A day in the park: 26 June 2008

Stuart and I went to Fitzgerald Park today to toss the Frisbee after being rudely asked to vacate the courtyard by our apartment. The woman’s reasoning for making us leave was that we would break a window or hurt someone by hitting them in the face. Neither of those things would ever happen to people with as much skill as Stuart and I so we were very bitter.

We walked around Fitzgerald park for awhile just checking out the sights and looking for random people to talk to. The first man we ran into looked like a leprechaun, so from this point forward I will refer to him as such. He was a very interesting looking man. He had several random tattoos on his arms, he was missing several teeth and the pointer finger on his right hand, he seemed friendly enough so we decided to see what he was up to. He was doing a very poor job of fishing on the river and a very good job at getting drunk at five in the afternoon. The leprechaun was sprawled out on the grass with a two-liter jug of cider with his fishing pole uselessly laying beside him, line in the water. He seemed to be paying no attention to it. We got to chatting with him about things. The problem was we could only understand about 1/3 of what he said to us. This was all fine and good while he was rambling but when he started to ask us questions we just looked blankly at each other, awkwardly back at him and said, “I didn’t really catch that, what did you just say?” Each of us must have said this at least three times. There was some useful information that was learned from him: there was no fish where he was fishing, there were fish in the UCC section of the river, the 13-year-old child that recently died had been jumping off of a bridge that was within viewing distance of where we were standing and everyone loved American girls.

The next people we came across were a couple of musically inclined individuals sitting in the middle of the grass playing the guitar and wooden bongos. Stuart decided that he too was musically inclined, so he joined them and I followed. We all got to talking and before I knew what was going on Stuart was playing the guitar and singing a song I had never heard before. It was all very interesting. I chatted with one of the fellows for awhile to learn about the music scene in Cork. He filled me in and directed me to the Old Oak Pub, which I had already been to. The kids seemed to be more into heavy metal music so we didn’t have too much in common. We left this group and finally got to throwing the Frisbee.