My first real Irish experience: Watching Hurling in a Pub!

Sunday, September 4th: Woke up and went with my roommate Emily, my next door neighbor Elizabeth and my across the hall neighbor Amber into town for lunch and to watch the hurling game. First, we wandered around the city of Galway for a while and went into a jewelry shop and looked at traditional Celtic jewelry before finding a pub to watch the hurling game. The pub we went to, The Kings Head, was super Irish with stone walls and an awesome atmosphere. We all ordered fish and chips with the mushy peas (our waitress asked if we were brave enough to try the mushy peas and we all said yes!). The fish and chips were amazing and just what I was craving and the mushy peas were surprisingly good! I really liked them! Then the game started on the big screen TV in the pub. Hurling is the major sport in Ireland and the game we watched was a qualifying game for the finals. Hurling, we figured out, is like a cross between field hockey and lacrosse where the goal is to get the ball (basically a baseball) down the field and either into the goal (three points) or through the field goals (like football = 1 point). But you can pick the ball up with your hand and smack it down the field (like baseball/lacrosse...while running) or you can hit it like field hockey. Regardless it is a very high contact sport so much so that the Ref got in the way of a fight between players and got hit in the nose and it broke his nose!

Hurling at The King's Head

Overall the game was really fun to watch but around half time we left the pub and wandered Galway again going to sweater shops and a mall. Then we made it to the grocery store before heading back to the apartments in the rain. Later that night we had a quite night in and watched dirty dancing :)