Butter, Crystal and Football Championships, Oh My!

So the past few days have been busy with classes starting up so this might be one massive entry.

Thursday: We were told there was an Irish music band playing at a bar called Clancys so me and my roommmates went down to check it out. When we got there, we heard such classic Irish songs from artists such as Lynyrd Skynyrd and Johnny Cash. It was pretty cool though because "Walk the Line" was played with singing, guitar and an Irish flute. We did hear some Van Morrison and I believe he is Irish. In addition, "Wild Rover" was played and that's traditional Irish.

Friday was orientation and the Butter Museum. That's right, Cork's World Famous Butter Museum mentioned in an earlier post. My roommate and I checked it out. Turns out I knew nothing about making butter but I learned that you have to first separate the cream and the milk and then you have to agitate the cream. They were very emphatic about that point. I also learned that kings in olden days weren't considered worthy if they had not conducted cattle raids. Probably the weirdest point though was learning about the churns that they keep the butter in. Turns out that the Irish are very superstitious. In County Mayo, the hand of a dead infant was placed under the churn to protect the butter.

On Saturday my roommate and I went to Waterford to check out the Crystal Factory. It was pretty interesting learning how crystal is made. I didn't realize that frosting is what naturally happens and then an acid has to be applied to remove the frosting to give crystal that clear look. Waterford makes some of the big sports trophies and the Times Square New Year's Eve Ball. For lunch that day, we ate something called sausage, rashers blaa which I'm pretty sure was just sausage, bacon on a bread roll. It was pretty good though. Even better that we ate it all before seeing the pig that was essentially all carved up.

Sunday was the Gaelic Football All Ireland Championship between Cork and Down. Cork's colors are red and white so my roommates and I got as much decked out as we could in red and white and went to the student bar to watch it (one of two student bars on campus!) Cork had a great come from behind victory. It was kind of interesting but since we were at the student bar, not all the students had on red and white because the Irish students were from other parts of Ireland and didn't really care about Cork winning. However most international students had on red and white. They had an instructional to learn how to Irish dance lesson later that day, so I went to that as well. I have a long way to go before I'm on Riverdance but it was still a lot of fun.

Monday the team came home and there was a HUGE rally in the city. My roommates and I went down to join pretty much the rest of the city. I couldn't really see anything but it was still fun to be among the masses of humanity. There was cheers, speeches and lots of flag waving. We went out to a couple of bars afterwards and had a good night.

Anyway that's pretty much all from out here. Tomorrow is Arthur Guinness's birthday which I'm told is like a national holiday so that should be fun.