Hacked through to get the Finagle implementation done. You see, Finagle is pretty smart. It won't let you block the current thread easily. It forces us to use a proper asynchronous approach.
Futher working with the Casssandra driver. Here we tried creating keyspaces. No command to find out (only by exception) that a keyspace exists. Next up is to try obtaining a session on an unknown keyspace (if not then create it.)