Day 1 – lost and jetlagged

We flew into Shannon airport about 80 km south of Galway (as the crow flies, but no road in Ireland is straight) and rented a car. Renting a car is good. Renting a car right off the plane isn’t. You see, we arrived about 8 AM Ireland time. To convert you add 6 hours to central standard time or subtract 6 hours from Ireland time. So it felt like 2 AM and it was full daylight. So we had to both deal with extreme tiredness and the shock of driving out of the Avis rent-a-car place on the left side of the road. After a few days driving was fine, but this was only an hour into our trip and it wasn’t fine yet.

After we got going with the free Avis map (which was pretty good) we made our way to Galway. We knew we had to get to Corrib Village, but we weren’t exactly sure how to get there. We knew what street it was on. Google maps made it look easy, it wasn’t. We needed the Ordinance Survey map of Galway. Once we had that the next day driving was easy. Again, that is the future. We had a really hard time finding it. We kept getting turned around because the streets wind everywhere and aren’t labeled. After an hour we finally found someone who knew where Corrib Village was. This was because we were 3 blocks away from it.

Corrib Village was interesting. They are self-catering apartments (with kitchen). Hotel rooms are considered en suite if they have a bathroom in the room — a private bath does not necessarily mean it is in the room. Because my mother was teaching for a summer abroad program we were able to share the apartment in Corrib Village. We wouldn’t have been able to take the trip without that help.
Some main points on Corrib Village:

• casual : times were flexible. The shuttle to City Centre (downtown) was supposed to run from 12 noon to 8pm. It actually ran from 10am to 7pm or so. It all depends who you talked to.
• concrete block construction : this seemed common throughout Ireland. We saw houses being constructed with concrete blocks and eventually stuccoed on the outside.
• damp : it had rained before we arrived and we started in a ground floor unit. It was damp! We eventually moved to a second floor unit which was far less damp and we could leave our windows open during the day to keep it aired out.
• plastic bathrooms : they REALLY like plastic in their bathrooms. The walls and ceiling were plastic and the floor was some solid sheet of flooring. Our hotel in Dublin also had the same plastic walls and floor!
• heating : The temperature must not fluctuate too widely since the heating was by small space heaters. We needed to use them a few mornings to take the edge off. Each bathroom had its own little fan-driven heater that proved useful in drying clothes — things don’t want to dry by just hanging them up! Oh, and the light switches to the bathrooms were in the hallway outside of the bathrooms. That left me confused initially.

After we found Corrib Village Aimee promptly found the bed and napped for 2 hours. I took about an hour nap. We pretty much took it easy.