Galway, Western Ireland, Ireland
We awoke to a beautiful blue sky day! We know this is not the norm here so we ate breakfast and headed out the door. Our B&B proprietors told us where to pick up the bus to downtown (a quick walk to the end of the street) and off we went.
Traffic in Galway is brutal during parts of the day, as we learned last night coming into town from the Connemara area
. Ninety minutes to get across town, and Galway isn't that big a city! By the time you burn up the petrol and possibly pay for parking, the bus is a better deal. It dropped us off right in front of the central park just up the street from the historic/tourist areas.
Most of the worthwhile areas of downtown are NO CAR access streets, so once we were there it was like a huge outdoor mall, only very quaint and historic. Because it is Saturday, there were a mess of street performers and a nice farmers market for all kinds of edibles. Like in the USA, the farmers also seem to grow arts and crafts, food stalls, and a crop of political stalls to save the salmon, etc.
We wandered the streets of the town and drifted into the largest parish church in Ireland. St. Nicholas' Collegiate Church of Ireland is its present name and presently Church of Ireland. But in 1477, when Christopher Columbus dropped in to pray, it was Catholic. He was in town tracking down the rumors about the new world and some northern peoples (like the Irish or Vikings) that may have beat him to the "undiscovered" continents to the east
. True story.
Our footwork also produced a stop at the Galway Cathedral, which isn't even old, having opened in 1965. We were just in time for the 11:00 Mass, which we sat through. How many times do you get to sit through a Catholic Mass in an Irish Cathedral? Pretty cool. I felt like a Kennedy! (Tonight we'll go to a pub and feel like Teddy Kennedy.)
Dayna's note: Tom inside any church is quite a novelty, but a Catholic church? Unheard of. It was his idea to stay for Mass. For the entire Mass. Amazingly, lightning did not strike!
We picnicked canal-side next to the locks, walked the quay (pronounced "key'), fed the birds some leftover bread, and generally watched the Galway world walk by.
Back to the bus, back to the laundry to pick up our dainties, back to the B&B to rest and write, and tonight back to downtown for some dinner and a touch of the evening on Saturday night in Galway.
Downtown Galway
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Galway, Western Ireland, Ireland
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Comments
2025-05-22
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dayna-tom-2013
2014-12-20
. . . As I have learned from our travels, Americans are the ONLY people who like ice in our drinks. I asked the proprietor of our B&B if they had ice and this is what I got. It appeared they had wrapped cellophane around ice cubes from an ice tray. He, then, cut off four cubes for me! It was ice!
dayna-tom-2013
2014-12-29
The Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas is the largest medieval parish church in Ireland in continuous use as a place of worship at the heart of Galway's life. It is dedicated to St Nicholas of Myra, patron saint of children (Santa Claus) and of mariners. There is some disagreement about when it was built, but it was certainly finished by 1320.
When the church was built Galway was a tiny, very new town, a sort of frontier settlement in the wild west. The inhabitants, however, thought a lot of themselves and had big ambitions. They built a huge church, bigger than many Irish cathedrals, and still the largest parish church in use in Ireland. During the 16th century, when the famous 14 Tribes were at the zenith of their power, the church was extended by two of the most powerful families the Ffrenches and the Lynchs, each of whom built a new side aisle to the nave, resulting in an almost square interior and the unusual three-roofed profile.