The Best Thing Ever

Today I went up to Limerick, to try to figure out how the city which has been nicknamed "stab city" also shares it's name with such jolly poems. The answer: I don't know. But there's a neat castle there, and a nice museum which is one part art museum, one part history museum, and one part 'random antiques'. It was neat, and I didn't get stabbed. Also, on the bus ride there, I saw what I think was the best thing ever. I saw, ladies and gentlemen, the Queen of Cows.

The ride from Cork to Limerick takes about an hour and forty minutes on the bus. Most of the ride is through rolling hills and farms. It's pretty much a given that, if you're going any discernable distance in Ireland outside of a city, you'll pass rolling hills and fairly cliched country scenes: cute little farmhouses, hills dotted with sheep, and so on. Cows are fairly common as well, but they always seem to be in one of two states: standing still and eating, or lying on the ground, presumably sleeping.

But not the Queen of Cows, no. A small group of cows seemed to be sharing their pasture with a huge heap of either dirt of gravel, I couldn't tell which. Almost all the cows were doing the normal cow things (see above). One of them, however, had taken it upon herself to explore this new mini-mountain in their midst. She had, in a manner most un-cow-like, climbed up it, putting herself a good few feet above the rest of the herd. We passed quickly, but all I saw was a cow, standing proudly on this raised heap, looking out at the road with her head up as if expecting someone to challenge the reign of the Queen of the Cows. The other, lesser cows stood around her, looking at her in what was undoubtedly awe.

It was fabulous, and words cannot do it justice.