GALWAY, IRELAND: The Second and Third Weeks

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June-July 2017

THE wanderer's next weeks were filled with lectures and learning and reading and lots and lots of walking. She discovered a brilliant walk along the riverside on campus that led to a beautiful, green, ivy-flooded wood. This became her most favorite walk, and she would often meander up the trail with a book held beneath her nose, reading and walking ala Belle. (Aside from the material she was reading for her literature class, she was currently reading The Horse and His Boy from The Chronicles of Narnia---which she bought for only a few euros from Charlie Bryne's Book Shop---and finishing up The Last Unicorn---which she'd brought across the ocean with her.) It was in the aforementioned ivy-flooded wood where she sat down in a patch of ivy and began to compose the beginning of her story. She would not get very far at all into her story during her time in Ireland because she did not have nearly as much free time as she had thought she'd have, but, nevertheless, she began her story here, in a patch of ivy in a quiet green Irish wood in Galway.

CELEBRATING the Fourth of July in Ireland oddly enough proved more fun than celebrating in the U.S. After a feasting at the college bar with all of the other American study abroad students, the wanderer and her companions trekked to the city center to a pub by the river called Monroe's. For it was Tuesday night: the night the old Irish men and women came out to dance. The wanderer ended her Fourth of July not with fireworks but with the cheery melodies of traditional Irish music, and the hopping and swaying and spinning of old Irish men and women as they danced the night away.

A couple of days later, the wanderer found herself in the Crane Bar for a Celtic storytelling session. The storyteller, a Scottish man from Glasgow, narrated two tales, each nearly half an hour long. The first, a tale about two drunkards featuring zombies who play hurling (an Irish sport the wanderer honestly still does not understand), was lighthearted and funny and completely new to the wanderer, while the second, the famous old Irish tale of Oisin and Niamh, was familiar to her, though there were some interesting twists. But perhaps what struck her the most was how talented the storyteller was at his craft: Never missing a beat, reciting the tales by heart and with much heart and even more energy and enthusiasm, the storyteller captivated an entire roomful of people, utterly transporting them all by the power of his storytelling, just as would have been done in the old days when oral storytelling thrived. This man was keeping this tradition---and these stories---alive. The wanderer wanted to hug him for it. For where would we be, what would we be, without someone to tell our stories?
































































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