yay-eireann

some dude bailed us up in the pub the other night, mikey he was called. we were in the west of kerry in cahersiveen where the english almost melds into gaelic so we could barely understand the guy. in short, his sister in law is not a nice person, we should get married, and those immigrants are alright as long as they show some manners. he was entertaining none the less, as drunk farmers go. good chap to have a pint with.
in other adventure news, we took a boat out to the skellig islands. we were hosted on dan's fishing boat with 12 other bemused foreigners as it putted and bounced and swayed back and forth towards the islands. little skellig looked rocky from a distance, a kind of grey/white colour. as we approached we saw that the colours were from the 40,000 cormorants nesting on it, it was chock a block with them clinging to every craggy peak, with seals laying about on the rocks at the shore. after circling little skellig we went to skellig michal, a slightly larger island where a bunch of monks used to live from the 6th to 12th centuries. the climb up the mountain was somewhat terror inspiring, 50 degree angled steps with no rails and just the sea below you. at the top was what remains of the monastery, a bunch of beehive shaped huts made of stones piled up on top of each other, no mortar just balanced carefully in a way that kept the water out. not much is known about the monks cos they kept no records but they chose to hide themselves away in a remote inhospitable area, to pray and that. pretty weird. and then it pissed down raining and we got soaked the boat trip back was no fun at all. according to one of the americans on board, the two of us won the wettest people on board award.
we also went to some tomb from 4000 BC or troy reckons way earlier, older than the pyramids, anyway we speculated whether we'd have anything to say to each other if we came across those new stone age people. same general physiology and presumably intelligence, but such a vastly different life... ireland's heaps old! its cool.