Galway and the Aran Islands

I rarely travel within Ireland but living abroad has given me a new appreciation of my home country. Bus Éireann have cheap student fares to cross the country, so I decided it was time to venture outside of the Pale, deciding upon Galway as my destination. Galway is a quaint city with colourful cafés upon small charming pedestrianised streets. And lots of swans!

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I had the two prominent vegan restaurant options in the city, Food 4 Thought's vegan shepherd pie and La Salsa's vegan burrito. A generous egg-free vegetarian breakfast from the Galway Bakery Co (when I asked for my breakfast without eggs I was given extra hash-browns instead) and a teriaki tofu dish from Kappa-Ya Japanese café were also amongst the culinary highlights. I must also give Café Express on Shop Street a special mention as I they gave my morning soya-latte some excellent foam decoration, a different design each time, which made me smile, and didn't charge me extra for soya milk.



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As the title suggests I went on a day-trip to the Aran Islands, specifically to Inis Mór. Inis Mór is a beautiful island of rocky, wind-swept scenery, but hardly the most vegan-friendly place on earth! Anticipating this, I brought some lunch with me, although I noticed that the island's sole supermarket stocked frozen veggie burgers and both soya and rice milk (I wonder if there are any vegan residents?).

Cliffs of Inis Mór

Happy Cow doesn't have much advice for visitors to Galway, so I also used menupages and the vegan forum.  

Outside the city, both on my bus journeys to and from the city and through Connemara to Ros a' Mhil to get the ferry to the Aran Islands, I saw lots of sheep, cows, horses and even the odd donkey and a goat in the roadside fields. My joy and fascination at seeing them up close (the fields where I'm from are full of vegetables, not animals) was tinged with the sadness of knowing their fates. My heart ached seeing all the animals in the fields openly and tenderly tend to their young and relaxing together in the grass.
What struck me the most was seeing a mother hen on Inis Mór surrounded by her clutch of chicks, with one insisting on hiding in her feathers the way a small child hides in their mother's skirts. Such a beautiful scene that I just couldn't help but be moved by.

Rocky landscape, common to the Aran Islands and Connemara