Thursday, July 26th, 2012

White pudding is amazing. Not that I actually knew what it was until this morning. I ate quite a bit of it regardless. This may have been a mistake, as we shortly thereafter took a bus ride to a local Gaelic sports club to play some, and eating a large breakfast might not have been the best move. The games were fun regardless, though sweaty. I've never been great at sports, but this time no one else was either because none of us quite knew what we were doing.

The first game I was in was called Hurling. Basically, imagine field hockey mixed with baseball. You're allowed to do basically anything with the ball and your stick (or “hurley”), but you can also hold the ball, though not pick it up from the ground, and also launch it through the air with said stick. My team didn't do so well, but that's okay. It was fun anyway, and fortunately we avoided the injuries that you may expect to come from a game involving launching a hard ball at high speeds at people.

Injuries weren't entirely unheard of, of course. Our next game was Gaelic football, not to be confused with either American football or European football, aka soccer. That being said, it does resemble soccer in some ways, though you can also carry the ball for four steps. Getting it into the goal is worth three points and getting it above the goal is worth one; this rule, incidentally, is also present in hurling. Anyway, one of the Emmanuel girls, Jesse, got hit in the face with someone else's face. She's fine now, and was fine in time to eat a sandwich after the fact with the rest of us, but she had to miss the third game, handball, which is kind of like tennis with your hands and bouncing the ball off the wall to your opponent.

After that, and the delicious sandwiches, we toured a stadium run by the same people who maintained the sports club, the Gaelic Athletic Association, or GAA. Then we had a tour of Dublin on WW2-era DUKWs, more commonly known as “duck boats”, which involved historically-inaccurate Viking helmets. It was called a “Viking tour”, so this was to be expected. (On our first day, a tour guide had been quite annoyed at the horns on said helmets, which actual Viking helmets didn't have.) There was also a lot of silliness involving roaring at random people as if we were Viking warriors, which is apparently a traditional part of the tour.

We then returned to the hotel and finally had a chance to shower after the games. We stayed there for a while, and then went off to dinner at a different hotel. I had something described as “pork belly”, largely out of curiosity, which tasted actually pretty great. There was Irish music and dancing until about 10:45 PM, at which point we returned to get to sleep.

Written by Patrick C. 


Today was a very athletic day in my opinion. We got up, had a wonderful breakfast, then made our way to the GAA athletics building. Once we got there, we learned the basics of hurling (the sport!), handball, and Gaelic Football. Afterwards, we had a delicious lunch then we went to the GAA stadium where many Gaelic sports are played.


Written by Jake W.