Cork is an adorable, quirky little city. Unlike any other part of Ireland I’ve seen, most buildings and houses (apparently in the entire county) are painted bright colors. This trend is most apparent from my lovely campus, where you can see this colorful city stacked on top of itself all the way up the hills and thinning out into the countryside. It sort of lets you know right off the bat that the inhabitants don’t take themselves too seriously and adds a bit of whimsy to every walk I take.
View of Cork from campus...if you look really closely you can see a row of lime green apartments at the top of the hill!
The River Lee runs throughout the city, and there’s a really cool area downtown (sorry, no pictures yet!) where there are all these bridges linking up both sides of town. The main University campus is built around part of the River Lee, right where Saint Finbarr—the Patron Saint of Cork—built his monastery and school. You can tell they’ve tried to preserve the monastic feel of the area through the campus architecture, even allowing ivy to cover the older buildings.
Main Quad
In addition to exploring my new city, I also had the chance to go to a small coastal town in County Cork called Cobh, formerly known as Queenstown. Cobh (pronounced “cove”) is a much more colorful place than even my city, perhaps by virtue of having so much of the town concentrated in one area. It’s one of those ridiculously picturesque places and sort of wraps around itself all the way up to a gigantic gothic cathedral that overlooks the bay.
Cobh, Co. Cork, Ireland
For being such a small place Cobh has a ton of history attached to it. There are several plaques and statues throughout the main road immortalizing historical events Cobh is connected to, many of which memorialize tragic events at sea. The first person ever to be registered at Ellis Island left from Cobh, and there are now statues of her in both ports. Cobh is perhaps more well known as the last port that the RMS Titanic left from, and there is a very moving plaque in honor of the Titanic just across the street from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Park.
President John F. Kennedy Memorial Park, Dedicated in September of 1966
Annie Moore, a fourteen-year-old Irish girl, traveled with her two little brothers to the States in December of 1891. She was the first immigrant registered when Ellis Island officially opened in January of 1892.
The southern part of Ireland is slightly warmer than the rest of the island because of a very warm jet stream that curves around the coast. The Irish here are very proud of this climate fluke and tend to celebrate the extra four degrees of warmth (I presume) by planting what most of us would consider tropical plants. All around Cobh (and some places in Cork) there are large gardens full of ferns and—I love this—PALM TREES. Yes, my friends, those majestic Arecaceae we so often associate with Hawaii, the Bahamas, and generally warm places, do in fact grow here in Ireland. Again, very whimsical :)
Back in Cork things are about to get busy, which will be quite a change after two weeks of just doing readings for school and wandering around town. Next week is my Orientation and Registration week, and it now appears that classes won’t be starting for me until October. However, I'm not one to begrudge more down time and this will give me a chance to settle in once I move. Tonight I'm going to a ukulele orchestra concert--very fitting considering I now live in the "tropical" part of Ireland.
Hope you're all well!
