Doublin'

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 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.

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.

Hold me to it.

With that, I remain ever your humble servant