Wexford was pretty much exactly what I was hoping for/expecting from a small Irish town. Village? I know there are classifications but off the top of my head I can’t remember what the dividing lines are. Anyway; a mix of old houses set back on large properties with stone fences, dingy row houses right up against the barely-two-cars-wide roads, lots of little one-way streets that come out of nowhere to cross the barely-two-cars-wide road you’re on, and little shops that look like they could have been there a week or could have been there since 1963.
The church parking lot is also a public parking lot for the city. You have to pay x-euros to park there but you can go in the church if you want, and they have such beautiful stained glass in there! They also have… priests buried in the parking lot, with little monuments….? So that’s a little … odd. But anyway. :: side eye ::
Hawk took me into his favorite used book shop, and y’all. Y’ALL. If you have an idea in your head about what a used bookstore looks like in a town that looks like what you imagine…? Your ideas about the book shop are probably right, too. It’s 100% not the kind of place you go into looking for something specific, it’s more the kind of place you go into when you want to stand there and go on an archaeological book dig! Each one of the shelves was three books deep. And this photo above? That’s not actually even inside the bookstore yet. That’s just the front stoop. Could I have spent all day there? Absolutely. Could I have bought hundreds of dollars of books? Absolutely. Couldn’t have brought them all back with me – stupid Delta weight limits. But yeppers, I could have stayed there for hours.
However, there was cider to be consumed! So we went to a pub called The Undertaker (guess where you go in Wexford to fill out the paperwork when someone has died?) and had a glass.
I honestly forget by now if it was before or after the pub, even though this was only like two days ago, but we also went into a little coffee shop to grab something to eat. In addition to coffee and tea, they had pizza and wraps. I got a pizza that was out of this world delicious! And while we were in there, a man came in with his daughter, who was maybe four years old, tops – the spitting image of Cindy Lou Who. She had something wrapped up in a blankie held close to her chest and she was clutching it with both arms. At first we thought it was a doll, but then it shook it’s head and looked out of the blankie, and IT WAS A WEE LITTLE BLONDE PUPPY. It was so cute both Hawk and I almost immediately died on the spot. I seriously would have asked if I could have taken a picture of it if I didn’t think it would have sounded super creepy. Oh my God it was legit about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen short of a baby goat in pajamas.
Then they just have thing like this in the middle of the city. Unlike in the States, where they will rope off anything old and not let you build anything within, like, 500 yards of it… here in Ireland, if you did that, nobody would be able to build anything, anywhere. So they have things like this just right there as you’re walking. It’s a sidewalk wide enough for one person, and you have a road inches from you on one side and ruins inches from you on the other.
There is also… cheese.
If you’d like to look at the rest of my Wexford photos (and I’ll probably add more in the next two days) you can find them here. xoxo y’all!