Stick With Fish And Chips. Just... Do It.

DAY EIGHT

"All our best times have been with animals," The Boy observed.

So when we were in Galway, instead of visiting the Aran Islands, 

I suggested the Atlantaquaria, the National Aquarium of Ireland.

 There was a tank where we could pet rays...

 

and little sharks.

                           

There were tanks and fish of all sizes.

It's no optical illusion... that lobster really is that big.

As is this crab!  One of the little guys on the right said, 

"Don't even THINK of putting that thing next to me!"

After a nice long time with the fishies,

we walked to a thrift shop to see if we could pop some tags...

... and then we headed out for lunch.

And the kids saw La Salsa.

(Remember that ominous music from yesterday?)

"We have to tryyyy it!" they said.

"C'mon, Mexican food in Ireland!"

This should have been the clue that this meal wouldn't turn out well...

"Gringo food"? Okay. But we went inside.

Now the special was "Taco chicken fries,"

which I read as:

Taco, Chicken

Fries

I was expecting something like this...

... with a side of these...

... but instead I got this:

Yeah.  Not what I envisioned.

It wasn't BAD per se, 

but what else it wasn't was Mexican. 

However, as we kept saying later,

What did we expect?

We were in the land of milk and potatoes, beer and fish,

and not one of fresh tomato salsa and corn tortillas.

Would we go into a Baja Fresh in the States and order fish and chips?

A Guinness?  Soda bread?

No, we would not.

So ignoring the lump the sauce-drenched french fries were creating in my stomach,

I went out to a monument in the bay.

Yes, I see the irony now that I was reading about Famine Ships

with a belly full of potatoes.

                                   

"Do you have family in Ireland?" several people asked before I left,
 and I don't that I know now.

But I do indeed have family that came from Ireland --

 two great-great-great-grandfathers left in the late 1800s;

one must have left before the Potato Famine struck as he was married in England in 1841,

but the other was married in Scotland in June of 1845.

(The famine went from 1845 to 1852.)

I wish I would have written down their names and birthplaces before I left;

I would have liked to think on them when I was at places like this.

After The Girl and I read the monument plaques,

we sat down at the edge and looked out over the ocean.

                        

It was funny, but this was the first time I really felt I was looking at the Atlantic,

 not the Pacific.

We headed back to the hotel,

and wondered if we would have had more luck eating at this nearby restaurant:

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Next Up:

I am almost skewered by an enormous bird. 

Chowing Down In Ireland

DAY SEVEN

It was time to leave Annie's Cottage and head to Galway.

People asked, "Why Ireland?" before I left,

and one of the reasons is that there wouldn't be a language barrier

 for our first foray outside the States.

Well, not much of a language barrier.

(And yes, I must admit that between the four of us

we spoke no more than a smattering* of five other languages.

So that deficit is on us.)

(*"Smattering" equals being able to ask where the library is.)

 We stopped in the town of Ennis for lunch at a tasty pizza place.

It really was not bad pizza!

(Cue the sound of ominous foreshadowing music, which will be explained in the next entry.)

And speaking of food...

A Brief Digression on Food in Ireland

We ate out a meal or two a day,

and picked up stuff from the grocery store

or ate at the hotel breakfast buffets for the others.

There was food that was delicious...

... and just plain genius.

Hazelnut Yoplait, y'all!

I wondered why this wasn't available in the bread section in the States...

... and I was surprised to see a not-common family name turn up on a product.

(This was the family name of one of my Irish forefathers.)

We ate a lot of cheese and bread and drinkable yogurt for our grocery-store meals,

and it wasn't until The Girl requested it that, duh, 

we realized we should have bought some non-perishable peanut butter at the beginning.

See the Statue of Liberty on the jar?

USA!  USA! USA!

There was only one meal that was really not good,

but I'll write about that tomorrow.

Back to Ennis!

We would often see reminders of the States,

such as this perplexing sign in an Ennis shop window:

And sometimes we'd see things that would just make us go,

"Heeeey...."

But after walking around a bit,

it was time to crawl back in the car...

 ... and get to the hotel in Galway.

 Which, yay! had WiFi.

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Next Up:

Fish and some not-Gringo food.