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| Good thing it wasn't "Ireland's 2nd Most Exciting Showcase" |
The day was beautiful for once so it was kinda sad that the schedule wasn't flexible enough that we could do something outside instead of go somewhere that's dark and wet all the time anyway. It was still really cool though and quite the popular destination for small children...so it was good for a group of college aged students who's attention span was just as long as the 5 year olds' there.
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| darn... |
Similarly, some of us were in desperate search of sheep stuffed animals:
The caves really are pretty cool themselves. They're I think about 8.3 km long but we were only allowed through the first 400 meters. Our tour guide seemed kind of bored like she'd done this millions of times before, which honestly, she probably has. At least she didn't get stuck with the birthday party of 4 year olds like the poor girl giving a tour after us.
We headed straight for the hotel after this as it was getting close to dinner time. Our hotel was in a little town call Cahersiveen that was pretty easy to get to all our other locations from each day. We had dinner which was fabulous not only because it was made of something other than whatever pasta and sauce was on sale at Tesco that week (as most of us are used to), but also because we were pretty ravenous at that point.
Afterwards we had a guest speaker come to the hotel to talk to us. He was a local farmer on Valentia Island who told us about his childhood, what he does for a living, how he's needed to change his income source as the years went on and so on and so forth. It was actually really interesting and I would've definitely been able to pay better attention if I hadn't been stuffed to the brim with food (specifically all those rolls and butter).
We got a short break before our last event of the night began which was a Ceili (pronounced KEEL-ee) dance. For those that don't know (I'll assume that's a large portion considering I had no clue what it was before coming here), a ceili dance is basically like Irish square dancing. We had a drummer and an accordionist playing music for us, one woman who was doing all the teaching, and two other girls that were the guinea pigs who did all the examples for us and filled in extra spots when someone was partnerless.
I was the lucky one that got paired with one of the girls, Lucy, when we were learning how to spin. Looking back I actually think it was a fairly awkward and extremely hilarious experience on my part. What you do is put your right hand on the other person's waist as you're facing them and hold left hands under your right arms. Now, I'll be the first to admit, I can definitely be kind of awkward when it comes to touching other people, especially someone whom I've never met before such as Lucy. One of my friends on this trip half jokingly (half not) had said earlier about the ceili "wait, we need to touch people for this?" and I was inclined to agree at this point.
The instructor was then like "Alright now you just SPIN!" and we were off. Most people there (with a few exceptions) had never Irish danced in their life before and so were flopping and jumping about in circles failing miserably yet hilariously. But no, not me! Just before we started spinning Lucy tightened her grip to vice-like and the split second before she started whiplashing me around like a rag doll I stupidly thought, "should I be holding on tighter?". It was one of those panicked moments where not even a second after something begins you realize you should be doing something else: in my case holding on for dear life. Thankfully, I didn't make too much of a fool of myself and managed to hang on to her without being flung across the room. I was actually quite impressed considering how much smaller she was than me. On the second try, I was a lot more prepared and even did a halfway decent job of it. I didn't slow Lucy down, which was what I was basing my success level on.
Turns, out that when I wasn't paired with her I was quite pitiful and that whenever someone else was paired with Lucy they were the ones being whiplashed around. At least that made me feel better that I was pretty much on the same level as everyone else. We had a basic lesson of 3 or 4 step moves, which are all really simple except when you start having them on top of each other, one after another. The first dance was called the Walls of Limerick and I guarantee you that if you were to look up a video of it, the dancers would be thousands of times better at it than we were. We couldn't really get through without bumping into someone, misstepping/stepping on someone else, losing count, not knowing where/when to go, or just standing in the middle of all the action looking clueless because you have absolutely no idea what's going on as people dance (read: stumble) about you.
It was definitely a blast as we were all sweaty messed bumping into each other and cracking ribs over how awful of dancers we were. They had warned us it would be physical, but I was absolutely drenched when we finished 2 hours later. No worries that night about needing to burn off the mountains of food we ate. And I have to say, for someone who's main form of physical exercise is slamming bodily into other people, I was definitely not the least graceful that night and would totally consider doing it again. The only thing is I wish someone had gotten some pictures. Not videos though, THOSE would be awful.
