I'm sitting here in my derelict room in Leeside, with my maps of foreign cities stripped from the walls and my suitcases clustered on the floor. It's bare and damp and would be very saddening indeed if it weren't for the sun streaming in for one last sunset through my floor-length window.
Tomorrow I'm going to get on a plane and start my progress back to the United States, where things will be significantly less green and the accents will be completely comprehensible.
These past five months have been some of the best of my life. Cork has come to feel like home and I can't imagine suddenly leaving, which is exactly what I'm about to do. Mostly I've been distracting myself by enjoying the surprisingly clement weather with trips to the shores of the Lough, having tea outdoors in all the restaurants we hadn't yet tried, watching football matches with the lads, baking incessantly, and, of course, studying for my finals which have at last concluded. The people I've met and adventures they've accompanied me on have made my time in Cork unquestionably blissful- like a vacation from real life, wherein everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
It makes little sense to keep an Irelandiary, one might say, when one is no longer in Ireland, and as of 11:45 AM tomorrow, I will no longer be.
BUT
BUT (you say),
"What about Skellig Michael? You've been witholding that one from us for months! And what have you been up to for the entirity of the month of May, anyhow?"
The Irelandiary, I have decided, will live on for at least a few more thrilling chapters, for I, sirs and madams, have many more stories to tell and a solid seventeen hours of air travel in which to type them! So this isn't really IT, I suppose; it's merely me putting off finishing my packing, becuase packing makes the fact that I'm leaving all too real.
I'd better get on that packing, so I will leave you for now. Should you want to empathize with me, look up an Uillean Pipe lament on the youtube and weep big crocodile tears while thinking of rain, sheep, stout, and tweed.
My next post will come to you from The Land of Hope and Dreams itself, but rest assured that there is still much to tell concerning the land of Saints and Scholars.
Moving right along,
you can rejoin our nonstop Irish party on a brilliant April morning in
Portrush, the North.
We had had a
delicious dinner and pint and taken in the late weeknight town after settling
in the night before, and already Portrush was shaping up to be a precious
little town. When one thinks of Northern Ireland, one tends to think of car
bombs, protests, lots of orange, paintings of William and his white horse, and
people behaving crankily about flags. One does not think of glowing blue skies over
crashing cold waves and snow-capped islands, viewed through mansard windows
with particularly delicious potato toast.
A boreen green
We had a full docket
of Northern adventures to accomplish that day, beginning with the eminent Giant’s
Causeway.
Just a twenty-minute
drive from Portrush, the Giant’s Causeway, in case you grew up in a home devoid
of National Geographic magazines, is a fantastic geological feature that was
caused approximately fifty million years ago by a lava flow encountering a bed
of chalk and forming a sort of liquid-basalt-mud that dried and cracked like
the sediment at the bottom of a dry pond. The surface cracks eventually worked
their way down to the base of this formation, creating the mass of columns that
have been impressing human beings for centuries.
The Giant’s Causeway,
as a UNESCO world heritage site, is one of the most happenin’ tourist hubs in
all of Western Europe, but the artful visitors’ center and up-tempo tour made
it seem far less touristy than it could have been. Our guide sported a thick
Northern burr, a mixture between an Irish and Scottish accent that was at times
hard to comprehend but endlessly fascinating. In this accent, the number “eight”
is pronounced with four syllables: “ayy-iii-uh-ut”
Legend has it that
the Causeway was not in fact formed by lava flows, but instead was the creation
of two giants, Fionn MacCool of Ireland and Benandonner of Scotland. They
decided to (either, depending on the
story) wage a war against each other or connect their two lands with a bridge.
They toiled away for many years, eventually connecting the two, but based on
the unwillingness to fight of one of the combatants (with the cowardice of
Benandonner being heavily favored) the bridge was destroyed, leaving matching
basalt columns on either side of the North Channel. Here is a much more
spirited and/or hardcore retelling of the tale, complete with onomatopoeias and
first-class animation.
