Game day traffic

I tried to head out to catch the session at Taafe's a bit ago and both car and pedestrian traffic on Newcastle road near the house was considerably heavier than normal. I noticed a few cars had car flags and soon saw that most of the occupants were wearing sports jerseys. I made it across the road and as I made my way downtown, the city was just starting to crawl with folks decked out in maroon and white Gallimh (Galway) and red and green Maigh Eo (Mayo) jerseys.

Apparently there'd been a big Gaelic football match in town today. Wish I'd known. It was eating me up a bit being in the midst of the aftermath of a sporting event atmosphere and being completely on the outside looking in. To be honest, I didn't even know what sport they'd been playing until I got back and managed to look it up.

I've tried looking up match schedules on line to find a game to go to, but the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) web site ain't exactly ESPN.com. Combine a fairly static site with a sport culture and terminology that is completely different from what I'm used to, and it is nearly useless to me. It's just another example of how folks here, while being fully aware of and frequent users of the internet, still have yet to realize its full potential and all-consuming usefulness.

I'm not even certain who won (real-time score updates online is not a concept that has made it over here yet), as neither group of fans was particularly boisterous. Although, I did hear a few "Mayo" chants, and I can say that the Mayo jerseys outnumbered the Galway ones about 5-to-1. I figure there's a few possible explanations:

1. The Mayo folks are just more prone to wearing jerseys (unlikely)
2. They were all hitting the town after making the drive down, while the Galway folks all just went home. (only slightly more likely)
3. Galway, being the artsy hippy town that it is, just doesn't care about sports that much. (May be getting warmer, but the fact that all the Sunday evening sessions in town were apparently called off is a huge strike against this argument)
4. All the Galway jersies came off in shame as soon as the match was over (I think we may have a winner here)

Either way, I'm now on a mission to make it to a GAA match of some type while I'm here and am going to have to double up my efforts to do so. The fact that today was an absolutely perfect day to be at a sporting event--mostly sunny, warm enough when the sun was on you, but with a strong breeze that kept it from being too warm, even in a crowd--made it all that much worse.

Oh yeah, and speaking of relative numbers of various sporting team clothing, I may have been premature in calling the GASTLR Collegiate rankings for Notre Dame. I've seen three more people wearing Michigan stuff in the past two days. If I were still keeping count, I think it'd be very, very close, if not a Michigan lean.

Well, anyways... the Red Wings game is on in 5 minutes, so I'll be tuning into that while working on getting the rest of my Normandy pictures uploaded and formulating some posts on that trip, so expect some more stuff up soon.

In the meanwhile, here's a gallery of pics from Conal's last night in town on Tuesday, which consisted of a session at Coili's, fish-n-chips from McDonough's, a comedy act at a club, then closing out The Crane, followed by closing out the Roisin Dubh, all topped off by a full traditional breakfast that Emma made when we got home at about 2:30. Conal and I had planned on making breakfast, but once we got home and started, Emma apparently decided she'd rather have her life in her own hands and took over the cooking. By the time we were done, we had about 3.5 hours before we had to all get up as Emma was driving Conal and I to the airport for our flights to Filly and Phrance, respectively. Good times. Good times.

Also hanging out with us that night was Melissa, a friend of Aoife's from Boston who had just flown in that morning, on the first day of a three-month backpacking trip across Europe.