The Galway spleen

‘Save tonight, tomorrow I’ll be gone’, sings the Hungarian guitar player in Shopping Street. It is cold, surprisingly dry though. I take refuge in Cooke’s wine bar and have a few oysters. The best ones are sold on Saturdays -market day- on the Churchyard Street, right in front of Sheridan’s wine bar. The best are the native ones, older and smaller. Eating them is close to oral sex with the Atlantic Ocean.

Sheridan’s Wine Bar is the closest to nice wine and tapas you can get. Still, the prices (as everywhere else) are unexplainably unaware of the crisis. Guess the best is to drink another glass and forget about the stock markets as well. Then you may pass by The Crane, or The Roisin Dubh where there is brilliant live music every night, from a vibrant, unforgettable, live Cathy Davey to the ‘Irish Pink Floyd’ (yes, it’s almost like the real ones) passing by dozens of music bands, many of which have a tendency towards ‘fusion’ of all sorts of harmonies (I’ve seen a hip hop version of Irish folk and a group of Finns playing a folk version of Brahms’ Hungarian dances).






The Galway street fashion is kind of a mix between tough Connemara hills shepherds and post-11 September hippies. Indeed the place is a mix of cosmopolitanism and provincial atmosphere. You’ll hear a lot of Polish and Spanish, certainly. I have a sip of Guinness outside Tih Coilis while a group of Basques form a circle and chant some choirs. The scene would be most impressive if some the voices were not painfully out of tune.





A few meters away there’s Lynch castle. The owner, John Lynch, Warden of Galway in the late XIV Century, was either extremely just or really pissed off with his son, because he put a rope around his son’s neck (the hangman refused to do it) for the murder of a Spaniard –a bit of a womanizer it seems- in 1493.









Down in the prom, the sea walk, you may observe the unique phenomenon of horizontal rain. It rains sideways, avoiding the shield of your umbrella, in a demonstration of predatory evolution.