Galway University, Ireland

I also wanted take a look at Galway University. Advice from the nice man at the Museum near the Spanish Arch suggested that the campus might have been outside comfortable limping distance. Undaunted, we decided to set out on foot (and just the toes of the other foot) and to take a taxi back if I had to wimp out.

Actually, the guy from the museum, while very nice, obviously didn’t do much walking, because getting to the University wasn’t a very long walk at all.


I was very glad we’d made the effort once I saw the grounds. My random babbling about living in Galway suddenly took on a very concrete form. I was going to come to Galway University … as a student … as faculty … as a cleaner … whatever would get me into that building on a regular basis.

Being educated, or educating others, in such beautiful surroundings just has to be a good idea. It may encourage a particular type of academic pomposity, but that goes with the territory. I think it would just be easier to turn up every day with this view to welcome me.

I had some cause for second thoughts about my rosy fantasy of life at Galway University when, in the time it took to make a pit stop in the ladies’ room, the sky ruptured and started haemorrhaging water everywhere. This was serious rain too. Not something in which anyone would want to limp back across town without an umbrella.

We decided to get a cup of tea in the café shop and wait it out. This turned out to be a particularly brilliant suggestion for two reasons. The first is that the rain actually did calm down enough to make the walk back merely unpleasant rather than actually life threatening. The second is that the great Gods of perfect timing favoured me with a blogworthy happening. Just as I was sipping my hot chocolate, part of the café ceiling just behind me collapsed and a waterfall poured out of it.

Official looking people in white coats scurried around with giant buckets, turning off lights and hustling people (including us) away from the scene, but not before I managed to get a couple of photographs of the happy event. The pic doesn’t quite do it justice, I’m afraid. You’ll just have to take my word for it that this was a veritable torrent of water that just kept coming and coming and coming. It seemed that it would never stop. Once the staff had locked us all out I think they were going to start building an ark out of lunch trays.