The Causeway drops away
into the sea and it is here that in 1588, during the Spanish Armada’s attempted
invasion of England through Ireland, one of the twenty-odd ships sailing into
the teeth of a North Sea gale was wrecked. This being a shipwreck, and a Spanish
shipwreck no less, rumors of sunken gold enticed divers to go searching the
base of the Causeway for the treasure of La Girona, a galleass whose crew, made
up of the survivors of numerous other Irish shipwrecks, was sent almost
entirely to a watery grave after their rudder broke and smashed them against
the cliffs. Nearby Dunluce castle, which will be covered later on in this post,
was the supposed site of the wreck, but it was not until the nineteen fifties
that a Belgian diver did some poking around with the local folklore and
discovered that it was not, in fact, the castle that had been sighted as the
nearest landmark to the shipwreck, but a rock known as the Giants’ chimney just
East of the Causeway that pointed to La Girona. The crags of the rock had been
mistakenly cited as the towers of Dunluce through the thick rain and wind, and this
mistake was not rectified for nearly four hundred years. It was only by
listening to the lore of the surrounding area- the peninsula under the Giants’
chimney is called, in Irish, “Spanish point,” something entirely passed over by
other treasure hunters- that our clever Belgian diver was able to recover the
loot of a thousand worlds from the briny deep.
What was the point of
that exercise, other than historical pedantry? Well, the tour guide and his
burr put forth that in this case, the legend, the story without scientific substantiation,
the far-flung possibility, turned out to be true. Perhaps, then it really was a
pair of Giants who built the Causeway with their bare hands. “Ya ken bileeve
what ye want,” he said.
I thought that that
was a nice way of putting things.
After the Causeway we
headed to the aforementioned Dunluce castle. There was not a shipwreck at this
castle (as the world now knows), but it was the castle upon which C.S. Lewis
based the palace of Cair Paravel in his celebrated Chronicles of Narnia.
Besides practically
being Narnia, Cair Parav- I mean, Dunluce was extremely well-preserved. This being
Ulster, not Munster, it was inhabited by MacDonnells, Earls of Antrim, and not
the McCarthys of the South, unlike every other castle we’ve talked about.
Dunluce is situated atop a near-island, surrounded by sheer drops to the sea
and is only reached by crossing a bridge. The impenetrable nature of the castle
kept it safe from Vikings and today makes it look extremely dramatic.
In the low-tide
saltmarsh at the base of the castle stood a towering hill, almost so tall as to
be level with the ramparts of the castle one hillock over. I trotted down the Cliffside
and climbed the hill, leading to some very cool photos of Dunluce from below. Aunt
Rita and various other visitors waved at me and shouted cautionary phrases from
the turrets as I clambered about on the slope. It was most thrilling.
There I be, on my hillock
Have I yet mentioned
that the weather was perfect? It was. It was cold and windy but not a cloud
passed over county Antrim that day. It was impossibly lovely.
Our perfect day was
about to get better, because after climbing every inch of Dunluce castle we
made tracks inland for the town on Bushmills, the obvious home of the Bushmills
Whiskey distillery. There we had a brilliant whiskey tour and tasting. While it
didn’t quite hold a candle to the Jameson distillery fifteen minutes from Cork,
to which I have gone (and been licensed as a whiskey taster… twice), there’s
always something to be said for extending one’s epicurean horizons.
Our last stop of the
day was at the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, a delicate bridge (of rope, no less!)
spanning the chasm between the mainland and the appropriately-named Sheep
island, to which sheep were herded in days of yore to benefit from the lush sea
grass thereon. Tourists went galumphing across the bridge, murmuring to
themselves about not looking down, before emerging unscathed on the far side
where they could frolic about on the beneficial grasses of Sheep island. One
group of pilgrims was even doing a tai chi session. I rather love heights, so
the bridge was little trouble for me. Aunt Rita has the usual human amount of
acrophobia, and y’all should be extremely proud of her for crossing the bridge
like a champ.
That evening we
uncovered a mysteriously deserted restaurant called “The Blue Duck” overlooking
the Portrush marina and watched the sun go down over the North sea before
retiring to the hotel for an impromptu crash course in whiskey, hosted by a
burring barkeep in the hotel bar.
I will skip right
along to the next two days, wherein we covered the West coast of Ireland.
Pictures speak louder than words for this bit, for, as anyone will gladly tell
you, the beauty of the Western Shore is worth a hundred thousand words.
We left Portrush and
went gliding through fields of sheep and tiny towns. We hit up a castle and
yarn stores in Donegal, skimmed the bays at Derry/Londonderry and Galway, found
the grave of W.B. Yeats (“Being
Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through
temporary periods of joy”
and “The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but
time”) at Drumcliff
in county Sligo, wound through Galway's barren, craggy Burren, passed under Croag Patrick, and crossed the broad majestic Shannon by ferry. While we didn’t
see any of the famed river dolphins, the smokestacks of the huge hydroelectric
power plants that brought light, heat, and running water quite suddenly to
rural Ireland in the nineteen fifties made my heart leap about like a merry
ocean creature.
