Halloween and Jazz Festival Weekend

Sorry I am posting this a little late. But as we have learned with this blog, everything is posted about a week late.  So yeah.  This past weekend was quite an adventure.  First off, it was the Cork Jazz Festival.  The Jazz Festival is a 4 day long celebration of jazz music.  There were tons of special events being held at all the pubs and venues in town.  Most of the pubs had live bands preforming all types of jazz music throughout the day.  It was really nice to listen to live music while having a pint of Guinness.

On Saturday, I went to a pub/ venue called Fred Zeppelins.  It is a different sort of pub then most of those as it is home to the alternative crowd in Cork.  I very much felt at home in there.  I was there to see a friend's band play.  I met Jimmy randomly in Hot Topic back in Hollywood.  It was his first day in the USA and happened to stop in the store.  He is originally from a town nearby Cork.  I saw on Facebook that his band was touring Ireland and was going to be playing one show in Cork.  It was great to meet up with him and see him perform. I had a lot of fun and met some of his friends who were all great.

Jimmy and I at Fred Zeppelins

Halloween ended up being a very fun day for me.  It was a Bank Holiday so I had no class.  In the early afternoon I went for a walk through St. Finbarre's Cemetery.  The cemetery has many graves from the late 19th century and early 20th century. I took lots of pictures and I will post them in a slide show on this side soon.  They are already up on Facebook.  The cemetery was very cool in a creepy way.  Just being around so many old graves and seeing how worn and weathered many of the grave stones were was a strange feeling.  You would see a grave that had been completely forgotten about right next to one with fresh flowers.  This dichotomy got me thinking about life and death and what happens when we are gone.  I hope to go back soon and take more photographs of the cemetery.  Let me know what you think of the pictures so far.  I am trying to teach myself Photoshop and applied some of what I have learned to the photographs I took.

Halloween must be a Gaffney thing! I swear this is not me pretending to be an 8 year old to win a pumpkin carving contest!

Later that night, I met up with two of the girls from my master's program and one of their flatmates.  We had a few drinks at home before heading out to the city centre.  All the pubs and clubs were pack with people dressed in various costumes.  This is how the older crowd celebrates Halloween here.  It is relatively a new thing for college aged kids to dress up, but it is defiantly catching on.  It still has a long way to come before it approaches the scale of Halloween in the USA.  We ended up at a pub named The Crane Lane where we sat around, socialized, and had a few pints.  The night was a lot of fun but I did miss working my haunted houses and all that craziness that is my normal Halloween.  I'll have to make up for missing this year next Halloween!