Since I last wrote.

I have seen and done so many more things than I can report. Most of it has been unequivocal pleasure: a dolphin leapt beside our ferry back from Inishmaan, the middle of the Aran Islands, on Tuesday afternoon, and that felt typical of the kind of luck we've had on this trip. For the most part, our weather has been glorious. (Today was an exception, but we didn't have plans anyway, so everyone was able to take a day and just relax.) Only one person has had to go to the hospital, and that was for a condition that pre-dated our trip. Some moods have gone low; fewer feelings have been hurt than I would have feared; tempers have only smouldered, not flared. And we have seen, and talked, and heard, and moved, and eaten.

And eaten. One of the students said tonight to next year's group (with whom we chatted briefly online), "You will probably never eat as well as you will eat during this program."

He's probably right--for us all.

Also: perhaps my favorite landscape of the entire trip--an almost unbelievable place called the Burren.

Dolphin!

I may finally have figured out the key: if I see a sign that suggests that a driver might need to be concerned about her car's going off of land and plunging into the water, I'm probably somewhere I want to be. And it might even be somewhere where I'll see a dolphin (even if I do have to rely on local high school students in order to know it's there).

Watching a dolphin at sunset with one of the Aran Islands in the background is more fun than watching fireworks.

Country and city.

After a cruise up a fjord, and a visit to a place I've loved for years because of a postcard, and a gorgeous valley drive through a mountain range, this sight felt to me as though it summed up our evening's destination, despite its much-vaunted status as a place people love to visit. Too many people, is my problem, and I suspect that my spectacularly poor choice of hotels for myself and our driver hasn't helped anything at all--though after yet another fine dinner, I will prove to myself once again tonight that I can sleep through nearly anything, up to and including techno dance parties raging in the bar two flights under my hotel room--and up to and including afterparties (and highly voluble Frenchmen and Irishwomen) raging literally outside my hotel room door.

Out and about.

If that skull gave you a start, imagine how I felt when I realized that it was only a few inches from where I was standing, taking the picture just before it in this set. I was keeping one student company while we waited for everyone else to come down from a mountain (at which point I was able to scramble up and look around up there myself). We both jumped and shouted a little. And then I started taking pictures. And then she joined in.