Galwegians

Galway is billed as this fabulous San Fransisco of Ireland, an artsy fartsy kind of place.  I dearly love SF, so I am really looking forward to visiting it’s smaller sister city. 

We are spending the next two nights at the Twelve hotel, which is a relatively new hotel built around the bones of a hundred year old bar/pub.  It is pretty darn cute if you like your hotels to have some personality.  The bathrooms are great fun with changing colors mood lighting, the décor is dark and modern, and the rooms are wuiet despite having a rowdy bar downstairs.  We have a great sute where the kids are each on their own ligne-roset couch beds, schweet.

Galway is meh for me though.  It looks just like every other touristy town, just plopped in Ireland rather than France or something.  That is kind of a letdown.  I expected a bigger version of Dingle, with more art galleries and Irish craftsmen showing their work.  This was not to be.  It turns out  that Galway is really a very good base-camp for exploring the amazing scenery  of the surrounding areas of the Burren and Connemara.  It is definitely worth another visit when I can plan some farther-out, outdoor adventures where we come back into Galway for a shower and a pub.

Then something caught our eye.  We might not be able to look at or buy art, but we could create our own.  We found a bone-carving studio.  Yeah, like the Maori.  Cool.  This chick goes to the local butcher and buys Irish cow bones in mass and prepares them for a further purpose of becoming talismans.

 

Dangerous beaches

Aidan is too young, so the next day I send him and Ken to Roundstone to see these beaches… Dog’s Beach and G, and yes, they are that nice.  Here is Aidan sinking up to his ankles in the seashell sand. 
 

Riley and I then went to her studio to spend six very long hours carving.  When she saw what we wanted to do, she sort of chuckled at our ambition, told us that was far more than a one-day project, and helped us scale things back.  We began by sketching our ideas, and finding a bone fragment that would work.  Then we sketched onto the bone and sawed it down to a two millimeter margin.  Then we went into a rotating sander, where I lost most of my fingernails, it was hard to tell amongst all the bone dust.  Then carving, dremeling and sandpapering, and more sanding, and more sanding, and file work and sanding and sanding and finally either polishing or a tea-treatment.  It was quite hard work and the tendons in our hands were sore the next day. 
 

I made an “S” which also stood for swan, because the kids and I ran into a famiiy of swans on a little hike, and they were magnificent.  We stood and watched, enchanted at them for quite a long time.  I also found a way to incorporate a moon shape into the swans wings, which I quite like, as the moon is usually a maternal symbol.  Riley Made a tribal-style cat in repose, and tea stained it to look more like an aged relic.  I think we are both happy with our carvings, even if they aren’t as complicated as we hoped, but we both want to do another one that we could spend more time on.