GAA fever

While we were in Dublin, Orla and I went to a Gaelic football match, which was put on by the Gaelic Athletic Association and played in Croke Park. In the first match, Kerry played Armagh, and in the second, Cork played Donegal. The security guard was kind enough to give us his program, so we could read up on the teams.


At the beginning of each match, both teams paraded around the stadium with a marching band. Here’s the Cork team heading off to play, while someone waves a Cork flag in the foreground:


Here’s a shot of the scoreboard. You can see what a surprising match it was: 22 and a half minutes into the match, the score was Cork, 1-0 (3), and Donegal, 1-3 (6). I mean... whoa!


Cork pulled ahead in the second half and won.

Here are two guys we met later at the hotel. They’re wearing their Armagh jerseys:


After talking about where they were from for a while, they recited to us the entire plot of Top Gun.

This is an aside, but while I was scanning the program cover, I also scanned the stamp in my passport from this trip. Most of the E.U. stamps are small, nearly identical stamps with just a letter in one corner indicating the country. Check out the full-page pair of stamps you get in Ireland. It was very clear (although perhaps not in this picture)—I could stay there only 30 days, and I had no recourse to public funds: