A Million Words

Two weeks of festival and sunny weather, crowds all day and drunks all night, are finally drawing to a close. Living in the middle of the Volvo race stopover fairgrounds has had its moments, but I'm glad that it's over. Nova fell asleep every night to the sound high-decibel music, most of which was pretty good. I didn't adapt quite so well, and have been awake past my bedtime every night for fourteen days running. I had intended to blog about the festival as it was happening, but when the time came I couldn't stand to look at it any more than I absolutely had to. I enjoyed some of it, but annoyance won out as often as not. Here's an abbreviated log of the two weeks as seen from our apartment. Arrivals and Opening Ceremony: I didn't get any pictures of the arrival night, but boy, was it a long one. The band played until 11pm, I had settled down to sleep by midnight, and then at 2 AM it started up again as the first boat came across the finish line. I would ...

I looked at the official festival brochure yesterday, and sure enough, these windmills are supposed to power the whole race village. That's what the brochure says, anyway. It's a "green" event... sponsored by an automobile manufacturer. I'd bet they get at least some of their power off the grid, if not most of it. I'm not as cynical as my husband, though, who thinks that the windmills are purely for show. As I was taking these pictures, there was a guy walking past who looked like he might know something. I said: "These sure look pretty permanent for something that just went up two days ago." "They won't be there long, don't worry," he replied. Too bad. I kinda like them.

Well, the tanks are gone, the docks have been scrubbed clean, and with three days to go until the boats start arriving, this is what the docks look like. First, there's the main race village: On the wall in front of the dome, there, you can see a sort of mural has been painted. I would have hoped for something I liked better, and expected a closer copy of the Green Dragon logo. I imagine that in an ad agency somewhere, a graphic designer is weeping. As you can see here, "non-food retail" tents have taken over a lane of the road in front of our apartment, obstructing the flow of traffic. A matched pair of windmills appeared earlier this week, on either side of the lock. Perhaps they will power something.

If you don't live on the Galway docks and aren't obsessed with round-the-world sail races, you may not know that there's much happening this weekend. If I didn't live right in front of the stage, I would hardly have noticed until a few days ago, but this week on Shop Street you can't turn around without hitting a Volvo Ocean Race banner. Now, I'm not particularly all this corporate-sponsored racing, but I am curious about it. Most people in Galway are only dimly aware of this race stopover event, despite a huge publicity machine and a full program of music and miscellaneous other shows. The organizers, however, are expecting this to be the biggest thing since Jesus... or at least since the Pope came to Galway in 1979. There's a bit of a disconnect between the hype inside the organization and practically everyone else I've spoken to. A business woman I talked to said that they're charging €6000 to set up a tent, and thought that was an awful lot to...

The Volvo Ocean Race stopover advertises itself as a major event for Galway, but you never would have known it was happening until a two weeks ago when the oil tanks finally came down. I mean, they'd said that was supposed to happen in December.  Now, the ground where the tanks stood has been more-or-less cleaned up and they're starting to set up the race village, and temporary floating docks are being dropped into the water where the racing boats will park: The race people are also setting up a fence around the perimeter of the docks to keep hapless festival-goers from tumbling into the cleaner-than-usual water.  From my angle, the best thing about these fences is that they're a sign that we won't see the scrap-metal barges for a good few weeks. So, although I'm sure there'll be plenty of race-related noise at least it will be replacing, rather than adding to, the usual things that wake me up at 5 AM.   I doubt, however, that these will prevent any determined s...