Croke Park and Archaeology

Yesterday (Friday), we went to Croke Park for our second field trip.  It's a giant stadium in Dublin for Irish games, hurling, camogie (which is ladies' hurling), and Gaelic football.  It was interesting to hear about the relationship between Irish independence and sports.  The stadium was huge (80,000 capacity) and beautiful, and it's cool because all the athletes are amateurs and actually older than you'd expect.  We got to see all of the levels of seating, go right up to the field, and see the locker rooms.  It's a neutral field, so isn't a home team with a nicer locker room, but they were very basic.  The championship games, called All-Ireland finals, take place over the next three Sundays for each sport.  So our field trip was well-timed.

Inside the locker room.  The jerseys on the wall are for Tipperary and Kilkenny, the counties playing in the hurling final tomorrow.

The spot where the winning captain gets the trophy and makes a speech in Irish.

The park.  The field is roughly twice as large as a football field.

Later that night, I went with a few roommates to a pub in town which was the perfect, quintessentially Irish pub.  It was a bunch of guys with instruments just playing together.  There were maybe 12 or 15 guys in this pub with everything from guitars, flutes, violins and so forth all playing together, young and old.  It was just what I'd hoped to see.

Today, I went with a few friends to the National Museum of Archaeology, which is pretty near Trinity.  It had a bunch of artifacts from the bronze age and several artifacts we'd had a lecture on a few days ago.

I also finished my first paper for Trinity, which was a bit of a doozy.  But oh well.  Then I took a really long nap.  I've been tired a lot here throughout the day.  It's strange.  And I never nap.  Anyway, now I need to crack into the massive amount of reading we have for this coming week and look up how to get to Dalkey tomorrow.

Oh and it rained this morning.  It was the first really rainy day in Dublin.  I'm not exactly looking forward to it, but it was clear for the rest of the day.  I guess we've just have freakishly stellar weather for the past week.

Last thing - I also added some pictures to some of the older posts.  And I've made a personal resolution to use "cheers" often. Good night!