By Jeff Meade

In Letterkenny, there was music everywhere ... and dancing in the streets

You know how it is when you've been back in the country a few days. It feels like that trip to Ireland happened to someone else. You're left with your memories, but you can feel them slipping from your grasp. Photos, though, help preserve many of your most treasured moments. Sounds, too, can bring it all back.

Some of my best memories are of the Fleadh Cheoil. Not so much the wandering about hallways at the Letterkenny Institute of Technology—a nice facility, but you might as well be in any school or college on the planet. What most resonates are the memories of the hours after the Fleadh, the special time when the streets of Letterkenny were filled with crowds. Kids danced. Bands played. Euros clinked in open fiddle cases. Chips sizzled. Guinness flowed.

To help you get a feel for what that experience was like, we've put together a quick (read: somewhat crude) photo essay, with natural sound recorded on a small hand-held digital recorder. Nothing about the presentation is what you would call "polished." But then, virtually nothing about the post-Fleadh proceedings were polished. In fact, many of the bands that assembled to perform impromptu music in bank storefronts and in front of pubs, often in a cold rain, really were a little rough around the edges. For me, that's what makes Irish traditional music what it is. It's unstructured, uncluttered, spontaneous ... and full of life.