Corkscrew Hill

            Friday, Victor and I caught the train to Cork. We met up with Isaac, another EUSA student from Kansas University and wandered around. St. Patrick street is the equivalent of Grafton street in Dublin or downtown in Charlottesville, where there’s a large cobblestone street with lots of shops and is the shopping hub. St. Patrick’s is larger and nicer than the other two though. While we were waiting for Isaac to arrive, Victor and I got lunch at this café called Paccino’s: quite possibly my favorite café thus far in Ireland. Not only did they have really fast service (even for American standards, which means it was turbo speed here) but they had really good food and snarky ridiculous comments on all of their items (i.e. sugar packets, plates, mugs). We both decided to finally get a full Irish breakfast, which let me tell you, is a TON of food. Bacon, four pieces of toast, two sausages, eggs, white and black pudding (looked like two slices of sausage and kind of tasted like it but I don’t actually know what constitutes ‘pudding’ – Mom did tell me that the black is supposed to be blood pudding – it wasn’t awful but I wouldn’t eat it again), half a tomato, and some potato wedges. Apparently some include baked beans, but this one didn’t. I guess if I were a farmer and wanted a really hearty breakfast before a long, hard days work, this would be a reasonable meal. Since I’m not, I couldn’t eat the whole thing and basically wasn’t hungry for the rest of the day. BUT, I have tried it and it is good. Here are some of the snarky comments on the sugar packets:

Church with purple doors?!? cool!

part of historic cork

Cork has cool doors like Dublin!

Full Irish Breakfast

snarky sayings

twice the snark

            After we met up with Isaac, we wandered around the city. There are two rivers running through it and most of the historic part is around the rivers. We went and saw St. Anne’s church:

main hall

along the wall

beautiful stained glass

establishing the Church

Lamb from Revelation

Holy Spirit

Unfortunately the butter museum was closed when we got to it, but apparently way back when it used to control the price of butter for all of Europe. I will say that the butter in Ireland is amazing (and I don’t like butter so that’s saying something). We got caught in the rain while walking around and it was starting to become dinnertime so we went into a pub for shelter. That was cool because it ended up being just Derrick the bartender and us, so we go to talk to him for a while. At least in the busy pubs, no one really talks to the bartenders, so it must not be very fun for them unless it’s a bit slower so they could actually talk to customers (or at least I assume so). After it let up some, we went in search of food and ended up in another pub. This one had live music and featured a band that played jazz music. They were really amazing musicians, it’s too bad Alex wasn’t there, he could have jammed with them.