Killarney Part 2!

Saturday morning we woke up nice and early and got breakfast (a bagel with preserves for me) and then enquired at our hostel about tours for the day. They have arrangements with a local tour company so that they come to the hostel and pick us up and bring us to the tour site and also give us a discount. While most tours of the ring of Kerry run about E28 we paid E17.50, which was a lovely discount. Our tour guide was the owner of the company and he had brought his nephew along for the ride. The ring of Kerry all in all was very beautiful, but I would venture to say that Killarney National Park was significantly more impressive (though the park does make up a small portion of the ring). The Ring of Kerry itself is a loop of secondary road that goes throughout the county of Kerry. It is known for it’s majestic views, which, I imagine, are more majestic in the spring and summer, or when it’s sunny. For a large portion of the tour there was some drizzle going on and it didn’t make for the best photographs.

I’ve come to realize that Ireland has various kinds of beauty in its landscapes, and not all of those are appreciated by every kind of person, myself included. My favorite kind of landscape is one filled with bright colors: green green grass, some scattered bright wildflowers, and blue skies. Often when the sun isn’t out you lose the blue skies but the colors simply show up brighter against the grey sky. Being on the west coast of Ireland, an area that is known for being rocky, this isn’t always the kind of beauty you come across. A large portion of the Ring of Kerry is very rocky and not as green. The interesting part is that a lot of the water that the ring passes by is a tropical-looking turquoise color, very out of character for the water in Ireland. One example of the areas that include this kind of water is the area surrounding the dingle peninsula. While these areas are very beautiful, as are the mountains surrounding them, unless it’s sunny out they don’t photograph as well. So, while the Ring of Kerry was very beautiful, the lush greenness of the Killarney National Park made for far more incredible photographs.

We had a lot of fun playing around with our cameras this weekend. I always wished I had taken a photography class in high school, but in the age of point-and-shoots, there’s so much that amateur photographers can do that previously was left to the experts. My camera even has a mode for “light skin tones”. It helps me to not glow as much in pictures ☺ .

One nice thing was having the room in the hostel to ourselves last night. No more of the midnight-yeller (who, we determined, was claustrophobic, which may have explained his yelling).

We had the opportunity to watch a couple of traditional music sessions while in the pubs in Killarney. I hadn’t spent much time at any trad sessions previously, so it was nice to just sit back with a pint and enjoy the music. I equate trad sessions to the jam sessions of jazz musicians. They’re the coolest thing to watch because all of the musicians just jump in as they arrive and drop out whenever they please. Everyone knows the standards and they will occasionally say a word or two to one another to make each other aware of when they’re moving on from one section of the song to another, but other than that the only thing keeping them all in sync in the stomping of their feet. They also have remarkable intonation for non-classically trained musicians; they can tune their instruments in the midst of a handful of other musicians playing with no problem at all. They also improv very well with one another. The group we saw Friday night included to violinists, one of which was jumping all over the place with melodies, counter melodies and just chords.

The All Ireland Irish Step Dancing Competition was this weekend in Killarney, so the town was filled with teenage girls, the most noticeable ones being the Americans. There were a ton of them out at the pubs both nights that we went out (though I’m 99% sure that most of them were not 18). Last night was adorable because a group of them was step dancing while the musicians played. At one point they were dancing with a group of old men doing Irish dancing that’s done in pairs (think of the Titanic scene with Rose and Jack dancing in steerage). It’s nice seeing a culture that embraces its heritage so much.

I’m writing this Sunday night, though it won’t be posted until Monday due to the aforementioned lack-of-internet. Cross your fingers for its prompt return! (Though at this point we’re pretty far past prompt…)