Ireland #12

Ireland #12
The past two days have been really interesting. Yesterday we had a tour of the University of Limerick. First was lunch then a walking tour. The campus is in two counties joined by the longest pedestrian bridge in Europe. On one side is County Limerick and the other County Clare. The dividing line is the River Shannon which is what the bridge is going across. It's a lovely bridge and so is the river (swans, several channels, little rock features). The university is only 40 years old and has done some amazing things. We were treated to a performance by the music academy then went to three lectures. They were bank and business related due to the nature of the reunion (Don's business class at Harvard) but very pertinent plus funny at times. This was followed by dinner in the original student building. It was a house for 200 years and only became the only place for students (100) to study at the beginning. This "house" was huge. Now there are 12,000 students and about 200 acres of land. Each table had a department head joining us. Our guy teaches MBA students plus of course runs the whole program.After dinner we had more entertainment by three more students. They are multitalented some of them. The young lady played the violin and harp plus dances. One young fellow played the guitar plus sang a very old song.
Today we went on a bus tour. We were redoing where we went last week but backwards. And because of this we got the ocean view, not the hillside one. Made it much more interesting. Went to the Cliffs of Moher again --- without the wind -- lovely. I had the best lunch ever --- called an open crab sandwich. It was a good sized dish of crab, mayo, two slices of their lovely brown bread and a salad. So I piled the crab on the bread and ate it that way. I was watching a Norwegian fellow (they eat a lot of open faced sandwiches) and he was cutting it with a knife and fork. I just picked mine up.For our lunch companions we had a couple from Norway and one from Scotland.
We had a bit of a break this afternoon --- made tea and sat in the little living room. Then it was back to the Manor for dinner. It was a dress up evening so I wore my new aquisition. It was a lovely evening, especially since we were seated with people we knew well. This is the third reunion I've been to so faces are familiar plus several feel like old friends.
I said one of the fellows was FBI ---wrong --- he was CIA. Nicest guy you could ever meet. He belongs to an organization called Veterans for Peace. It had quite a bit of influence in the recent events where Obama backed off from shelling Syria. Nice to know that there are people out there like that.
Again we had entertainment. This time it was a youngish fellow who started the Irish Symphony Orchestra. He played us a series of tunes on the violin. His other interest is making sure every student gets exposed to music in school. He has proved that it increases marks, decreases bad behaviour, etc. And he said that if a baby is exposed to music before three months they will have perfect pitch. Can be any kind of music.
We walked back and forth to the Manor twice today so that's about 1 1/2 hours. Don's feet are sore but we still enjoy the walk. At night it is peaceful going through the quiet property roads and seeing the stars up above. The bulk of the trip is on Manor grounds. We go through a locked gate then have about 5 minutes on village streets.