"Too Much of Nothing Can Make A Man Feel Ill At Ease"

Ahhh the freedom of the Monday after you return from an exciting weekend.

I had less extravagant goals over the last couple of days, but hey, there's two festivals in town for the next two weeks-- Galway Arts and Galway Fringe-- so I figured I'd try and take advantage of both. For Monday, this meant picking up tickets I'd pre-ordered for this weekend (Macy Gray/a talk on Shakespeare's impact on America), and then going to this random British tenor singing a broadway set.

First though, you gotta eat. I finally visited the best located restaurant in town, which was doubtlessly overpriced, Ard Bia at Nimmos. It's the best location because it's right on the old long walk right next to the Spanish Arch, which for the uninitiated means it's both in a cool stone building, but also looks out onto the river.

Not my picture for once, too lazy/hungry to take my own.

The menu's both crunchy, local, and interesting. Quick side note-- here they say "farm to fork" instead of "farm to table", which really is a missed alliteration opportunity. I ended up eating a nice smoked fish salad

Two kinds of smoked fish, crab salad, jasmine tea infused with seaweed

You know what I couldn't eat? All the things I wanted to eat, including the sweets below:

Why oh why cant I eat that pie?

Anyhow, sufficiently fueled, I went into the city to listen to some of the music and see some acts. Let's fast forward past the numerous great trad (they call traditional irish music trad here, fyi) acts and get to tonights attraction.

So, there's a tenor from Britain called Thomas Cameron who does a lot of musicals/operatic numbers performing at the Loft at Seven Bridge Street. Really, not as fancy as it sounds-- the venue had maybe 20 plastic chairs set up in the 2nd floor of their bar. Here's what he looks like so you can appreciate my smoldering review:

Ok, so here goes: as the show starts, in a room that could fit 20 or 30 people tops, there are perhaps 10-12 people sitting including myself, half of whom are wearing "Galway Fringe" t-shirts (meaning, as I overheard: "Claire said we had to sit in because no one bought tickets!"). For my part, I bought my ticket at the door and got a 2 Euro discount because I flashed my Georgetown ID to get a "student ticket" (Hoya Saxa!).

So in this mottled, half full crowd, what does he sing as an opener? "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables". Either this guy has the best sense of humor ever, or just has atrocious taste in choosing mournful, dirge-like songs to open your set.

Spoiler alert, was definitely not the sense of humor. I swear, if they hadn't been strict about no phones, I really would have taken pictures/video so you could hear the technically amazing, but emotionally wooden delivery of favorites like "Bring Him Home", "All I Ask of You" and others. By the way, I thought that last one had to be a duet... but apparently if you just remain awkwardly silent as a music track plays in the background, you can avoid having to do anything. He also "Thomas Cameron-ized" (his words, not mine) a couple of pop songs, which again means sapping them of their emotion so he can apply massive vibrato

All in all, pretty good performance :) .

Anyhow, I walked home, and this place really is beautiful

"Sunrise, Sunset"

I'll spare you some suspense-- didn't do a whole heck of a lot Tuesday other than strike out on finding the book I wanted (The Shankill Butcher by Martin Dillon about the Troubles in the 70s), and going to see some live music. I'm on vacation! There's gonna be some give and take in my level of activity. Here's a quick video of sizzling Indian meat, one of the few things I can eat I guess.

Oh, and I also went to some weird art exhibit called "in the flesh" by an artist named Sam something... and guess what, it was basically a bunch of weird wax sculptures of naked old people. Again, no pix permitted, otherwise.... you know what, these were just weird, I wouldn't have taken pictures anyway.

Caption: "Way better than the Indian joint I go to in Boston, O'Doyle's"-- 30 Rock

Random Things:

-I think "Galway Fringe"just means "a lot of weird art exhibitions, and a couple of musicians who couldn't book larger venues"

I love hamsters! Hipsters though...

-You really get a lot of askance glances not eating the bread everywhere you go here. People are really proud of their restaurant's brown bread! They make it fresh every day! Stupid picky American.

Moment of Zen