We stopped at sunset
at the Cliffs of Moher. Again, there are not words.
The Cliffs are
perhaps the single biggest draw for visitors to Ireland outside of Dublin, and
this is no surprise. They are absolutely majestic, tall and wide as far as the
eye can see, dropping down into mist and clouds of wheeling seabirds. We liked
them so much we came back the next day for a few hours to see them in broad
daylight. I don’t know which lighting was more stunning.
I live life on the edge.
That night we rolled
into the town of Lahinch and happily stumbled across Vaughan’s, one of Ireland’s
top-ranked restaurants, quite by serendipity. Our hotel was equally awesome and
besides a wee bit of trouble in not crashing through the entrance arm to the
parking lot, everything continued to go perfectly.
Back on the Iveragh Peninsula!
Our next day, fifth
in the trip, took us down the rest of the way to Kerry, which you as a
tried-and-true reader of the Irelandiary will recognize from a pair of posts
waaaaaayyyyyy back in February. Yes, we had made it, once again, to
Cahirsiveen, and it is there I will leave you for next post, we shall discuss
perhaps the pinnacle of my Irish adventures before or since: climbing, at long
last, Skellig Michael.
About
a month and a half has passed since the events described in this blog
transpired, but better late than never, as I always say. Now you get stories
and pictures, and when it comes to blogs it is imprudent to ask for more.
This
journey of epic proportions began with my wonderful Aunt Rita (hi, Rita!)
kindly volunteering to come and visit me in chilly Cork. We would hire a car (one
does not rent a car here; one hires a car from a car hire) and go speeding down
the wrong sides of Irish roads in pursuit of scenery and escapades and culture.
Our journey would take approximately a week and put us through twenty-two of
the thirty-two available counties, in both the North and Republic, and all four
provinces. Below is a map, colored in charming pastels, which I have drawn on (poorly)
for your benefit showing the general route.
We
missed the counties of Mayo, Monaghan, Cavan, Longford, Westmeath, Offaly,
Laois, Kildare, Tyrone, and Fermanagh. We’re saving them for next time.
The
circumambulation of Ireland began on an inauspicious Easter Sunday. I woke up
to pop the extremely fancy pesto-stuffed chicken I’d made for Easter brunch in
the oven and found that every single electrical appliance in the apartment had
ceased to work. After a frantic hour or so lodging calls to the landlady and
flipping switches like madwomen, the inmates of number twelve Grattan street
got the fridge running and lights working. Our less-than-fantastic luck
continued the next day when, en route to Belfast, we stopped by the immigration
office to finally register myself with the state. However, it being Easter
Monday, it was a bank holiday and that particular office was closed. My dear
beloved bank here in the magnificent land of Hibernia hadn’t processed my
deposit until Good Friday, so I was quite nearly an illegal alien in Ireland.
Yet, postponing our gallivanting off through the counties by a day allowed for
some adventures around Cork, which brings me to…
Phase One!
As
a UCC student and technical resident of Ireland for the past five months, I’ve
been fairly hesitant to partake in the more diddly-eye tourist activities offered
from the Northern highlands, to the Western islands, from the hills of Kerry,
to the streets of Free Derry (Which, as the Waxies will tell you, belongs to you and me. The views expressed in this video are not necessarily those of the author.) Blarney Castle is one of those things from
which I shied away for the first three months of my stay, due to its
association with loud, culturally insensitive tourists, wearing leprechaun
shirts and asking after corned beef, searching for the gift of the gab.
However, it’s only a fifteen-minute tool through the countryside North of the
city, so we set off to kiss the stone quite soon after being denied the
opportunity to register me with the Garda Siochaina.
One
thing to Blarney’s credit: it is drop-dead gorgeous. The weather was chilly and
damp, with icy crystals of quasi-snow in the air and a gale blowing up at the
top of the tower. The majestic tower of Blarney castle and the elegant gardens,
park, and turreted mansion (Blarney House) were, however, a perfect contrast in
the teeth of the wind, order and right angles and beds of chipper daffodils
despite the frost. The cold had also culled out the weaker tourists, so the
line to climb the tower and plant a smooch on the Blarney stone wasn’t as long
as I’ve heard tell it can be.
