Forty Foot

This is skipping ahead in time a bit, but I was so excited to share this video that I thought I would go ahead and do it anyways. Yesterday, we went to the Martello Tower in Sandycove, Dublin 4. The tower is the location of the first episode of Ulysses: "Telemachus," where we meet Stephen Dedalus and stately, plump Buck Mulligan.
A bit about the towers:
 They were built all along the coast of Ireland (primarily in Dublin) to defend Ireland from an invasion by Napoleon and the French -- though the Irish would have preferred to be "liberated" by the French, and free of the British. Anyways, James Joyce lived in the tower himself for a while, before the fateful night that is almost exactly the same as the first part of the book. One of the men also sleeping in the tower, portrayed by the character Haines, has a hallucination of a black panther in the tower and wakes up the other two men (Joyce and Oliver St. John Gogarty) by shooting all over the room trying to kill it. Joyce never returned to the tower.
Outside of the tower lies the "Forty Foot", a swimming area in the Irish Sea that used to be a bathing pool for men up until the 1970s. It is still in use today, and I decided that I would jump in! It was absolutely FREEZING. Irish people were swimming around like it was just a nice, deep hot tub, but I barely lasted two seconds. On my way in, I asked an 8-year old girl who was playing around like it was nothing how it was. She told me, "It's cold but it warms up quick!" Well, I jumped in and then scrambled out. Here's the footage to prove it...