Day Five

Day five saw a return visit to the Galway clinic to I guess decide my fate.  If it was indeed torn ligaments it possibly meant a premature return to the states in order to receive surgery to reattach them so we were hoping for the best. Luck was apparently on my side. The doctor that we saw stated that he did not think it was a torn ligament rather just extremely stretched which meant a removable boot instead of a half cast which I had worn for the previous 24 hours.  Below is when Richard, Susan, and I returned to the college from Galway.

 

When I returned to the studio I could not get an image of the Burren out of my head. So I decided to do a landscape painting of the area which is not my typical style but why not. Here was my initial layout of it.
 

This is just another image of the studios, and in the very back you can see the start of the gallery.

Day Four

Day Four was more of a relaxed day. I was in a half cast so my movement was not the best and it was a studio day so it was mainly about getting some work done.

The Studios are pretty nice. They have high ceilings and I share mine with my friend Julia.

 

Here is mine pretty empty in this picture but it was the first day and I have a more extensive amount of stuff now.

This it the first piece i have worked on here. I am not totally sure if I am finished with it nor do I know if I even like it but we will see where I take it from here.

Galway Clinic

Galway is about a half an hour to forty minute drive from Ballyvaughen we then reached the clinic and sadly you were not able to take pictures but i snapped two before we got in.  I was pretty impressed by the clinic it had a grand piano in the center and was more like a hotel when you walked in then a hospital.

Here is Susan and I as we just arrived i was in a wheel chair for most of the day.  In the process of getting to the hospital I was injected in the hip with a pain killer, had some X-rays done, and then had to get a half cast put on my leg so I have some lovely crutches that i had to travel on.

Day Three A.K.A. Me being an Idiot and Injurying Myself

So it is finally to that point that everybody wanted how i injured my ankle.  We had just taken a tour of the college and myself, Julia, and Jenny decided to take a walk.  We started on the road and as we were walking down in a field we saw this car and decided to investigate. 

 Well the car was down a bit of a steep and unstable rock hill thing and i decided to climb down. just as i was doing that the rocks underneath me gave and I fell down into a thorn bush, scraping my thigh and gaining some nice cuts on my hands.  I was pretty much stuck and my three options were to either, climb up through the unstable rock (which I tried to get a good grip and could not and I was pretty sure it would have fallen again), walk through the thorn bushes (which would have been extremely unpleasant), or jump into the field below avoiding that whole dilemma. I chose the third. Little did i know that there was a decent sized divot in the ground and as i feel rolled my ankle really horribly.  It then was a messy amount of getting me back to the school which Jenny and Julia helped a great deal.

This is Jenny and I walking through the field. I then was carried by the Manager of the college, Robert, to the car where i then iced my foot waiting to o to the Galway Clinic.

Feeling really cool at this point.

Cliffs Of Mohor

This was probably my favorite part of the trip as in places to see.  The Cliffs of Mohor are amazing so beautiful and just all together brilliant.  There is a section that they caution you not to go on but you only live once so Jenny, Trish, and I decided to enter and travel to the are with no safety railings.  It worked out because I was able to get some great pictures of the cliffs. I also dangled my feel over the edge which was pretty dangerous but I am still a live so successful visit? I think so.

Just as we entered the cautioned are there were these German guys taking shots. So in the Spirit of the Ireland Trip we took shots with them. The picture below is Jenny taking one with them.

This was the view of the studio looking back from the cautioned area.  It was really beautiful and so cool the castle was originally built I believe by the O'Brien Guy who was in the tomb two posts back.  Just so people could get a better view. 

This is a view of the other area of the cliffs when you go to the left of the entrance instead of the right. (Picture Below)

Legend Of The Corpse Eating Eel

While we were at the cliffs of more information center they had a section dedicated to myths related to the area. The one that really interested me was the one about the giant corpse eating eel. I took pictures of the myth to show so here they are.

Shrine/Tomb Of O'Brien

So the next place we went after lunch was this shrine dedicated to a saint. Apparently back in the day when the pagans were around they had a bunch of shrines dedicated their gods. So when the Catholics swooped in instead of destroying the shrines they converted them to shrines to saints or something like that.  For some reason I could not remember the name of the saint this was dedicated to but here is the initial shrine are.

 

The Shrine Also had an alcove for offering to the saint, usually the normal wants were in it but our guide said that there was a picture of an ultrasound that was thanking the saint for blessing them with a child which I thought was pretty cool. 

This is an image of the alcove previous spoken of it was pretty chill and had this nice fountain at the end of it. I don't know if it was holy or not but it did not give me too much luck for the next day but i digress haha.

 

Just above the shrine was the tomb the the guy that made the are prosper. His family name was O'Brien, from what we were told it seems like everyone who worked for him hated him, but he established the area and recognized the beauty of the land and allowed for it to be preserved and not disturbed.

I got a good picture of some cool flowers.

Kilfenora

After traveling around the country side or the Burren area we then decided to stop in Kilfenora to walk around and grab some food. What was cool about Kilfernora was that it had a well preserved amount of Celtic Crosses.  Some were extremely tall one which was I think 24 feet tall was located in a field not far from the church where most were preserved.

I think this was the behind view that entered into the cemetery.

This was the cemetery as you can clearly see.

The Celtic Crosses were pretty old and because they were mad of lime stone some of the much older ones were moved under a glass sort of display area to protect them from weathering.  Most depicted some sort of religions story from what I had learned and had some amazing imagery as you can see in the stone above.

This is the large Celtic Cross in the field, they warned us not to go in if there was a bull but luckily there was not and the group could get a closer look.
After we looked through this village we stopped in a nice pub to grab a bite to eat and then proceeded to go through the country side to an area that contained a bunch of golf courses.  We did not stop there to take picture and immediately proceeded to a a Shrine/Tomb area. The Tomb was of some man with the last name of O'Brien and the Shrine I am not totally sure some Female Saint but not sure.

Portal Tomb

The first place we stopped off at on our second day in Ireland was an overlooking view of the area of Burren. In order to get to the platform to do so you must pass under a really cool old archway as you see above.  It is a really lovely area but once again every way you look is pretty much a perfect view so I will show the best ones that I got.

 

This was the over looking area it was really spectacular and also, if you can possible pick it out,  The castle spire to the right side of the screen is correlated with the school which was pretty awesome and the school is really badass and has a lot of nice studio space.

The Next area we went to was the Portal Tomb. It is a big tourist attraction and has something possible to do with a burial site for large amounts of people around 3000 B.C. if i am correct there were also apparently mass graves in the surrounding area due to the potato famine.

 

The above image is the Portal Tomb it had only recently been roped off because tourists use to stand on top of it as well as carve their names in the bottom of the large slab. so that has been stopped.