Hurling & Cafe Mexicana

Last night Meghan, my roommate Elaine, and I went to a Hurling match.  Hurling is another popular sport in Ireland.  If I were to describe it using sports that you all know it would be soccer but instead of kicking a ball you hit a tennis ball with a baseball bat.  It's really intense.  It is a 3000 year old sport and it's the second fastest-moving sport behind ice hockey.  The players are constantly running.  It was pretty difficult to follow the ball around! Click here to watch a pretty good YouTube video that my Irish professor showed us about Hurling.  I tried to take a video myself but the field was so big that you wouldn't be able to see much.  We played UCD (University College Dublin) and they were no competition!  The final score was 38-8.  Here are a couple pictures that I got.

Tonight Meghan and I took my roommate Laura and her boyfriend Johnny out for mexican food.  They had never had mexican food before.  This blows my mind.  Given that mexican is my favorite kind of food, I was so excited to take them to Cafe Mexicana.  Cafe Mexicana is a mexican restaurant in Cork that we stumbled past one day.  It is the only Mexican restaurant in the whole Cork county. Ridiculous?!  They had never eaten a taco before, had never heard of sour cream, and thought that margarita was only a type of pizza.  We ordered a pitcher of margaritas, nachos, and chimichangas.  They loved all of it!  They were big fans of the refried beans.  We decided that next week we are going to make them fajitas at our apartment.

One mistake that Meghan and I made tonight:

Unlike in America, you do not get free chips when you sit down at this mexican restaurant.  After we ordered our margaritas we asked the waitress if we could have a basket of chips so Laura and Johnny could try out the sour cream and different salsas.  This is what we got...

A basket of french fries.  I guess we felt out of our Irish element when we were in that Mexican restaurant. It slipped our mind that "chips" here means french fries.  Shoot.

Well tomorrow morning Meghan and I are off to Galway!  We are so excited.  This will be our first trip out of Cork.  We have packed a couple things in our backpacks to make the trip a little more budget friendly.  These things include: 4 bottles of wine, 2 packages of instant pasta, 2 mandarin orange cups, 1 tube of Oreos, 1 can of sour cream and onion Pringles, and 1 package of chocolate muffins.  Give us a break...it's kind of hard to eat healthy when nothing can be refrigerated.

I won't be taking my laptop with me for fear of something happening to it in the hostel.  I'll be updating you all on Sunday afternoon when I get back to Cork.  I'm sure I will have lots of pictures to share!  I hope everyone has a good weekend!