Still,
the stone sits embedded in the wall at the very top of the tower. It is part of
a machicolation; that is, an opening in the wall through which projectiles can
be hurled to repel an enemy. You may remember this vocabulary word from the
post on Cashel and Cahir. Waiting to kiss it was a line of people winding all
the way down the narrow, dark, clockwise-turning staircase- probably three or
four stories’ worth of mumbling, shivering folks, some of whom were frightened
of the dark or the height or the tight space. There were many small children,
but they tended to be the hardiest of the lot. Behind Aunt Rita and me was a
young man from Florida who was deathly scared of heights and was chattering
nervously to distract himself. It was all very tense.
At de top dere
At
the top of the tower it was nearly snowing and my hands were numb. We snuggled
into our collars as we watched the stone grow ever closer, with each successful
kisser grasping a pair of iron bars for safety and sliding down over the
parapet to plant a big one on the Blarney stone. Blarney castle employs someone
(or a number of people) whose job is to firmly cuddle each and every gab-getter
to make sure they don’t accidentally go slithering through the iron grille just
below the stone itself, hundreds of feet down. While this was somewhat
uncomfortable, it’s certainly preferable to the original method of kissing:
stone smoochers in days of yore used to be dangled over the edge by their
ankles.
While
we’re waiting, let me tell you, in three sentences, the history of the Blarney
stone:
1.The
official statement from Blarney castle is that it was given to a McCarthy forebear
by Cliodhna, the sea witch goddess.
2.McCarthy,
one of those rebellious Desmonds who’ve built every castle I’ve thus far
mentioned, used its magical properties to sweet-talk his way into winning a
lawsuit
3.Ever
since, McCarthys and everyone else for that matter have been able to gain
mystical skills of flattery after kissing said stone.
Blarney,
by definition, is improvement of the truth, usually in the form of sycophancy,
and while I reckoned I could use that skill every now and again, I wasn’t
overly concerned with gaining the gift of the gab. I’ve had enough Blarney
practiced upon me to know how often it fails to achieve the desired effect.
Still,
when it was time to lay down on the plastic mat and slide on out over the
ledge, I must admit it was rather thrilling. I made sure to kiss the underside
of the stone; legend has it that annoyed locals urinate on the thing at night
as revenge against the tourists that clog their roads with their shoddy
driving. I gave the rock a chaste peck (no stone shifting here) and clambered
back out. It was not that bad, although our Floridan friend about died for
fright.
After
Blarney we roadtripped to Cahir (which YOU know all about) before heading back
to Cork city for some publicious sightseeing.
The
next morning we at last got my official foreign resident card run off at the
Garda station and made tracks for the North. Our goal was the town of Portrush,
situated far and away up in county Antrim. Our route took us up the entire East
coast of Ireland, with notable views to be had of Dublin and Belfast both.
Incredible sunsets, seaside vistas, and snowy fields of snowy sheep rolled by
our windows.
The
highlight for me came in New Ross, a town in Wexford on the river Barrow. This
town has two claims to fame: it is the ancestral homeland of the Kennedy clan,
and is currently homeland to the famine ship Dunbrody.
I’ve
mentioned the famine ship Jeanie Johnston numerous times on this blog, and so
you gather already that such a vessel entails a gorgeous three-masted ship at
permanent anchor, furnished with frightening mannequins intended to educate the
masses on the conditions faced by Irish emigrants fleeing the famine during the
middle of the nineteenth century. Dunbrody is another such thing, but the catch
was that I wasn’t expecting it. When we came zipping around a hairpin turn into
New Ross and I saw its yards and topmasts silhouetted against the noontide sky,
I about screamed.
“OHMYGOSH!
IT’S ATALLSHIP!” I gasped, flailing like a beached whale. An agile beached
whale, too.
Aunt
Rita did not understand my garbled screeching or gesticulating (sorry, Rita)
and was concerned that we had hit a small animal or child. However, I soon
calmed down enough to make my sentiments known, and we summarily decided that a
tour of the Dunbrody would be the only way to keep my blood pressure at a
normal rate.
The
tour was perfectly overdone, with actors, mouldering mannequins, copious fiddle
music, and fake puke buckets in the hold. I was in raptures. I feel like I learned
a whole lot of nothing as any new information I might not have picked up in my
numerous history courses addressing the famine (which was, as you know, a
genocide) went straight over my head. I was too busy casting loving glances at
crisply tarred shrouds and smooth sanded gunwhales. Not even the actress portraying
an upper-class termagant poking me in the bicep with a bony, suspiciously
manicured fingernail and asking if I stole her chamberpot could ruin my
argument that this was the best historical experience ever.
