Cork

Sorry for the long silence. I was away for 2,5 weeks because of the Easter Break trip Belfast-Glasgow-Edinburgh-London-Paris, a trip that I will write more later on, and after the trip I was busy finishing up school assignments and all that jazz. But I'm back, for now at least.

So on Tuesday I did one last trip in Ireland with my friend, this time visiting South of Ireland, Cork to be exact. If I had to describe Cork briefly, I'd have to say that, sadly, it is the least attractive city I've seen in Ireland. Sure, it wasn't all bad, the city centre was rather lovely having some nice looking buildings and the river running through the city made some parts of the landscape quite nice. But the overall look of the city was quite colourless, especially compared to the other Irish cities I've seen, and quite ugly due to the industrial city look of the city. Also, one thing that my friend and I noticed, which was rather disturbing, was that there seemed to be something seriously wrong with the men of Cork. Never before anywhere in Ireland have men stared at us in such a disgusting manner and so often as they did in Cork. What can I say, lovely, just fucking lovely..

But anyhoo, back to Tuesday and our arrival in Cork. It was surprisingly long to Cork from Sligo, over 6 hours on a bus. Basically, even though we left quite early in the morning from Sligo, it was already afternoon when we finally reached our hostel in Cork. After sitting hours on the bus, we were too exhausted to do anything else than just get something to eat and then taking a small tour around the city. We even went to bed before 11 pm.

The next day we decided to go shopping. Like usually in Ireland, we ended up doing most of our shopping at Penneys (gotta love this store!), especially me. But I figured that I will never find clothes as nice and as cheap in Finland, so abusing by Penneys here, I won't have to buy any clothes in Finland for a long, long time.

After all the shopping, we decided that we would go out the same night. Finding a cool place turned out to be a lot more challenging than we would have thought. Regardless of the "great night life of Cork" it was nearly impossible to find a place that not only would have a dance floor, but also would be open on a Wednesday night. Eventually we ended up going to a place called Havana Browns, a bar/club that was supposed to be "one of the best night clubs in Cork." Well, in reality, it was worse than oh so lovely night club in Sligo that I solemnly swear to hate, Pure. First of all, I've never met any men coming on to women as strongly as they did at Havana Browns. Of course, my friend and I got our fair share of that. What made it even more disgusting than normally, was the fact that the we weren't exactly talking about boys who were coming on to us, we're talking about grown men, in at least their late 20s/early 30s. On top of that, they seemed to be seriously offended and surprised by the fact that we weren't warming up to them. 

The other thing that seriously ruined the night, was without a doubt, the worst DJ I've ever heard of. He seemed to be suffering from ADHD, with a goal to ruin every single dancable song with a horrible remix and playing one song for less than 30 seconds, till moving on to a next one. Listening to that for almost 2 hours, beyond annoying! On top of all that, the place was expensive, about as expensive as in Finland. So all in all, it was far from the night out we would have pictured to experience in Cork with its "great nightlife.

On a lighter matter, the next day was much better. When we went out, summer had arrived! It was the warmest weather I've experienced in Ireland yet, you could actually go outside with just a top and shorts on, in May. How awesome is that! Because of the lovely weather, we decided to work on our tan, so we sunbathed while the weather was still warm enough for that. But of course, after a while, the wind got stronger, and made the weather slightly chillier. That's when we went to another tour around the city centre, bought ice cream and all that.

Since it was only a couple of weeks from the long Easter Break trip, during which we had pretty much traveled from one city to another and from attraction to attraction, we were simply too exhausted to properly go sightseeing in Cork. I'm sure there would have been plenty of things to see in Cork, especially if you had gone outside the city centre area, but we just weren't cut out for it this time.

On Friday, it was already time to head back home. This time the trip would be even longer, about 7 hours and 20 minutes on the bus. Needless to say, after such a long trip, it felt so good to be back home.

All in all, the trip to Cork was okay. The city itself was a bit of a disappointment, especially considering how long it took us to get there. But I'm still happy that now I've seen one city in the South of Ireland as well. And of course the lovely weather in Cork was something that made the trip better. To finish up, here's a couple of photos from Cork: