Adventures on the Emerald Isle: Post-Apocalyptic Ireland and Airbending

I went on lots of adventures this weekend and I'm here to share them with you!

This past Friday was Culture Night in Derry, where basically the whole city has all sorts of activities going on all day. We hit up the Guild Hall Square after our dance class to check out the live music for a bit. The band that was playing was a local pop-punk band with a horde of teenage school girls fangirling over them. I remember those days. I remember when I was one of those teenage fangirls fawning over a band (Okay, I still am sometimes.) Eventually we decided to go exploring some more around the city, so we wandered around and looked into some shops. We found a comic book/music/movie store and I fangirled over the Doctor Who and Harry Potter merch. We also found the Across the Divide statue, a monument symbolizing reconciliation and hope for the future after the Bloody Sunday events. Later that evening we headed back to the Guild Hall to listen to a pretty cool folk band and head to the fashion show in the Craft Villiage (Diagon Alley) and watch some fire dancers..

Fangirling.

Across the Divide

Approximately 2:30 in the morning, Lydia and I Face Timed into the photo shoot jam session of Bluffton's favorite creature rock band, The Anabaptist Bestiary Project! So excited for the album to come out! We didn't get to bed until after 4:00 AM, but it was so worth it!

Bright and early Saturday morning (Okay, it was only 10:30, but when you don't get to bed until almost dawn, it's a little rough) we hopped on the bus to go to Donegal to the Inishowen Peninsula for the day. Mervyn, our program director is currently in the US doing some work for Bluffton and Earlham's NI program, so our bus driver Francis gave us the tour through the area. Our first stop on our foggy morning was to Grianán Ailigh, a circular stone structure built in the 6th century A.D. Archaeologists aren't exactly sure what it was used for, but personally I felt like it was a site for an ancient version of the Irish Hunger Games. It was totally awesome.

Our next site we ventured to was Fort Dunree, an abandoned British military base on the Inishowen Peninsula that originally was used to ward off invading French troops. There was a museum on the base, but since it cost money, we decided to just explore the actual base. I'm still not entirely sure if it was technically safe, but the buildings were all decrepit and eerie and ghostly. It was mildly terrifying - it felt like we were about to become victims in a slasher film, but it was beautiful.

The view off of the peninsula

The Ghost Town of Fort Dunree. Slasher Film.

Our final destination of the trip was through a village and to a beach called Doagh Strand where Francis showed us houses from the 1960's that still had straw roofs and a "Famine Wall." During the potato famine in mid 19th century Ireland, land owners would provide food for tenants only if they did work for them. Since there wasn't much actual work that was beneficial to the economy, the land owners would require the workers to complete pointless tasks like dig holes and fill them back up again or building stone walls on the hills.

When were on the Doagh Strand beach, we tromped through the sand down to the ocean waters and took some pretty rad pictures, which you can see below.