April 26th A guy who’s lived in Galway for some time told me that, compared to spring and summer, in winter the Galway cultural calendar is as bleak as the landscape. “The only thing to do here is go to the pub,” he said. Granted, that’s the main Irish pastime in any season, but spring [...]
April 21st Acclimatizing to Galway means accepting that sometimes you have to wear sunglasses and hold an umbrella at the same time. It also means, in a city where the seasons change by the hour, that your sinuses will, in their confusion, revolt, and you will spend the first few days or weeks (depending on [...]
April 11th I remember once reading a travel article about a place that the author refused to identify, on the grounds that he or she did not want to make it easy for tourists to find and corrupt what was, to that writer and traveler, a place whose singular characteristics should not be sullied by [...]
April 10th Okay, so I’m cheating a little. I haven’t gotten the Stray Travel pass yet, but still, I need to get out of Dublin. So instead of going to Donegal (which would be the first stop with Stray Travel), I’m two hours into a three-hour bus ride to Galway, a place that, according to [...]
April 9th I’m not interesting in partying in Dublin. Money is tight, and prices here would make a Londoner cringe. So little do I wish to party in Dublin, that on a Saturday night I went to bed at 11:30. Unfortunately, this decision resulted in someone trying to beat me up. My staying in is [...]
April 1st Reality keeps forcing me to refuse to allow myself to believe that my pending trip to Ireland is not an April Fool’s Day gag that I have played on myself. Reality keeps reminding me that it is true that I leave for Ireland on Tuesday, Apr. 4, and then, when I try to [...]
