Thursday, June 6, 2013

Dublin, Ireland

Dia dhóibh—Cheers from sunny Dublin town,

I was under the impression that dreary was the adjective more often associated with Dublin, but we’ve been in Ireland for nearly two weeks now and have seen only one rainy day. I’m lying in Saint Stephen’s Green Park, where it’s a lovely, 18°C (65°F), blue-sky afternoon. Judging by all the pasty-white red-headed sun-worshipers skipping work to cover every square foot of grass, I would guess this weather is a bit of a rarity. After all, this is the land that the Romans dubbed Hibernia, land of eternal winter, and didn’t even bother to colonize on account of the dreadful weather. The Celts, however, and later the Vikings, were undeterred by the climate and each left their mark (and their freckles) strewn about the country.

After my last post from the Dingle Peninsula, we ventured north along the western shore to the majestic Cliffs of Moher, whose grandeur could be diminished only by the herds of tourists filing single-file along the bluffs’ edge, finding odd solace in the suicide prevention hotline numbers posted along the path. After chewing our cud a bit, we drove on, passing hundreds of miles of mysterious dry-stacked stone walls. Each, we learned, has been built by several millennia’s worth of determined locals, from Celts to Vikings to Christian shepherds, to I/T workers on summer holiday. Each hell-bent on displacing cursed stone to the edge of the field to make way for seaweed and sand, dredged from the sea bottom and heaped upon previously-infertile land in an attempt to correct the mistakes of iron-age ancestors too eager to deforest with their new-fangled axes.

We landed, eventually, in Galway and were beckoned off-shore by the mythic Aran Islands. The timing of our solitary rainy day was a blessing that drove day-trippers (and Pa) into warm pubs and allowed Cyrus, Jason, and me to explore the island virtually alone on bicycles, damp and chilled until we were saved by cozy lambs-wool sweaters and hats purchased from deft local knitters who gossiped in Gaelic amongst themselves, knitting with one hand and accepting credit cards with the other.

After ferrying back to the mainland, we pushed north, past inland lakes that fingered between green mountain peaks shrouded in mist, where feral goats played king of the hill alongside spray-painted rams and sheep, which grazed on obliviously in fields of clover. Onward, past valleys where bricks of freshly-cut peat blocks were stacked in an optimistic attempt to dry, smoke hung low over stone cottages, and the air was filled with the sweet perfume of peat fires (a scent that we initially assumed was from the clutch that we were burning out of the rental car).

We continued north to the quaint village of Westport on the west coast of County Mayo, where we were pleased to find that Elvis was making a special appearance at McCarthy’s pub. Elvis, along with the entire bleary-eyed crowd, took quite a liking to Pa. Here we discovered the Irish art of craic. We’d noticed many pubs throughout Ireland boasting about their ale and craic, which as far as I can tell means fun or good conversation, but we hadn’t fully appreciated this Irish tradition before. (We found our first craic house in Dingle, which made me chuckle. After all, Pa would never have let me visit crack houses when I was a teenager.) As far as I can tell, the tradition of craic involves the art of bellying up to a bar and chatting about everything, and about nothing. The art of raising spirits on a rainy day, of passing the endless hours of winter when the sun scarcely peeks over the horizon.

Why the Irish are endowed with this gift of gab, whereas the rest of Northern Europe seems to have been skipped over, I assume stems from their proximity to the celebrated Blarney Stone. The stone, which apparently bestows the gift of eloquence upon all who kiss it, was only miles from our route days ago down south. We could easily have stopped by. Being practical Americans of German descent, however (with insufficient Cherokee in the mix to convince us otherwise), we had calculated the 27 extra minutes that a detour to Blarney would have cost, added in the value offered by the alleged gift of eloquence, and then subtracted the gross-out factor involved in kissing a boulder dampened by centuries of slobber. Ultimately, we opted to take the quick road around the town, thereby breaking Rule #2 of traveling in Ireland. (Rule #1, I’m told, is Never Pass a Pub with Your Name on it. Rule #2, it follows, must be Never Fail to Kiss a Rock Bestowing Super-Communicative Powers.) Despite this oversight on our parts, nonetheless, our lack of articulateness can generally be remedied by a couple pints of tongue-lubricating Guinness, so we’ve succeeded for the most part in joining in on the fun at the local watering holes.

Happily, the Irish seem to have a tender spot for Americans, as each seems to have a cousin Paddy in Boston or an Uncle Finn in New York. Thanks in part to the mass migration to America that took place during the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, today there are ten times more Irish in America than in the old country.

After a week exploring the west coast, our time was running short. We crammed into the little Skoda one last time and landed here in Dublin. The pace of the city has taken a bit of getting used to after the mutton-laden countryside, but Dublin manages to maintain Irish charm. Before the economic downturn of 2008, the city became a hot-bed for high-tech and information-based industries, including translation, so career-wise this trip was long overdue. While the boys are off getting their fix of museums and historical sites today (which would bore me to death in any case), I’ve been zipping around the city schmoozing with clients with whom I’ve worked for a decade but have never met in person.

The business day is drawing to a close, thankfully. Along with the rest of Dublin, I’m soaking up the rare sunshine in a field full of pasty-whites who’ve had no recent exposure to daylight or leafy greens and who will soon, no doubt, be gravitating pub-wards to discover newfound thirst. And sunburns.

Slán—Cheerio!

Angela