Kilkenny and Frighteningly Large Deer: This Weekend Update

Blogosphere, how are we doing?

SO, I'd say a lot has happened this past week with experiences and events, but I want to be honest to my viewers and tell you that it's been a slow week full of coursework and generally melancholy non-exciting news. For instance, the big thing this week was that my bottom permanent retainer fell off.....I promise to never bore you with anything that action-packed ever again.



WHICH BRINGS US TO THE TRIP TO KILKENNY!
I hopped on a bus this morning in the soft grey drizzle I've become so used to here in Dublin with 3 friends from campus, and we took a two hour bus ride to head down south to Kilkenny.

A UK based map, you can tell because people in Ireland call "Londonderry" "Derry"

After arriving with the bus spending excruciating minutes making turns on streets that were clearly not designed by the Nords for buses, we finally arrived at the famous Rothe house in the middle of the city.

It's a house. And Rothe onced owned it. And it's in Kilkenny

After milling around for a few minutes outside whilst waiting for the majority of the tour group to finish using the restrooms and the tour to start, I was able to get a look around the courtyard where I thought the tour would be starting. I was only mistaken however, to find out that the majority of the tour was the courtyard. After cursing myself for not dressing warmer, we listened to the tour guide talk about the history of Kilkenny from the 6th century on. Apparently, the city started from a monastic order who started a church up on a hill. The Normans came around the 11th century and built a wall and a castle around the city, and laid it out like you would normally see a fish skeleton, with the main bone running from the castle to the cathedral, and the houses being the long skinny ones that get stuck in your teeth. This specific house had a lot of history as it had stood from the last 500 years in some order of disarray or high esteem. We got a tour of the upper rooms, where I found one of the scariest things I've come across in my life.

Deer from your nightmare.

Say hello to our good friend the Irish deer. From where he's stationed from where I took the picture would be where you would see him normally in the wild. Let's just make a few notes here.

1. You can't see the ground from where I took the photo.
2. There is an upward angle from where I took the photo
3. The width of his horns stretch further than the fireplace.
4. The fireplace is almost as tall as the guy standing next to it, who was well over 6 feet tall.

Now, I spent a lot of time among the American deer this summer, and I have no problem with it. But if this guy came up to me in the woods 10,000 years ago...there would definitely be some issues. Any hope I had for upholding the traditional sense of masculinity would melt away right then and there as I sobbed for mother to shoo it away.

But anyways, we continued to tour the house and saw some pretty neat elevated gardens on the 2nd-3rd floor that housed mallards. I think if I had to have a fallacious job for one day, I would tell people that I am a mallard houser. So, we continued onward to lunch, which consisted of a few light sandwiches, soup, and a cup of tea.

We were still kinda hungry, so after some light bookstore browsing/shopping, we found a comfortable café that was serving breakfast all day and jumped on the chance. We only had a little bit more time, so we spent it just walking around the cobblestoned city looking into various shops. I ended up buying a thicker jacket because I was freezing to the bone walking around Dublin. I have high hopes for it. Because we did a castle tour last weekend, we decided to skip the one this week, but I do have a final photo to leave you off with.

Castles on Castles on Castles

I think if I'm going to keep stumbling on these castles. Incidentally. It's called a luxury problem.