After
disembarking from the Dunbrody we continued our way up North, reading aloud
Keats short stories and eating jaffa cakes. The border breezed by us without
comment; it wasn’t until I saw a sign referencing our exit of county Down that
I realized we had been in the North for a good half hour. We stopped for petrol
and had to pay in pounds; the accents were different and the attendant was
named John, not Sean. I will leave you in the darkening streets of Portrush,
Northern Ireland, where we parked on the side of a cliff overlooking the harbor
and its rainbow of boardwalk carnival lights. I have a concert to go to and I
shall finish the story presently!
This is a quick interlude to prove that I have given Dublin’s
fair city a fighting chance against Cork, like, in the high-stakes competition
of Which Fairly Large Irish City Does Kaylie Like Best?
I arrived in Dublin for the second time in the early
afternoon, having spent significant amounts of time befriending Texans and a
team of adolescent Russian footballers in the Vienna airport. Both were chivalrous sets of people.
The flight had
been delightful; after chancing my personal comfort on the likes of Ryanair and
WizzAir (both a few shades shy of legitimate) for the past handful flights I’d
taken, the clean, air-conditioned interior of a real live Aer Lingus plane,
with Van Morrison singing me to sleep during takeoff, was like heaven. The
flight attendants didn’t try to sell me lotto tickets or cigarettes every five
minutes during the flight, the cabin remained blissfully pressurized, and no
unholy trumpeting startled me when we landed (Ryanair has this ridiculous
fanfare that plays every time their planes land in a timely manner, as if this
is a rare, special, or otherwise surprising circumstance). I pretty much danced
on air through customs, where everyone spoke English and called my “luv.” It
was also sunny, or fairly so, with puffy white clouds zipping overhead and nary
a downpour in sight.
It was good to be back.
I hopped on a bus to the city center where the hostel I’d
rented with my friend Morgan (hi, Morgan!) was located in the
famous/infamous/notorious Temple Bar. Temple Bar is for all intents and
purposes entirely tamed in this, the enlightened age, and is mostly home to
loud American tourists and enterprising Concern lads. However, it is still
completely populated with pubs, so live music and happy drinking noises wafted
into the hostel on the April breeze round the clock. Anyway, thanks to my
previous twenty-odd hours spent in Dublin back in March, I had a surprisingly
accurate grasp on the territory and so, after cruising down Grafton street and
stowing my things in the surprisingly well-appointed hostel (Barnacles Temple
Bar, five stars) I decided to go on a ramble.
Now I don’t know if any of you, my lovely, gracious, and
clever readers, have had the distinct pleasure of reading a James Joyce novel,
but let me take this opportunity to say that I have, regularly and for a period
of eight years. Joyce has been lauded by the author of a rather self-important guidebook to Ireland as THE most important novelist in the HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Whether or not this is true he certainly revolutionized the way in which fiction is written and also wore a snazzy eyepatch.
It all started back in the seventh grade when I stumbled across
an article penned by Captain Obvious himself in a dentist’s office magazine
praising A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s thinly-veiled
autobiography. Portrait is just chock-a-block full of bildungsroman and
profanity and innuendo and no quotation marks whatsoever, and I hated it the
first time I read it. This was because I was twelve, and no twelve year old has
any business trying to enjoy James Joyce.
What a smashing eyepatch. MY TEAM.
But disliking a book was a new experience to me, and the pit
of dissatisfaction lodged in my heart did not sit well at all with twelve-year-old
Kaylie; or fifteen, eighteen, or nineteen year-old Kaylie, for that matter. I
cannot count the number of times I have read Portrait without using my fingers
and toes and now, eight years after I first tied my poor, overworked adolescent
mind into knots trying to distinguish between the feverish hell depictions and
Our Protagonist’s fever dreams, I can say that I am much enamored not only of
Portrait but also of Dubliners, Joyce’s ever-so-much-more-palatable short story
collection.
Ulysses, you see, will have to wait for a day when I say, -Hmm time for light reading like. Notice I did not use quotations; Joyce did not use quotations, either. See how great I am at writing. I haven’t made it past the first third of Ulysses yet, as I have an active life to live.
