A Full Day in Cork

May 15, 2012—Cork, Ireland

The place we are staying serves a fullIrish breakfast.  It was a lot of food, especially meat.  It had only one egg, but it had two slices of fried ham, two sausages, a piece of black sausage (blood sausage), a piece of white sausage (no blood), hashbrowns, grilled tomato, toast, butter, jams, tea, and orange juice.  In addition, there was a buffet of smoked salmon, fruits (prunes, grapefruit, mixed fresh fruit), cereals (5 kinds including a wonderful granola with nuts and dried bananas and a “molded” granola in a bar shape), and various breads. We were stuffed afterward.

This was a day to thoroughly explore Cork.  We walked from our hotel to a park where we toured the Cork City Museum.  The exhibits were interesting, but the best was a series of films of the city around 1900.  Outside, there was a strong smell of manure as maintenance personnel prepared the flower beds and planted flowers for the spring weather we are having.

From there, we headed to the University College Cork.  On the way there, a woman pushing her child in a stroller that allowed him to pretend he was pedaling a bicycle started talking to us and guiding us.  Her accent sounded as if she had grown up lower class.  She has managed, however, to put three students through degrees at the university mainly due to the facts that costs are low (about $2000 per year) and that they could live at home and go to school without the expense of housing or food beyond what she was already spending on them.  She was nice and quite funny.  One of the things she said to us was, “You lucky lads, we hardly ever see sunshine!”

The university has a very nice quadrangle formed by nice stone buildings, an interesting old observatory, a fantastic student center with outdoor space, and a very nice modern art gallery.  The students are taking final exams, so many were free to relax and enjoy the feel of the sunshine on their bodies.

When we left the university, we headed downtown for the rest of the day.  We visited several churches, went through the English Market which is a great food market, toured the Crawford Gallery which is the local art museum, went to a commercial art gallery, found the Cork Opera House and the Everyman PalaceTheater, sat in the sunshine beside the river, listened to musicians performing on the street, etc.

The Crawford Gallery was a rather strange collection of artwork (amateur to professional to weird) located in a building that had one of the most unusual configurations of any museum I’ve ever visited—a hodgepodge of rooms in odd configurations and arrangements.  One of the best features was a piece of public art outside—a contemporary cow sculpture upside down in an artificial tree.