Rainbows and ice cream

Hey everyone!

This week was pretty low key.  A bit more rain than last week but it is Ireland :)

I will just highlight a few things that went on this week!

On Tuesday it was my friend, Tierney's 21st birthday!  During the day, a small group of girls went with her to get some of that wonderful hot chocolate that I talked about last week.  How could I pass that up?!  Later, we all surprised her with pizza and guinness chocolate cake that we made earlier and went to a pub with her after that.

On Thursday we decided to check out a few new pubs that we had never tried.  We found one with an open mike night on Thursdays which I really liked.  It wasn't necessarily traditional music, but the performers could play whatever they wanted and the ones that we heard sang about half traditional Irish music and half modern music.  I really liked the atmosphere as well, so I will be going back there.  Also, some friends of ours know one of the guys that performs so its kinda cool to be like 'hey I kinda know that guy!'

Anyways, Friday and Saturday were pretty uneventful.  You may be wondering where the title to this post comes in.  Since it rained more this week, (or maybe you could say since it was the moodiest weather I have ever experienced) there were a lot of rainbows!  It will rain for 30 minutes or so then be sunny blue skies for awhile then rain for an hour and then blue skies, so you can imagine why there were so many rainbows! I didn't mind though, Saturday was a pajama and homework day so it was fun to look outside everyone in awhile and spot a rainbow.

Saturday afternoon I did take my pajamas off and put some real clothes on to go run an errand at the post office with my friends, Clare and Morgan.  We walked right past an ice cream shop on the way back so we decided to treat ourselves.  The local teens in front of us ordered honeycomb and Oreo ice cream and we have never been so right in doing what the locals do.  For such an interesting combination, it was really good.

Ice Cream!

Oliver Plunkett

Costigans- This is the pub with open mike night on Thursdays

Rainbow right on my street :)

Sunday was my field trip day.  It was a field trip for my archaeology class that I am taking with a few friends.  The class was split by last names into two days for the field trip and since my last name starts with an 'm' it put me in the second day where all of my friends were on the first day.  It was a little disappointing, but it worked out fine.  I don't mind being a bit independent and I made a few friends.

Anyways, we saw a few pretty cool sites.  We saw a medieval tower castle called Ballynacarriga Castle, a 17th century fortified house called Coppinger's Court, and a stone circle and a fulacht fiadh at Drombeg in County Cork.  I will explain these later.  We haven't gone through the time periods for the first two sites in class yet but it was still interesting to see them and listen to our professor explain the significance behind some of the architecture and how you can tell what time period the building is from.

If you don't care much for archaeology or history you can skip this paragraph, but for those who are interested, the stone circle and fulacht fiadh are from the bronze age in Ireland (around 2000-1100 BC).  A fulacht fiadh is a horseshoe shaped structure with a water trough and a hearth in the middle.  The hearth was used to heat stones and then they were placed in the water trough to boil water mostly for cooking meat.  Once the rocks were cooled they would be shattered and placed on the outside of the horseshoe structure, forming piles of burnt and shattered rock pieces that are on top of the structure.  This is usually how archaeologists find these sites is by finding the shattered rock pieces surrounding it.
The stone circle was mostly for religious purposes and determining the annual cycle. All of the rocks are vertical but one, and that one horizontal rock lines up with where the sun sets on the winter solstice which is December 21st.  So when the people saw the sun getting closer to the horizontal rock, they knew that it was almost the start of a new year.

Well, now that you've all had a lesson in archaeology you can rest your brains by looking at some pictures :)

Ballynacarriga Castle

Coppinger's Court

Professor getting really excited about these rocks

Ireland!

Stone circle at Drombeg

Fulacht fiadh- You can see the water trough in the middle