Hot dogs

So far as I can tell, the thing in Ireland most associated with Americans are hot dogs. At the local convenience store/market they have bottles of yellow mustard which they call hot dog mustard and cans of "American hot dogs in brine". I felt like for the fourth of July I should crack open a couple cans of hot dogs, but I was just too tired, and now the store is closed.

Today we had our first geology field trip. We went to a coral beach and the Martin Ryan Marine Science Institute. They do work with NUI Galway, but the center we visited was in Carna in County Galway. It was a little over an hour to get there by bus. They took us on a very nice tour and showed us what they do there. It seemed like the majority of what they do was related to expanding and improving aquaculture. They took us through the facility and showed us the various stages of the process from growing microalgae up to full grown fish. Here are a couple jars of microalgae.

The fellow on the right was the one giving us the tour and the man on the left is our geology professor. They are standing in front of a tank containing an estimated 5000-6000 young cod. Which will eventually be grown to market size in this facility and sold.

After the marine research facility we went to a coral beach. The interesting part is that the coral is from a local seaweed. It is red when it is alive, but on the beach it bleaches and looks like this:

The professor we have had for geology this week is a different fellow than the one in the previous photo. This week we have had a seaweed specialist giving our lectures, so the point of going to the beach was for him to show us some tide pools full of various seaweeds and such. I have always had a mild fascination with tide pools, so I enjoyed that. This is a photo of our professor, Liam, pulling up a seaweed to show us.

And here is another photo of the beach we went to. It was a really lovely beach. Nice turquoise water and everything. It is a shame that it is always cold and windy here.