Today was the first day it rained basically all day. Yesterday it rained in the afternoon, but that was thankfully only on our way back to the apartments. So today was a little harder to dress for even though I expected it when packing. This morning my friend, Rachel, and I went to Church. The website said it was the Irish Mass so I was interested to see how it was. Catholic Mass is Mass so I didn’t really think too much of it. But there were definitely some noticeable differences. The procession was quick we stood up sang a part of the song and Father didn’t walk down the altar. Instead he came out from the backroom. I was a little thrown off when everyone immediately knelt as soon as the music stopped. We knelt more than usual in this Mass, but the things I found most interesting was the Our Father was sung in Gaelic, which was really cool to hear. When it was time to go up for Communion, instead of going row by row everyone rushed up all at once. I also noticed that everyone there was either elderly or moms with their little kids. There was no one close to our age, probably from end of elementary school to 30s or 40s. Nonetheless it was really cool to experience it all over here. (Note: this Church is not the Church we went to. We found this later on. I just really like how it was designed.)

I met up with some other friends and headed down to the Fitzgerald Park for Picnic in the Park to kick off Cork’s Midsummer Festival. The rain did put a bit of a damper on things. People told us that you usually can’t see the grass the park is so packed, but today was rather empty. There was an orchestra that played lots of classics like Phantom of the Opera, Star Wars, and other things. We checked out the food trucks which all smelled amazing. There wasn’t much more to see so we decided to go across the bridge and check out the asylum Laurie had told us about. We made the trek uphill in the windy rain up to the other part of the city. We couldn’t find it, but ended up at the old jail. We decided to check it out anyway because we didn’t walk all the way up the hill for nothing. The museum was really cool! Each area was numbered and they gave us a guide book that had passages that corresponded to the numbers. It was really fascinating and we learned a lot about prisoners. We looked through this window down a dark corridor and everyone jumped back after seeing a shimmering figure appear. I didn’t understand what the commotion was about at first, but I looked closer and I saw the mysterious thing too. When we met up with another group later they were convinced they saw the ghost as well. We had kind of thought it was a projection apart of the museum, but no one mentioned it at the end or even in the packet. Whether it was actually there or not we will never know.

It probably took us a couple hours to get through the whole jail. The second part of the jail was a small radio museum because that’s where the first radio station in Cork was. This was especially cool for all the Smaddies in the group. After the museum we walked back down into city center to warm up and get something to eat at a Japanese restaurant near our theater. We didn’t realize how much walking we did or how tired we were until we sat down to eat. It was nice we could take our time before having to pick up our tickets and grab seats for our show. We went to see the Jungle Book, but not the Disney version you’d expect. Not even close to a Broadway production either. This one was the Urban Jungle Book. Talking about the urban jungle, which was a city, and they performed it using no talking at all. The story was told through spoken work, dance, and acrobatics. If you didn’t know the Jungle Book story it might have been hard to follow. We were surprised about the amount of kids there and wondered if they even knew what was happening. I loved how the cast consisted of 7 people who traveled around and they would recruit 4 local people for the background people wherever they went. It was so interesting to see and probably one of my favorite performances.

We met up with a larger group after the play, casually running into them as we walked out of the theater and decided to go to a diner for a late night snack/dinner. The only one open in that area after 9 o’clock was an old American diner themed place with the classic milkshakes and burgers. It was pretty good actually and we hung out there for a bit before going back home to the apartments because we have class in the morning and we are all exhausted after the wanderings on this first rainy Sunday.