We must share with you the local joke about the weather. An Irishman says, "this past week, the weather was not too bad. It only rained twice; first for three days and then again for four"!
We keep praying for sustained sunshine.
As we got closer to the Cliffs of Moher, the car traffic and number of buses on the road increased dramatically.
While the number one Irish tourist attraction on most lists is the Guiness Storehouse and Visitor Centre, the Cliffs of Moher, on the craggy Atlantic Coastline, is near the top of every list. The cliffs stretch for 5 miles and at the maximum height are 700 feet above the Atlantic Ocean below. On a clear day you can see for miles, and this attraction draws over one million visitors a year to stand atop the cliffs and admire the excellent views.
To be perfectly honest, we were disappointed. Perhaps it was the weather, and perhaps it was the fact that we really enjoyed the Cliffs of Kerry a couple of days earlier, but this was a letdown for us. When we got to the top of the cliffs, the views were OK but not breathtaking.
On the other hand, if we had been looking at the view from the vantage point of the picture below that I found on the Internet on someone else's blog, we might have told a different story. But I am not sure where to stand and how to get the weatherman to create such colours, to see such an amazing view. Here is the shot (again, not mine😟):
We continued on our way north and the weather continued to threaten. We wanted to visit the Burren Smokehouse, close to where we had booked our Airbnb for the night near the town of Lisdoonvarna. The Burren Smokehouse is an Irish family-run producer of smoked salmon, mackerel and trout and is under the supervision of the London Beth Din (KLBD). And because we were going to be passing right by their door, we thought it might be a good place to stop and sample some of their wares.
The family operates the smokehouse (factory), a very modern visitor centre next door and a restaurant (the Roadside Tavern) just up the road.
What we did not know when we arrived on Thursday August 25th was that the Smokehouse had suffered a major fire a week earlier (August 19th) and that the entire operation including the Visitor Centre (which had not suffered any damage) had been closed until the day we arrived. The fellow behind the counter, (who was incidentally from New Brunswick), explained to us that all the salmon, trout and mackerel were under the supervision of the KLBD and that if we wanted to taste a variety of their supervised hot and cold smoked salmon, there is a dish on the menu at the tavern next door that is simply that: a variety of all their fish products.
Every one of the samples on the dish was unique tasting (the whiskey & fennel cold smoked was our favourite) and the one portion that we shared was sufficient to satisfy our palate and our need for an Omega 3 boost. Fran even pointed out this very unique "mezuza" on the door of the tavern😀! I guess given the placement of this fiddle "mezuza", this must be a Sefaradic Irish family, the "Ben O'Conners"😄.
By now, it had begun to rain and so we continued on our way to our evening's accommodation, about 15 Kms north.
It was a small complex of apartment townhouses out in farm country that had remained empty for a number of years as a result of the economic collapse in Ireland at that time. A group of young owner operators had purchased the complex and when we arrived, had been in business for just 6 months. It was a real find. Beautiful well equipped apartments just off the main road to Galway, our destination for Friday.
Our early arrival gave us the chance to do our laundry and get everything we needed ready for Shabbat in Dublin.
We left Friday morning for Galway and had only a few hours to enjoy it before having to leave for Dublin. The entire centre of Galway, a harbour city of 75000 on the west coast of Ireland, which still retains portions of its medieval walls, has a very popular city centre of pedestrian streets and winding lanes with boutiques, cafes, art galleries and pubs. It attracts many tourists and the main street called Shop Street (wonder why?) regularly features buskers (street entertainers) performing for the visiting public. Here are videos of two of the buskers.
We enjoyed the couple of hours and were only sorry that we did not have more time to spend in Galway...but Shabbat was beckoning and so we left for the more than two hour drive to Dublin.
We checked in to our Airbnb, about a 30 minute walk from the shul. This was much further than the place we stayed in for the first Shabbat but the accommodations were much nicer. We prayed that we could walk to shul with no rain and the forecast indicated clear sailing.
