Friday June 19, 2009

In the morning we went to Ballynahinch Baptist Church for a scholarly talk on homosexuality, which turned out to be a big waste of time.  The Dr. who was talked to the group sounded knowledgeable but he talked about a whole lot of nothing to conclude with being gay is not genetic.  Then we had like 5 minutes to eat little sandwiches and were off to Bellaghy Bawn where Seamus Heaney, a famous Irish poet, lived and wrote about a lot.  I didn't feel well at all that day and we were all tired and bored and we get to Bellaghy Bawn and are first put in a room to watch a really poorly made movie then up to talk to this Druid women with crazy red hair about her needlepoint work that portrays Heaney's poems.  At least we didn't spend too long there.  Then we drove to the North Coast which is not a town but a place and ate at a nice restaurant called the Cromore Halt.  Most of us had chips with our dinner and our table of 6 used 39 packets of ketchup... ahh Americans.  Talk about injustice, the two other tables had an appetizer, which in Ireland is completely necessary because the food takes forever to come out.  Just when we got the blessing from Billy to order one our food came out.  It was Chris's birthday so we are telling Billy that we need cake, and out comes one piece for her, which is good, but we want chocolate now too.  We are thinking that we won't get any when Billy and Hadden come out with Magnum bars! They are ice cream on a stick covered in chocolate (like the dove bars), but of course better.  They told us to use the bathroom because we were going to be walking around so I did, and Hadden said I needed to see a plumber.  We walked around the coast outside in the rain, which was sorta wet.  The boys were playing hacky sack with some local boys.  We then went to the hostel in Bushmills, which is the town where Bushmill's Whiskey is made on the Bush river.  The hostel was a much better experience than in London.  We had four of us girls to a room with our own bathroom and shower in the room.  The mattresses were similar to concrete and the pillows more closely resembled sheets of paper than anything fluffy, but we made do.  I slept terribly the first night.