But you crave some background on this nasty Joyce cove, what
with his profanity and his fire and brimstone and his lack of quotation marks!
Here are the things that James Joyce writes about:
1.People being angsty and walking around Dublin
2.There is no number two
But he writes about it in such a lovely way! For all of his
slightly (read: very) creepy quirks and expatriotic behaviors, there is nothing
to make the reader pine for Georgian squares and damp cobbles and stout like
that time when he says:
Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the
reality of experience and to forge inthe smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
And because one of my beloved classes at good aul UCC (Politics,
Society, and the Irish Novel: great class, five stars, highly recommend it) assigned
both Portrait and Dubliners, along with a whole passel of delightfully gloomy
Irish Novels, I got to read them again and then write about them. They were,
then, fresh in my memory, fresh like the grass in Stephen’s Green after a
rainstorm.
(that above is by no means a simile Joyce would have used,
for he was a great fist for scatological comparisons. I cannot stoop to such
levels and that is perhaps the thing standing twixt myself and literary
greatness)
I am drawing you along on this extended ramble, you see, so
that you understand why I thought it a grand idea to go traipsing off into the
redbrick canyons of Dirty Dub, mapless, goal-less, and without an umbrella. Or a
watch. Or single person who knew where I was going.
Morgan didn’t arrive until the next afternoon so I was alone
in Dublin for a day and itching to go rambling, thinking deep thoughts and judging
others and slurping thin tea and slowly starving and doing other marvelously
Joycical things all alone. I brought ipadraig, the modern-day typewriter lent
me by my fantastic aunt Rita (hi, Rita!) so that I could write things using
many colons and no quotation marks. Ipadraig came equipped with an application
(they tell me they’re called apps, but I am James Joyce; I do not fall for this
hep cat slang) entitled “301 Short Stories” and among these were each and every
one of the stories from Dubliners. With that and some screenshotted Patrick
Kavanaugh and Padraig Colum poems to keep me busy I set off to brood.
I could, of course, have jumped into any of the ubiquitous
national museums, and I could have paid up for a Georgian house tour, a run
through Dublin Castle, or any such historical expedition, fascinating no doubt.
But you forget, dear reader, that it was SUNNY; ta sé ag ghrian, if you know
what I mean. I had brought the weather with me and I would have been remiss to
waste it indoors.
I pondered in Merrion square; I pined in Stephen’s Green. I
brooded at three separate places along the Grand Canal, once the next bench
over from this fella (who had a dozing older gent sitting next to him).
I even
made it so far as Raglan road, and I walked down it twice, once on each side of
the street, just to make sure that I wasn’t accidentally snaring some poor unsuspecting
poet with my dashing good looks and dark hair.
Because really, don’t YOU want to know the secret signs/that
are known to the artists who have known/the true gods of sound and stone? I
sure do.
I spent the rest of the day on walkabout, taking stops to read
Joyce and write letters and work on the great American novel, and contribute
somewhat to the post on Prague (BLAGUE), if I remember correctly. The feeling
of being completely anonymous in a new city (though one significantly closer to
home, home being Cork, than Naples or Vienna or Paris) was glorious. Being able
to understand the conversations around me was better still. I could have
embraced every person who threw out a “howareya,” thrown money at everyone who
used “grand” in passing. It hadn’t hit me how much I missed living in Ireland until
I was right in the thick of a gaggle of happy, warm Dubliners, out for a stroll
in Stephen’s Green, speaking of exams, hurling, Pope Francis, and the aul wan
back home.
I walked a few centimeters off the bottoms of my trusty
Timberlands by the time darkness started to fall and catcalls started rising
like river mist (still not a Joyce simile) from the pubs I passed. Yes, it was
time to head back to Temple Bar, and I, with no map at all, knew exactly where
to go. I turned my toes up Baggot street, already looking forward to a nice
PB-n-J, made with Austrian jam, Czech peanut butter, and complimentary hostel
bread. I was chugging along, trying to be angsty but failing because I was
quite content, when I was accosted by children on bikes.
I didn’t quite lamp the three buggers as they came hurtling
around a blind corner and into the street, nearly taking off the end of my nose
as they passed. They hollered something about moving out of the way, you
langer, before tearing off through traffic. I sighed to myself and said some
people’s children! And kept on strolling North…
…
Until a few minutes later, the bike children came screaming
back the other way, hollering yet again in my general direction. I wanted to
grumble “Leave off ye blighters” but instead just smiled tolerantly and dodged
down a sidestreet.
