Week 3 was all about venturing to Ireland’s west coast, a region famed for its natural beauty. After a very early morning departure, and on our way to the Cliffs of Moher, we made a fun stop at the famous Obama Plaza, a glorified gas station/rest stop celebrating Barack Obama’s Irish ancestry. The Cliffs themselves were beautiful. I took more photos than I have anywhere else in Ireland so far, and we could even see the Aran Islands off in the distance. We then went to Galway, where Anthony, Gideon, and I had dinner at the King’s Head Pub, which is in the original mayoral building dating back over 800 years.
The next morning we left for Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands. This day was a highlight of the weekend. Out of an abundance of caution, Anthony and I upgraded to e-bikes, which made exploring Inishmore much more enjoyable. Along with Abbott and Gideon, we biked around 14 miles across the island, but as we started to run out of time before the ferry headed back to Galway, we decided to make one last stop at the Wormhole. Around a 30 minute hike off the bike path and over relatively rugged terrain, we decided if we ran we could make it, so Anthony and I set off. We thought we were leaving Abbott and Gideon behind with the bikes, but while we were sprinting across the rocks, Gideon caught up with us! We were staggered that he’d caught up, but apparently he had been behind us the whole time and we just hadn’t realized. We ended up making the 25-30 minute hike each way, plus a photo break once we got there, in less than 30 minutes total, there and back. We then raced back to the ferry feeling rather impressed with ourselves. That night, the four of us had pizza at Dough Bros, which lived up to the hype as one of the best pizza places I’ve ever been to. (We split four pizzas: a Caesar, a pesto, a margherita, and a pepperoni topped with candied jalapeños (unreal idea, it made the pizza so much better).) After dinner, Abbott and I retraced our steps from the night before and found a pub that had had a sign outside saying “live trad music every Saturday night”, and we camped there for a few hours listening to music. After a while Gideon joined us, and I had a fantastic time. Live traditional Irish music is an experience, and the nonchalant way that all the musicians were sitting in the corner booth having pints while they played felt quintessentially Irish.
On Sunday, after yet another early start, we visited Kylemore Abbey, which had been built as a token of love, but only lived in for a brief period of time before it became a nunnery, and then a boarding school, before turning back into a nunnery when the school closed around 2010. This is one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen, and the grounds also include gorgeous Victorian-style gardens. We wrapped up our day with a boat tour of Lough (Loch) Neagh, Ireland’s largest loch. Fun fact, loch and lough mean the same thing. ‘Loch’ is the Scottish Gaelic word, and ‘lough’ is the anglicized version more commonly used in Ireland.
This week at Carraighill, I finished working on my first report covering European asset management (EAM), and began a macro report on the Brazilian and Mexican economies. While this was a super interesting report, I learned less from it than the EAM report, and I am flying through it.