bar immediately was drawn towards Julia and her Irishness. A group of 40 year old women insisted on friending her on facebook! A balding man named Liam tried to track down her ancestors! I guess if you are a red head named Julia O’Keefe the Irish locals can sniff you out. Molly and I cheered her on from the sidelines and enjoyed approximately a billion Coronas. When we got back to the hotel that night we watched the most bizarre dystopian British game show called Celebability. Can’t recommend that less.
Sunday we slept in and then walked to Joe’s and Bro’s for brunch before driving back towards Ballymaloe. We stopped in Ballycotton to do the cliff walk which was stunning as the sun finally made an appearance for us. But the rainy weekend meant the path was extremely muddy and slippy. Luckily we were all very tough and brave about it! But unfortunately my time with Molly and Julia was winding down to an end =( They headed off to Galway and I headed home to do my homework and received a call from Guiness Book of World Records saying I actually set a record for most Corona’s drank in one night. Too blessed to be stressed!
