I have worked in tourism here in Northern Ireland for a few years and found that a lot of our visitors are touring the whole of Ireland. And almost all that I meet have brilliant things to say about Galway and the West coast of Ireland from natural beauty to the nightlife. As is often the case I haven’t visited half of the places on my own doorstep. When my sister and I were chatting about how we both could do with a wee break Galway came up as a handy option. And so I hopped onto booking.com and got booking. I thought I would share here what some of our plans are for our visit and when we get back I’ll let you know how it goes! We will hopefully be arriving at 5 o’clock on a Monday evening and leaving about 4 o’clock on Thursday afternoon. My sister and I are both keen musicians so first and foremost we are looking forward to hopfully enjoying some traditional sessions and a pint in the evenings. From what I can gather the places to be are either Tig Coili’s or Th
As my fourteen year old self sat on a busy train to Belfast, trying not to look anyone in the eye and praying to God that no one would sit beside me an old man got on the train. A very old man. And of course he sat down beside me. I smiled at him and he smiled back before I was absorbed back into my, super cool at the time, blackberry phone. A few minutes past when I could feel him looking over my shoulder. He asked “what is that?”, and for a moment my young brain could not comprehend the idea that anyone on the planet would not know what a mobile phone was. I smiled and explained that it was a phone and you could go on the internet, take photographs and send text messages to people. He expressed his wonder at this, but what perplexed him most seemed to be the small size of the phone. He began to tell me a story about his life during the war. He had worked with Morse code machines which, he explained, used to be the size of a desk. Then one day he came in to work and there was