Like this:

Galway never has good weather. “Shite weather,” the Dubliners tell me, shaking their heads. Sure. Like they live in Bermuda.

Galway’s on the west coast of Ireland, a four-hour bus ride from here. I went with a group of international students I’ve been hanging out with in the last couple of weeks. Good craic, all of them.

The crew, from left to right: Megan, Shane, Andrea, Hannah. Regrettably I’m taking the picture — we weren’t smart about getting someone to get a shot of all of us. Oh well. These are great people.

We were hungry after a long ride on the bus, punctuated by the hilarity of trying to talk to an Irish kid about our age who decided it would be great craic to discretely bring along a flask of vodka to make the trip more bearable. (Maybe it did for him, but it made our journey seem a lot longer). Our Galway experience started at the Supermac.

I’ll explain the Supermac culture in Galway briefly. It’s a national chain, but the one we visited has an especially colorful nightlife. Imagine a McDonalds that purveys the same breast of chicken presented in five or six different ways, equally unexciting. Now put it into a building with bad floor tiles and garish fluorescent lighting, populated with students aged 14 to 24 who come stumbling in much too late at night. Fights apparently broke out quite regularly at the entrance, and the security guard in the place advised us to hustle out when we were through, just in case. (Every store in Ireland has its own security guard, something I’m still getting used to).

Galway was a relief after the busy streets of Dublin. Aside from a small shopping district, the downtown isn’t much — a mandatory selection of Irish pubs on every corner, a couple of crisscrossing avenues with breakfast places and coffee shops. A small shopping mall. Our walk to the hostel took us near all of these, and also over the Shannon River, whose bridges offer some pretty spectacular views of downtown if you know where to look.

The hostel was tidy and just what we needed, full of other students on weekend holiday. At least there was carpet, which put it well above the hostel where my roommate and I stayed in Buenos Aires during our trip this summer.

We had a couple of good nights in the city, which I’ll come back to in a bit. But the real gem of the trip was seeing the countryside — that famous landscape that has become synonymous among every culture with rolling green hills, rugged cliffs, and herds of woolly sheep. In our room, we found someone had left a brochure for day trips into the country, and we decided to book one for Saturday. We had a choice between Connemara, the highland region to the north of Galway, or a trip that would take us south, where we’d be able to see some legendary Irish cliffs. We had heard the cliffs were a great stop, so we decided on the southern route.

Our six-hour bus tour Saturday took us through the Burren, a wild, rocky region of green plains peppered with rock outcroppings. Fields enclosed by stone walls whirled by; groups of sheep and cattle looked up to watch the bus roll past; every once in a while, a stray burst of sunlight would peep through the low-hanging clouds to give us a better view of what lay all around. It was the Ireland we had been searching for when we came here, an Ireland that takes some searching nowadays thanks to globalization and its rapidly homogenizing effects on much of Western culture.

Looking around us, we realized we had been thirsty for this for the past half month. Starving. Coming from the city, with its American retail outlets (and Soulja Boy blaring from every club and bar within earshot), Galway and the Burren were a wonder, a retreat, the fantasy of postcards and old poetry come alive right on the other side of the glass, streaming by full-tilt as our driver drove the bus much too fast down the narrow roads.

Our tour finished at the Cliffs of Moher, which I later found on Rick Steves’ list of must-sees for Galway, and with good reason. We don’t have many cliffs in Georgia. It’s the Piedmont; cliffs just aren’t something we do. So when I found myself on a high overlook, staring across the windy gap, it was a lot to take in. The wind tried to snatch us off the walkways at every moment, and rain pelted our faces until we couldn’t feel a thing. We took some pictures beside a watch tower left over from medieval times, perched at the top of one of the ridges.

They say the Cliffs of Moher are 800 feet at their highest point. I haven’t done physics or math diagrams since high school, and maybe it’s because of this that I didn’t really understand just what the guide meant until I got up to the overlook. The cliffs aren’t just big — they’re dazzling. You get up on the overlook and peer around you, and you become aware of the enormity of some things in the world, in nature. That kind of colossal scale has no words, and the picture I’ve included isn’t going to do it justice. You have to stand on the edge and feel the tug of the salt air on your clothes, feel the pit opened up in your stomach where security was a moment before. I’ve never felt so small. And so watched. You have crazy thoughts at the tops of those cliffs, battered by the bad weather and swallowed by the empty space above and below you. For all our barking and bluster, human beings are small, fragile creatures. The hands that shaped those cliffs, the tower-thick-fingers and volcanic thumbs, were strong beyond comprehension.

After such heavy meditations, food was obviously in order. Some pub grub on the way home — a good baguette with one of the best pints of Guinness I’ve had since I came here.

(How can he tell the difference? you ask. I’ll tell you a story my Irish roommate passed along to me about the Guinness culture. Every Guinness pint glass you’ll find in Ireland has a box with the number 1759 on the side. Tradition holds that Arthur Guinness, during his earliest days as a brewer, was pouring a pint of Guinness at this time — in American time, 5:59 p.m. — and he was interrupted by the bells on a nearby church, which rang at noon, midnight and 6 p.m. to call all good Irish Catholics to a brief prayer. He stopped pouring the pint halfway through, said his Hail Maries, and finished the pint. Now, all these years later, if you get a pint of Guinness in any respectable Irish pub, the bartender will pull you half a glass, let it sit a moment for the head to rise, and finish it off. Older Irishmen, who drink Guinness like it’s their job, which it probably is, will return a pint of Guinness if they don’t get this special “long pull,” and the bartender has to pass them another, with much chagrin.)

Our night in Galway was a great one. We wound up in an enormous pub downtown called The King’s Head, home of a million stag and hen parties, and the cheapest pints we’ve had since we came (3.80 Euro — let’s just take a minute to think about how sick that is). The highlight of the night by far was the cover band that played, Tightrope. All the musicians were grossly overqualified to be in cover bands — the lead guitarist ranks among the best I’ve seen live. I’ve never heard a version of My Sharona that dropped my jaw, but these Irish musicians changed my mind on that score.

(I wanted to put some footage of ‘Hey Ya’ at the end of this, but I think the band would get after me because they already have some stock footage on YouTube, so check out this one instead.)

That’s about it as far as the Galway trip. It was well worth it, and the travel bug has bitten hard. I’ve got Cork planned for this weekend — the TRAD (traditional music) festival is starting, so it sounds like this is the best time to go. I’ll try to get updates up a little more frequently from here on in, as I’m sure you folks at home are interested in Irish goings-on of late. Slainte.

(That being the Gaelic word for ‘cheers,’ pronounced SLAWN-chuh.)

Knights of Cydonia, by Muse. Note the intense guitar jam toward the end. Other Tightrope hits from our Galway concert included When You Were Young by The Killers, Highway to Hell, and a Metallica medly ending with Enter Sandman, which brought the house down.