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on the J.K. Rowling countdown, I thought I’d rap out a quick update about my trip to Cork this weekend. (Be on the lookout soon for a celebrity photos gallery, which includes Will Ferrell and Eddie Izzard; I’m serious, no point playing around when so many famous people are coming to UCD).

Galway was a breath of fresh country air for this city-dweller, and Cork was just the same way. Normally, bus trips can get on my nerves; they’re long and tedious, and every once in a while, if you tripped too many people on the way to class or broke a pretty girl’s heart or maybe killed someone recently, you’ll get stuck beside a chatty Norwegian with bad English and a life story longer than the Appalachian Trail. (That’s not a true story, but you know what I’m talking about.) When you’re in Ireland, though, every bus trip is an adventure. Who wouldn’t pay a few Euro to be flung through storybook pages for four hours? You can just at the window, looking and looking and looking, the green countryside rising and falling gently outside. I could have slept on the way down, but what was the point? Ireland was out there, miles and miles of it. I could take a bus trip like that every weekend for the rest of my life, and never be sick of it.

Cork is one cool town. I went to visit Rebecca, a buddy of mine from UNC. The walk from the bus station to her flat, which couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes, gave me a pretty representative impression of the city. Downtown is a compact grid of streets packed with shops and restaurants. Both of us always have an eye out for good bookstores, and Rebecca showed me her favorite, Connolly’s, which sits in the shadow of the biggest Tesco I’ve ever seen. Her flat is near the River Lee, which cuts through the middle of the city in a way that reminded me of the Liffey in Dublin.

But there’s no point in comparing the two. Aside from the rivers and the locals’ love for drink, Cork and Dublin couldn’t be more different. Dublin is huge, and full of multitudes. Although Cork isn’t exactly a hamlet, the city is spread up and down the sides of a large valley, and it gives it a more spacious feel. You don’t feel hemmed in or assaulted; the town is much quieter, and the old Gaelic spirit that Yeats and the crew were so intent on reviving seems closer to the surface here, and easier to brush shoulders with.

(Stout is generally cheaper in Cork, too. I’m just saying — we college kids are easy to impress.)

A brief summary of the highlights:

1. A trip to the gaol, or jail, which closed in 1923. They have art museum-style tape recorders with headphones, and you can walk all around the cold and dreary place, now populated only by echoes and lifelike mannequins of prisoners who were there once. They say the place is haunted, which is hardly a surprise. Nothing like a few chilling tales when it comes to inspiration for fiction.

2. A trip to the pub, a little spot called Southside, where it was me and my crew (all college students from America) and a bunch of Irish people, none of whom were under the age of fifty. I did meet one kid of about my age in the bathroom, and as he was fairly banjaxed, convinced him that I was President Bush’s son, or cousin. The man playing piano for our entertainment knew the words to a hundred American pop songs from the eighties, but when I requested my favorite Irish folk tune, “Dirty Old Town,” he had to play it on the tin whistle, being unfamiliar with the verses. The bartender was proud of me for taking my Jameson without ice.

3. A trip to the college — University College Cork, that is. Rebecca’s walk to class takes about 20 minutes, but I wouldn’t trade the sights for extra sleep: winding roads packed with houses painted a hundred pastel colors, the stately bulk of St. Finbar’s cathedral towering above us at one point. UCC is everything I expected in an Irish center of higher learning — stony and vine-encrusted, stories hissing out from every pore. We explored a few of the wings and tried the doors to the tower classrooms, but they were locked, which banished any Harry Potter-esque fantasies of secret rooms and old mirrors that tell the future from my head.

And speaking of the boy who lived, his mother’s coming, so I suppose I’ll wrap up. I’ve got to upload the pictures from Cork, but they’ll be coming soon. It’ll be good craic for all.

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