Take it to the Top!

SO, yesterday Sarah, Mika and I got out as early as we could to see the infamous Shanndon Bells. There's a Church on the other side of town where anyone who so desires (to pay 5 euros), may ring the bells in their bell tower. We had fun, to say the least. I'm not sure if most visitors play every song they have available, but we certainly gave it our best. I mean, there was a sign saying to play to our hearts content.

The area where the bell pull-ropes were located was not too much of a climb. The top of the tower, offering a panoramic view of Cork city, however, was 40 meters up.
Look at Mika go! Sadly, I lost the video of Mika displaying her innate bell skills. When deleting old videos off of my camera, so as to speed the uploading process, I was so tired that I went into a sleepy trance and started to delete half my Shanndon videos. Sad, I know, but what's done is done.

There's still Sarah and me.

You are my Sunshine anyone?

This is one of the creepy statues by the window in the rope room. I kept seeing them from the corner of my eye and thinking other people were in the room.

The next floor up was the clock's pendulum.

Floor after that we had an up-close look at the gears of time.

Eventually we made it to the small space the bells hung in. We actually had to hunch ourselves through a small door, climb a little wooden ladder and over a large wooden beam to get past the bell room and out to the balcony.

We were wearing the headphones provided in case anyone like us decided to play the entire set of songs while we were standing by the bells.
The farther up the tower we climbed the more narrow the stairwell became. Here Sarah has enough room to reach out her entire arm. At the very top, however, the space was hardly wider than the breadth of my shoulders. I had a picture, but it was also lost in my sleepy stupor.

At the top, we promptly began locating all the buildings we could recognize. We also got to see just how far, precisely, our apartment is from City Center. It came as a surprise I can tell you.




After playing a few more songs on the way out, we considered going to the nearby Butter Museum, but decided to devote our money to shopping instead. We saw our second cat for the day, sitting on this glass encrusted wall. The Irish are serious about people not climbing over their barriers. I've seen glass, barbed wire, and a variety of wicked looking metal spikes.

Now, I'm currently dying because Sarah only bought book 1 of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. Which means, now that I've reread it, I want to read the rest and can't. Not to mention I did some oil painting today and didn't aerate the room of turpentine fumes as well as I should've. But hey, Sarah's sister has arrived, so woo-hoo! Least a ways, I assume so. I better call and ask.