KILKENNY: On weekends, the town is flooded with people from the surrounding countryside seeking relaxation; the result is an enormous number of pubs crammed into a town whose length which you can easily traverse in a twenty-minute walk. When we arrived, it was Saturday night, and there was a terrific traffic jam caused by a regional hurling match scheduled for the next day. Families were decked out in their team colors. Hurling, a sort of amateur roughneck version of field hockey, is intensely popular in Ireland.