At the beginning of 2005 I met three charming ladies from Ireland through the Comenius program. The result was that I finished the summer semester university exams in record time and then it was just a matter of packing and … here I go to discover the Emerald Isle. I spent most of my time in the touristy but very nice city of Galway on the west coast. I worked in the Garveys Inn on Eyre Square as a night receptionist (and sometimes as a “night barman” when people were too thirsty). As in any Irish pub, it was a lot of fun, although one of the bosses had a fixed idea that my English was too bad because I did not understand him (and only him). This was not very fair on his part because his English was heavily marked by an accent from somewhere in Sligo that was completely unintelligible. Anyway, when I came back to Galway two years later, while I was studying in Dublin, we met again and remembered those times only with a smile.
As if the night shifts were not enough, during the day I worked as a web designer for Golden Egg Productions. Not much time for sleeping. At the same time I managed to take a lot of nice walks along the beautiful promenade of Galway, to visit Galway Cathedral regularly, to walk around Lake Corrib and to make some trips to Connemara and the Aran Islands. At the very end, as the icing on the cake, I moved from Ireland to Northern Ireland and spent the last few days with my friends in Omagh (and thanks to Hugh, also learned to like the Guinness).
