Ireland: a compressed update

Dublin:

I have a question for Dublin: Why is your Guinness so expensive? At a pub down the street from the Guinness brewery a pint of the beautiful black stuff will cost €5.50 – it’s only £3.35 at my pub in Edinburgh. What’s going on? On our first day in Dublin we hopped pubs for the afternoon and into the evening, and when we found a place with 3.75 Guinness we settled in for the long haul. Jonathan, the regular at the bar, gave us his ‘favorite bits of Ireland’ tips. The cute Polish bartender let us play Jenny’s ipod until the band with a cello showed up. Jenny was impressed that I was able to navigate us back to the hostel, but luckily it was the same one I’d stumbled back to several times last June with the boys, so I’d had some practice.

Dublin also tends to like to rain on me, it seems.

So as cool as Dublin can be, the two times I’ve been there I’ve always been pleased to get out and into the rest of Ireland. The rest of Ireland is where it’s at.

Galway:

I was impressed with Galway the second time round. From my last trip I remember mostly lying in the grass, then going out to the pubs, falling down on the dance floor at the King’s Head and stealing most of a pizza from a guy called Eamon.

I forgot that Galway has cute twisty streets full of shops, and hadn’t even made it last time to the wee harbour, the cathedral. Jenny and I had a walk around town, appreciating laid-back Galway after taking the bus straight across from Dublin.

Then, of course, we went to the pubs.

At the first pub we ended up in conversation with an old man who wanted to tell us about all the ‘naughtiest’ places he’d ever been in the world. We were glad when he left.

At the second an entire stag-do took a shining to us. We drank many Guinness.

Belfast:

In Belfast we took a black cab tour; this time, though, from a man who didn’t sound as though his mouth were full of marbles. He was also upfront from the start that he was a Republican, and would be giving us information from a Republican point of view.

It was grand. Jenny has the pictures.

We created our own pub tour of Belfast, because we had to fly out of Dublin the next morning and were catching the midnight bus. To occupy ourselves we drank Guinness in various places. The first place was full of men watching horse races, until a man carrying a pile of plastic bags came in and started demanding to watch Coronation Street. Jenny said she saw him combing his eyebrows. We moved to the other side of the pub for a bit, and when we left, all the other patrons gave us a big wave goodbye.

The next pub played nothing but Garth Brooks, and smelled like a barn.

A few more pubs and even a pitcher of cocktails later, we made our way to the bus. It dropped us at Dublin airport at 3 am, and we made an unsuccessful attempt to sleep on the floor until our plane left. (Our plane to Berlin. Germany.)

Ithaca

We went to the Giant’s Causeway, land of funny rocks, to the Bushmills Distillery, oldest distillery of all time, and to Belfast, where a guy named Walter gave us a black cab tour of the city, and showed us a lot of the murals from The Troubles, immortalizing people who were killed or who played a part, people from the IRA.

That’s the briefest of all summaries, but I’ve taken way too long to wrap up my tales of Ireland, and I’ll sum in up with this:

In Belfast, we said goodbye to Squidget.

Apparently they weren’t bothered that we dripped honey on the backseat. Whoops.

A pictorial of the rest of the journey:

We crossed into Northern Ireland without seeing so much as a sign, let alone a border, but suddenly there were British accents on the radio, and the shops accepted pounds.

We could only take pictures in the bar at Bushmills, because everywhere else in the distillery the use of a camera might cause the alcohol in the air to ignite. Apparently.

 Walter, our tour guide, showed us the Peace Wall in Belfast, that seperates Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods. Its gates still close every night.

***

G doesn’t want me to tell people he reads poetry, but as we lounged in the grass in Galway one afternoon, he handed me a copy of this, that he kept in his notebook. I copied it down, and refer to it often.

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon — do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.
 
Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber, and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.
 
Always keep Ithaca on your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
 
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
 
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what these Ithacas mean.

 - Constantine P. Cavafy