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.
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.
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 in the 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.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg00cAhMcldqrMpyTD4Np4vaQEl7tm38eGJYjxWUuekfT4ozZOoJR109swK9xbwcrShH9ZmGi0o-xOUYvGpCDXka9cE5WRdIIEUwZ2JPqTrXf54gS-EWmRHn733Pz8RqUKCSJl_uWpFClb3/s320/St+Stephen+Green+Park.+August+2001.jpg)
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.
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 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.
Hold me to it.
With that, I remain ever your humble servant
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