Awakening a New Part of Me

Thursday night (September 4th) we all dressed up really nice to go to this fancy Italian restaurant in Galway. The owners and employees were all really Italian, and we could barely understand their English. The food was amazing, though, I had salmon, roasted potatoes, and vegetables with this lemon sauce that was really thin and yet amazingly creamy. Even Olivia found something to eat! It was one of the best meals I’ve ever had in all of my life. The new best experiences keep coming! For desert I had tiramisu and a mocha. Way to finish, if I do say so myself!

All Tammi had told us up until this time is that we were going to a traditional music and dance performance at the Galway Bay Hotel. She didn’t know much about it herself, as she’d never seen it before. It was called Trad on the Prom, and from the first moment that we arrived I got the feeling that something great was about to happen. Everyone was dressed so nicely, and our tickets were souvenir-worthy. We had really good seats, only a few rows back from the stage, and then it began.

This show is apparently one of the (or the) biggest traditional Irish music and dance show in the country. Besides the band which hosted the whole thing (they could play like every Irish instrument imaginable,) there were eight dancers (five girls and three guys) including the six-time Irish dancing world champion. Tell Crisann, I’m almost certain that some of these people have probably been in Riverdance (or at least they were good enough to have been!). The number one male vocalist in Ireland was also there. His voice was magnificent. It was like gold. Michaela bought his CD during intermission and got it signed. Envious! JK. I actually got my ticket signed by almost every performer there.

I had tears in my eyes throughout the show. That kind of music speaks to my heart like nothing else in all the earth. It’s perfection beyond beauty and beauty beyond imagination. It awakens something inside of me which other types of music brush but can’t rouse fully. The only other word I can use to describe it is beyond. Beyond the hold that other music has on me. Beyond my heart and straight to my soul.

At the end the number-one guy came back up for the third time and had the entire audience join him in singing “You Raise Me Up”. Do I need to say more? Can you feel how that song sets me free?

Quotes of the  Day:

“She  looks like a fairy.” –Emily (when describing the six-time world champion dancer, who was wearing a Lord of the Rings-worthy costume and positively gliding across the stage.)

“I think we were both bouncing in our seats.” – Olivia  (to me)