Shiftin up to Barnacles
Trip Start
Apr 12, 2006
1
98
115
Trip End
Ongoing
Galway,
Ireland
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Up early this morning, it was a pleasant change to walk the main drag and surrounding streets without squeezing through a thick matrix of wandering tourists and at least half a dozen jugglers and dudes who dress up as statuesque characters and stand still until someone throws money in their box, whereby they make some subtle robotic movement and ackowledge their paymaster, before resuming their motionless stace. They would all become more and more prevalent as the morning slowly became arvo. Aside from the handful of early movers and shakers, it was really only a couple of zonked out buskers strumming neglected beat up guitars, and one notable old boozehound standing bedraggled on the same street corner where i saw him skulling Guinness tubes on the way home last night.
I walked around town in the glory of the early morning, calming, soothing sun shining down again over Galway. I made my way over to the riverline, and the distant shore where gulls massed in large numbers and flew about wildly, and large green fields lined the whole area with their emptiness. All that, and a brilliant blue and white swirling sky, and time to kill by taking it all in, lying on the middle of the enormous green field, writing, reading, and listening to my Ipod with only one earphone working properly. I spent the morning pretty much just soaking up the Galway vibe, realising that i was once again in the right place, feeling deeply content with my new surroundings. As i'm doing it on the cheap over here, i picked up a bread stick from the 'Dunnes Store' and accompanied it with my cheap jar of Peanut Butter, my staple lunch for the next couple of days. As 2pm struck, i made my way back over to Barnacles and checked in, making myself at home in the far plusher, and much cosier surroundings of the new upstairs dorm room.
It was a near-roasting afternoon again today, another consecutive sunny-ass day taking Ireland by complete suprise. You can see the happiness this weather generates in the town folk, people walking past smile and tap their head g'day to you, and everyone seems better off for it. Whether it was the glorious sun, the good vibes, or the two balltearing coffees i just consumed, i was slave to the sudden pangs of rock, picking up my sax from the dorm, marching through the main drag like a man on a mission. With wifebeater and floral boardies, i parked myself in the guts of the main thoroughfare mall, and saturated the busy, reverberant corridor with my trademark array of bluesy wailin'. Though not anywhere near as successful as Cork, i made a significant stockpile of shrapnel, somewhere around 10 Euro, and even had a couple of old geezers sitting back and enjoying the show. I gotta say though, it's a pretty tough gig here in Galway, especially during this peak tourist time, as every two-bit baton twirlin funambulist and buskin' fool such as myself flocks to the same stretch of road and vies for the same market of shrapnel givers and musical apprecionados (if that is, indeed, a word). So it's tough. But who cares. I was there to have fun, to offer my ballsy horn sounds to the masses whether they liked it or not, and thankfully some did, and threw some bread my way in appreciation. It was cool. But in the other sense, it was freakin boiling, and after sweating my clakker off in the stark heat, i'd later enjoy half a sunburn with the left hand side of my body predominantly exposed to the sun's skewif afternoon position.
All in all, another fine attempt.
As the afternoon elapsed, i took it easy, went for a run, bought some new earphones for the IPod, and hung out like a wet smell. Made some dinner in the hostel kitchen, another Lloyd Grossman number, this time with Broccolli for the purpose of health, and watched some tv in the main chill out room. It was around this time that the conflict in the Middle East began to flare up, and each new development in the early stages became more and more frequent as CNN became a perpetual background presence. As i write this ten days on, i continue to be horrified by these awful events, the unfair, one-sided way they are generally portrayed, and the sheer disregard for the respect for shared humanity that seems to relentlessly blight our planet, at the whim of politics and profit.
I had a reasonably quiet one tonight, traipsing the streets like the random that i am, thinking lots about everything and nothing simultaneously. Walked past the same old boozehound on the corner, who'd seemingly polished off his Guinness supply, and was now gesturing like a deranged thespian in his private hallucinatory realm. Crashed out somewhere around midnight with the hustle and bustle of the merry Galway drinkers cheering and chanting through the pitched ceiling windows of the Barnacles dorm.
