Hello Scotland, Nice to Meet you Again

Helloooo Edinburgh! Yes, I am back in the ‘burgh and waiting for that sunny day so I can juggle on the Meadows.

I spent one month in Ireland participating in various shenanigans, most of which involved juggling. The first week was kicked off in Dublin with the Dublin Juggling Convention, discussed in the previous post. Then I headed out to Galway where I lived with Kate in a hostel for about a week. In the hostel, I met some really cool people who I kept in contact with after I moved out (so I had friends, yay!) and I also ran into a girl who I had met in the Edinburgh hostel – the travelling community is a small world indeed!

Kate found a flat about a 10 minute walk from the city centre, and I found the couch……satisfactory, haha. I had a killer St. Paddy’s weekend, in which I travelled out to south east Ireland to meet a poi spinner I had met in Edinburgh. Her family lives on a small farm in Westport and she invited me out to spend the holiday. They had a farmhouse over 100 years old, and it was awfully rural and cool! It was made of wood and clay and it was heated with a wood burning stove. The weekend weather was beautiful, and the walks around the property were stunning. We even hopped in a rowboat and floated through the wetlands until we came upon an ancient and abandoned farmhouse that we explored. The structures were crumbling and vines were growing all around the old junk left out and about.

Back in Galway, I saw the Cliffs of Mohr on a sunny day and they were just as majestic as the postcards looked. I went in a cave and I saw the peat bogs. One of the jugglers I met, Steve, invited me and a friend on a drive through Connemara county and he told us history bits and facts since his family was from that area. It was very picturesque (imagine the sheep grazing/stone walls/green pasture image) and we saw the remains of the old fields with ridges carved into them where they used to grow potatoes.  I have to give a huge “thank you” to Steve who was so generous to me!

During the last 2 weeks in Galway I juggled, juggled, juggled. There is a cute touristy street lined with shops that leads down to the waterfront where there is plaza called the Spanish Arch. If you ever want to run into your friends, the Arch is the place to meet them! On a typical weekend, it looked like a mini juggling convention – it was amazing how many jugglers would show up. There were also musicians, artists, and cool kids just hanging about watching the water flow by….  The pictures in the sidebar were taken there – Brad brought Connect 4, haha!

I started to regret my choice to leave Galway – it had everything I wanted. But the biggest juggling festival in Britain was calling my name, and I can’t resist a good festival!