July 3- Early Christian sites

Today was our tour of the Dingle Peninsula, which involved visits to a lot of early Christian sites. Now, I'm always up for learning about history and visiting old ruins, but at this point, if you've seen one monastic settlement, you can guess pretty well what the other ones are like. But regardless, our tour took us to examples of early Christian round huts, the Gallarus Oratory (early Christian church made famous in a poem by Seamus Heaney), and an early Christian 12th century church. The last church, Kilmalkedar, was kind of cool in that it had a sundial, an ogham stone (ogham is an old Irish form of writing) and a stone with the alphabet written on it. It was also an early example of Romanesque churches in Ireland. But again, we've seen a lot of early Christian sites since getting to Ireland.
One of two highlights of the tour was the Blasket Island Cultural Center. The Blasket Islands sit right off the coast of the peninsula and once were home to about 200 people, though they have all been evacuated because of the islands' isolation from medical supplies and emergency resources. The islands are important because they were an area were Irish was the primary language, which lured scholars and writers to the community to study the language and the culture. The islanders also produced a library of about 40 books, which have been translated from Irish into many languages. I've added several of them to my reading list, which is growing longer by the day, but I hope to get to them soon.
The other highlight of the tour was actually the time spent on the bus. Driving along the coast was incredible--on one side, you're staring down steep cliffs at waves crashing around below you, and on the other side, you're gazing up at huge mountain ridges that line the peninsula. Pretty spectacular.
We got back to Dingle and were free until we had to leave the following morning, so we went off to do more exploring. We found another pub for dinner where I got Cottage Pie, which is basically Shepherd's Pie (beef, veggies, and mashed potatoes). Our after dinner wanderings took us past the ice cream shop we'd visited the day before. I skipped the ice cream for an Aztec chocolate, which I've wanted to try since I saw the movie Chocolat. It was basically hot chocolate but with nutmeg, cinnamon, and chili, so it had an intense kick to it. Montezuma apparently had 30 cups per day, but I just stuck to one as we watched Spain take on Paraguay in the lobby of our hostel.