Erin's trips

So today we left Dublin and are in Cork. It may be kinda tricky to update now, the internet cafe is hard to find. The rock of Cashel was amazing, its an old ruined church on a hill, there used to be a fortress there as well but it was wood so its gone now. I have a video of us singing in the old chapel but I wont know if the sound worked till I get home.
Now we are in Cork, its kind of like Banf but big and super classy. We looked up the hotel in the guidebook and it costs 150£ per person so ya good deal for us.
Going to go find some food.

So I've been able to write on here a lot more than I had thought so far, fortunately there is a really cheap internet cafe across the street from the hotel, but tomorrow we go to Cork so we'll see.
So yesterday after I got back after writing, a couple of us decided we should go find a little Irish pub and have some real Guinness. So we asked the desk at the hotel where was good and in walking distance. The place he sent us was called Bleu Note and supposibly has good live jazz (which sure doesn't sure Irish spelt that way and didn't have jazz but it was a Tuesday night) and once we found it, it had half its signs in Chinese and only 2 people were sitting in it. So we walked a little further down the street and found Slatterys. It was amazing, we got upstairs and it was Portuguese night or something. But every other Tuesday they go there with drums and cowbells and shakers and sing and jam around a big table. I tired videoing it on my camera but i wont know if it worked till I get it on to the computer with the sound. Also the Manchester game had just finished so it was the Portuguese, the hippy's jamming with them, the guys watching the game and the table of Canadians. We were sitting with the guys who had just finished watching the game and learned some stuff. They taught us if the pub is two floors always get your Guinness from the bottom floor because it gets shaken up on the way up to the second and doesn't taste as good. And we told them our story of the other pub we got sent too so they wrote us a list of places in Dublin and another list for Cork. There is a really really old one in Dublin that we are going to go to on the last night before we leave and then there is another in Cork that they said was great because they guy that runs it is crazy, everyone sits around a tells stories, and when it rains it leaks through the roof.
So today we had a three hour bus tour of the city which was ridiculous, everywhere we went was in walking distance and we never even got off the bus. Thankfully we had a couple hours free so we got up to the river and the Christ Church Cathedral. Hopefully on the last day we can get to the St. Patrick's cathedral.
Then we had a concert in a little coastal town called Greystones. beautiful little town.
I'm going to go back and play cards in the lobby!

K so we are in Dublin now, I've slept about 2 hours since I woke up Monday morning. We had a couple people missing tickets in Heathrow but the people just hand wrote ones on a blank boarding pass and we had two bags that didn't make it over from Heathrow but they should be getting to the hotel tonight. Which is good cause I only brought one extra dress for the choir and there are two missing at the moment. And then we were delayed sitting in the plane from Heathrow to Dublin for at least an hour. Our hotel is really nice but it took everyone a while to figure out how to turn the lights on, and the shower on, and the tv on Then we had about half an hour to walk around for a bit. There was a ridiculously tall silver metal pole about a block from the hotel but we couldn't figure out what it was for. (Turns out it was a millennium monument that cost millions of euro). We had to go back to the hotel then to meet with our tour guide that is traveling with the choir. We all went for dinner to a place called The Temple just a couple blocks from the hotel. It was fantastic, a bunch of us split a bottle of good wine then for appetizer I had a sun dried tomato and butterbean dip, then the main course was fantastic. It was chicken stuffed with vegetables, garlic and feta with a really good sauce and then for desert a fantastic white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake. It was great two because part of the money we paid to the trip goes to a welcome and a goodbye group meal. So all we had to pay for was the wine. So right now we are trying to stay awake for long enough so we are on a somewhat normal schedule with the gig tomorrow night in Greystones. And tomorrow morning we are going on a tour of the city (unfortunately a bus tour a walking would have been better) but we do have some time in the afternoon to look around as well on the way home we have a full afternoon here.

So I am currently cleaning my house before we head off the Ireland on Monday! Hopefully I will have chances to write in here on this trip but it is with the choir so it might be a little tricky. Here is the website for the competition though:
http://www.corkchoral.ie/pages/fitc.php