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.)

a Squidget is born

Dublin had redeeming qualities other than the Guinness brewery. One was Sam, the Aussie who worked at the desk at the Bunkhouse Hostel, who led us bravely to the Temple Bar district each night. Also a plus was Booze2Go across the street, where you could buy off-license by shouting your order through glass at the staff, who would assemble your order and slide it to you in a drawer.

We also managed not to get hit by a bus, which I consider an accomplishment.

Other pluses for Dublin:

+ 24-hour Burger King stationed neatly between Temple Bar and our hostel. Good for both late night snacks and bathroom breaks on the way home.

+ Our introduction to the Lisbon Treaty issue, by banner-waving protestors outside the General Post Office, site of the 1916 uprising.

+ Hen/Stag-do season. This meant packs of women in bars dressed in matching t-shirts or Moulin Rouge getups, and men in the streets with feather boas and dresses.

+ First hearing ‘Galway Girl’, a song that would become a favorite on the ensuing road trip. Unfortunately the man who played it in the pub largely interpreted Traditional Irish Music to include John Mellencamp. And the Irish love Johnny Cash, specifically Folsom Prison.

By the end of the weekend we were aching to get out of the city, and on Monday we got to pick up our rental car. Dustin picked up other-side-of-the-road driving quickly, which may or may not have been helped along by his philosophy that if you don’t know what you’re doing, just do it faster.

The car needed a name, and as we cruised out of Dublin, Dustin declared it “Squidget!”, a word presumably pulled from thin air. It sounded good, until the boys decided it wasn’t manly.

“It needs a middle name, like Crusher.”

“Yeah, or Thunderdome.”

The Thunderdome is a building in Dublin, whose name they liked to randomly say in a Hulk Hogan voice.

“But it’s Irish, so….O’Callahan,” Dustin concluded.

Our silver Ford Focus was thereafter known as Squidget Thunderdome Crusher O’Callahan. And it was good.

Rocky start

Keeping with the theme of giving slogans to countries, here’s another one:

Ireland: Hard On The Liver.

Also, one Dustin will appreciate:

Ireland: It’s Very Green Here.

Dublin, unfortunately, was awful. It wasn’t Dublin’s fault. It started out with me arriving on June 4th, expecting the boys would arrive June 5th, at 5:30 a.m. After waiting until noon with no sign of Jeff, Dustin or Mike, I sent a frantic facebook message saying WHERE ARE YOU, before realizing that they left the States on the 5th, and wouldn’t actually arrive in Ireland until the 6th. Oops. It was drizzly and awful all day, and instead of seeing anything I went to the theatre to watch Iron Man and eat popcorn to take my mind off my stupidity.

For the rest of the day I stressed about having nowhere to sleep the next night, because my hostel was going to be full, though after some cancellations I ended up being able to stay there anyway.

The next morning, the 6th, I got up fairly confident that the boys would arrive. I took my book to the hostel lobby around 7 a.m. and waited. Jeff showed up shortly afterwards, and I was so relieved it took a minute to realize he was alone.

Dustin and Mike were supposed fly from Buffalo to Boston where Jeff was waiting to catch the flight with them. They didn’t show, so he got on the plane by himself, after a quick call to dad saying “If Dusty calls, I went to Ireland”.

Right. Crap.

Mysteriously, a travel companion I didn’t even know about, Ben, showed up during breakfast. So at least there were three of us.

At 7 a.m. the next morning I went downstairs again, to find the missing two were downstairs having breakfast. Their flight from Buffalo to Boston had been cancelled, and they’d caught the same flight the next day.

Finally, everyone was in Dublin. And when in Dublin:

go to the Guinness brewery.

(The boys in order: Jeff, Ben, Dustin, Mike)

We checked the barley

(apparently Guinness buys two-thirds of all the barley in Ireland, and it’s all “of the highest quality”).

We learned how it’s brewed. We read the history. We tasted.

To get through Guinness, you travel up seven floors, on the top you get a free pint.

You have to wait until the beer is completely black before you drink it, or people will yell at you. Well, Ben will likely yell at you.