Dingle all the Way

Today our group toured Dingle, which is a peninsula in Southwestern Ireland. The scenery was really beautiful, what I always imagined Ireland looking like, with the misty mountains in the distance and rolling green hills divided by hedges and rock walls, and sheer cliffs dropping to the sparkling sea. They had said it was going to be a worse day today than yesterday, but for most of the day it was sunny and lovely. Travalon says Dingle is his favorite place we have visited so far, and I enjoyed it a lot myself.

Not only is Dingle beautiful, but it is in the Gaelteach, or the areas where they still speak Irish. Travalon and I attempted to learn a few phrases today, like "Thank you" (which I totally had down but now have completely forgotten, except that it starts with a G), "How are you?" which is "Canas ta tu?" and the reply is "Taim go maith," or at least that's how the woman in a shop we stopped at wrote it down for me. I don't think I have pronounced it right yet, so don't ask how to say it. Apparently "tu" is the only word for "you" in Irish; it feels very weird to use it with strangers when you come from a Romance language background, where "tu" is reserved for close friends and children. Irish does actually seem to have a lot in common with Romance languages, especially French, so I can sometimes make out what the signs say. Seeing all these bilingual signs in a mountainous, overcast land brings back memories of my time in the Basque country, except that I'm not struggling to understand them when they speak English... for the most part. A few people have such strong accents that I'm not quite sure what they're saying.

Travalon did buy me a lovely piece of jewelry today: a silver necklace with a pendant that has both our names written in Ogham, the ancient Celtic alphabet, and then on the back it says "Go Deo," which means forever in Irish. Then our group went to an education center to learn about the people who used to live on the Blasket Islands, rugged islands off the Dingle peninsula. The government made them leave in the 1950's because it was too hard to get there in an emergency during the winter. Yet people had lived there for millennia without any concern about that. We didn't go out to the island, but on the mainland we saw stone beehive huts that were four thousand years old. Pretty impressive! As our busdriver/tour guide said, "I doubt if my house will still be standing in four thousand years." Then we returned to Killarney, where I am blogging before we go out this evening for a late dinner and maybe some live music. Tomorrow we're off to the famous Cliffs of Moher!

Famous Hat