This was not the best idea for, lo and behold, a block or so
later the wee biker gang came cycling towards me down an alley.
“We’ve seen ye near ten times today!” shouted the ringleader
as they passed.
Stalked through Dublin by children on bikes! What an ignominious
way to go, harried by ten-year-olds everywhere between Rathmines and Dame
street, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide! They’d pegged me as a foreigner,
albeit a stealthy one clothed in dark, unobtrusive colors, and would chase me
back across the Atlantic if I didn’t change my course. So I dodged; I ducked
and doubled back and there I was, twenty minutes later, deep in the residential
south without a helpful tourist sign pointing me back towards places to spend
my fat American dollars.
It was time to cave into reason and pull out ipadraig, whose
brilliant mapping features would have me back towards the hostel in a jiffy.
But NO; I could figure this out.
I did, no less than an hour later, when I staggered into the
hostel and flopped down in my bunk, lulled into a sudden sleep by the
comforting sounds of revelry below my window. After a full day of rambling, concluded with
an intense action sequence of high-speed stealth rambling and navigational acrobatics,
it was time for bed. No pints tonight.
The next morning was again sunny, but my morning
constitutional back to Merrion square was cut short by a flash rainstorm. I dodged
into the nearest Starbucks, feeling quite the traitor to authentic Dublin
things, to drink fancy tea and leech from their free wifi as I tried to sort my
life out (by the way, should anyone have a room for rent in Moscow, Idaho, for
the Fall 2013 semester, I would rent it from you in a heartbeat). When the rain
cleared I went lurching down Grafton and O’Connell streets, admiring the
statuary and commemorative plaques before heading back to the hostel to meet up
with Morgan.
We proceeded to have a brilliant time catching up and seeing
all the Dublin sights. The highlight may very well have been our stop at KC
Peaches, a delightful café on Nassau street that has what I sincerely think to
be the most delicious cupcakes in all of the world. I forget to feed myself
when I’m travelling alone, so finally having something in my stomach was both wonderful
and surprising. After a quasi-informative tour of Dublin’s central features we
hit up Temple Bar’s wide variety of public houses for five different trad bands
and Morgan’s introduction to the extreme selection of world-class beers offered
by Irish pubs.
The next day we woke up for my second tour of Trinity
College; it was well worth the price, firstly because collegiate grandeur on
that scale never gets old, and secondly because the book of Kells was at last
our on display. If you remember from my post far back in March, the book was
undergoing maintenance when I last visited so finally getting to see it, as
well as the book of Armagh and the Garland of Howth, was just about enough to
make me weep happy historian tears. And of course, the Long Hall just gets
better with each viewing. I was legitimately dancing about with excitement for
Morgan to see it.
We took a stroll to the Jeanie Johnston, the famine ship
mentioned last time, but frugality kept us from paying for a tour. Instead we
took in the fantastic views of sunny Dub from the Samuel Beckett bridge and saw
all the significant bits of heritage trailing their way down the Liffey. We
concluded Dublin day with a second visit to KC Peaches before catching our bus
to Cork.
Which brings me at last to the present, where I sit in the
sitting room (naturally) of my run-down old flat on Grattan street, sipping tea
and listening to the morning run of Guinness trucks rumbling past with their
trailers of kegs to be rolled down the cellars of pubs all across Corcaigh. I can’t
describe the feeling of stepping off the bus at Pope’s Quay after over a month
of trotting around Europe, of finally being back in the city of steps and
spires, where people punctuate every sentence with a liberal dusting of “so!”
and no day is complete without rain. I got to show Morgan around for the next
few days before she flew back to Spain and it was almost more than I could bear
not to go skipping through the English Market, kissing haddocks and juggling
Ballycotton potatoes, singing An Poc ar Buile (a notorious Cork song). We took
in Shandon and Sunday’s Well and even made a trip out to Midleton, the lovely
home of the Jameson Distillery, and I got my second certification as an Irish
Whiskey Taster.
Now that you’re up to speed I can begin to cycle back
through my experiences thus far and write blog posts about the missing bits of
Ireland and Europe-at-large, since nobody wants to read accounts of my
wanderings in the Boole library on campus, scouting for a seat among the
throngs of stressed Irish students. First up is the oft-promised account of my
circumambulation of the island with Aunt Rita and a lovely rental car.
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