We dropped into Super Valu to pick up a few supplies for our Sunday to Friday sojourn to Iceland and then returned to prepare for Shabbat.
Once again, we were being hosted by Rabbi Zalman Lent and his wife Rifkie for Friday night's meal. And so were about 40 other visitors to Dublin for Shabbat. In fact, there were so many visitors that this was the first time since Rabbi Lent's arrival in Dublin about 15 years ago, that the Friday night meal had to be served in the shul social hall, because there were too many guests to fit into his home. And the real amazing thing was that the Rebbetzin prepared all the food herself in her home next door.
What we especially like about communal eating for Shabbat in places where we travel, is the opportunity to meet fellow travellers from all over the world and this week was no exception. Many from Israel, a few from the UK, and others from France and the USA. What was interesting is that there were a number of young people at the table who had begun working in the Dublin area and all of them were in hi-tech. There were people with Intel, Google, Apple, PayPal, Facebook etc.
On Shabbat morning, we walked the 30 minutes to shul and so far the weather was cooperating. There was an unusually large crowd in shul (well over 150 people) because of the gala kiddush celebrating the Chazzan and his wife's 25 years in Dublin.
For lunch we were invited to Tova and Lewis Citron's home and they had a number of other guests as well. We had a great time there and of course played Jewish geography and found friends in common...small world!
In the afternoon we went to shul again and at Seudah Shlishit, there was a guest speaker from Israel, one of our fellow travellers. His name is Prof. Yair Amichai Hamburger, and he is an expert in the psychology of the Internet. It was a fascinating lecture, one that I subsequently found on YouTube and if you have the time, is well worth watching. Here is the link:
On Sunday morning, we returned our rental car and took a short 2 hour flight to Reykjavik, Iceland. We flew on Iceland's WOW Airlines....love the name of the airline...I wonder if when they land safely, the pilot goes "WOW....we made it!"😀. Actually it was a very pleasant uneventful flight and for a low cost carrier, the seats were large and the legroom plentiful.
We arrived at about 1 PM, picked up our rental car and drove to the apartment that we had rented in an eastern suburb of Reykjavik.
The airport in Iceland, is not in Reykjavik, but rather in Keflavik, which is a 40 minute drive from the capital city. Along the drive from the airport, you are driving on a well maintained highway, but on both sides of the road there are vast lava fields. We had seen lava fields in Hawaii but these looked very different. The lava rock was covered in green moss and the scene was quite strange looking.
The Airbnb apartment, in a low rise apartment complex, was huge and very well equipped. It was in fact a full 2 bedroom apartment, and actually looked like the owner, who we never met, moves our whenever someone rents the apartment. It was in a very residential area about 15 minutes from the centre of town.
We unpacked and drove into town to get our bearings and to get a sense of the flavour of the city. We also wanted to visit a local supermarket for essential supplies. Our next post will deal with kashrut in Iceland as well as some of our observations about life in Iceland.
We spent a couple of hours walking thru downtown Reykjavik.
It is a pretty non descript kind of city. There are a few statues here and there to the people who originally came to Iceland from Scandinavia and discovered it, and there are a couple of pedestrian shopping streets, filled with store after store selling the identical souvenirs of woolen items, t-shirts, tourist items, mugs, all priced identically.
Then there is the huge church, the Hallgrímskirkja, that at 244 feet high, hovers over the entire city. It has become the landmark by which the city is known.
The shopping streets are situated a few blocks from the water's edge. At the sea is the old port district which has been gentrified into pubs, restaurants and artist galleries. At the junction of the shopping districts and the old port is the new arts centre which is a very striking glass building that is meant to look like a glacier.
On this rather cool Sunday night, many stores were closed and as a result, the tourist traffic on the streets was very light.
We stopped into Bonus Supermarkets and picked up a few essential supplies for our five days in Iceland and drove back to our apartment, ready to begin our Icelandic adventure on Monday morning.
More to come
All the best
Fran and David
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