I was in Ireland. And Wales. And England.
Ok, I’m back. It does feel both good and strange, and it sets me thinking even before we’ve landed.
What were my words before leaving, ten days ago?
“To relax and…”.
Yeah, right.
I hope that writing things down will help me put them into the right perspective, and give the right importance to all that’s happened; however, and it’s a wrong thought to begin with, I doubt it will help me at all. But as record of my adventures, here’s the story.
Forget the flight: check-in is on time, we take off on time, we have a pleasant journey except for my natural uneasiness at the idea of going to a country I have visited only once before, and I am terrified that I will not understand their accent, they will not understand mine, and then we are not going to enjoy it because Dublin is not such a big city and three days would have been more than enough, and where are we going to eat since I promised my mum that she would eat fish every day, and fresh, and good.
When we land I’ve already cursed this idiotic holiday a thousand times and I can’t wait for it to be over and to go home.
Dublin is a shock.
After queuing for a taxi, we find one with an eerily silent driver, who drives like mad and enjoys stopping at less than an inch away from the car in front. My paranoid me, who respects the distances between cars even more after the accident (when I was bumped into!) is obviously happy when we reach a street with no traffic at all.
It is our street to be for the next five days.
But the house isn’t there.
Number 61 is not after number 59.
Actually, after number 59 there is…number 229.
Which doesn’t make sense, right? Even the driver is puzzled.
It takes me a lot of self-control and bell-ringing before I can find a house and a couple of kind strangers who answer the door in spite of the hour (it is almost 11 pm, after all), and explain the right way to our silent driver. So eventually we reach the house, and here’s the big secret: the street begins half-way, then ends at number 59, and if you want numbers 57 and 61, you must go back all the way to its beginning.
Rationality must not be into Irish DNA.
We have a first night of good sleep and I manage not to think about the coming day and the problems that we will encounter.
Which start as soon as we are out of the door: we cannot find neither a bus stop with indications to where it’s headed, nor somebody who knows anything about it. All car-drivers? Or don’t they ever go downtown? It hits me that there is an exceptional number of taxis, around the block, by the way…
A blond girl with headphones helps us in a super kind way, and a small gesture like this is beautiful for me, because I’m a tourist and I am not comfortable in a place where I don’t know anything. So, thanks, blond girl who told us the way to the bus stop, which is hidden in a street we would have never thought of.
Ok, one thing’s out.
Next, I get the amount wrong from the bus driver, who’s mumbling , so I understand 2.80 when it’s actually 2.70, and I’m told off by the driver “I told you so!”, he says, and all I can think is that it’s only 9 o’clock…
The rest of the day is a perfect comic picture of two average tourists swinging the map in any direction and looking at the corners of the streets trying to understand the way: neither of us has any sense of orientation, and I fall from grace right away when my mum, who’s never been here (vs I who have been here three days, ok, only three days five years ago, but surely I should remember better? Then again, geography is not exactly my subject) understands and directs us everywhere all day long.
(I must say that the miracle of “Navigator Mum” lasts for only three days, and on the last two I RULE! It takes me time, but once I get the idea of the streets nothing can stop me!)
Like perfect tourists we catch the hop-on hop-off bus and go around Dublin, then we visit Dublinia, the Cathedral, we stand in the middle of the street and we look the wrong way before crossing, we spend a fortune (not really, but it feels like it is) on shirts and silly badges at the tourist office.
And all the way I’m thinking: is this Dublin?
Somehow I don’t remember these streets, these bridges, Bachelors’ walk looks like a sordid cheap shopping street, I cannot find any market in Temple Bar where I was convinced there was one, the one where I had bought my Angela Carter five years ago, so I get more and more frustrated and sad.
The evening comes, and with a lot of effort I make our way to a famous pub/restaurant/hotel, where I went to watch Irish dancing, five years ago, on the advice of a museum guide on our second day here.
We enter.
And there’s a couple on stage.
Dancing.
Irish.
Music.
Tapping and moving like in my videos.
We stand and watch and I must hold back the tears as the tension releases.
We sit, I get a pint of Guinness, the dancers end their show and a couple of musicians begins to play beautiful songs, mostly Irish pop songs, and I sing along with them and the public and smile. They conclude with U2, “With or without you”, and all I think now is that yes, I’m in Dublin for real.
The day after we have booked a trip to Wicklow and Glendalough. All I know about these places is:
- they are vague names on the map, somewhere outside Dublin.
- There are lakes, a monastery, and some more Celtic stuff.
- There is some weaving mill which is the oldest on the country.
It turns out I don’t need to know more than this…
It is a rainy day, today.
I mean, it’s pouring with rain.
No, I mean that the streets are flooded with water, and we’ve soaked before the bus arrives to pick us up.
Us and another 50 noisy Italian tourists…August is vacation-month for 90% of Italy, so what did I expect?
After all it doesn’t really matter that it rains, since we spend almost five hours on the bus while a guide tells us about Irish history and all that; in the meantime the bus stops for thirty seconds so that we could take a picture of the Blessington lakes, if only the weather weren’t so awful that all I’m wishing is a cup of coffee, an armchair and a book. And my room in my house facing my garden and my mountains.
Mum is wearing sporty sandals and she’s wrapped her feet in tissues to keep warm, and I’m telling myself off for being such an idiot and forcing her to come with the promise that the weather would be good and she could even have worn her summer dress, and I know that she suffers this cold climate a lot more than I do, and that she should have been on some hot beach now, close to the sea and ready to swim in it any minute she felt like it, because she waits for the summer only to go and have swims in the lakes or in the sea, and where are we now? Freaking rainy Dublin, 10 degrees and pouring with rain. Where are my brains, all of a sudden?
When we stop in Glendalough and wander about in the Celtic cemetery (romantic, huh?), it’s raining as if the sky had decided to use up all the water of the world, and I get more and more depressed.
In Avoca we stop for lunch, and she eats a scone and coffee, which she enjoys, and I have a delicious soup, but I cannot stop repeating to myself mantra-like that the end of this holiday is nearer than I imagine, and then we will go to beautiful Wales which is usually decent at this time of the year.
I don’t know exactly what happens when we go back to Dublin, that evening: well, we go back to the pub of the night before, but we don’t like the group playing there, so we go home and everything explodes.
As usual, for a trivial matter.
My shirt is slightly stained on the back, and I’ve never noticed. Apparently she’s told me, but in such a way that I misunderstood, and so I get angry because I kept using it to go to work, and it makes me furious to feel that we haven’t been able to communicate over such a simple subject like t-shirts, and then I’m furious because we’re arguing over such a stupid, stupid, stupid matter, and I don’t want to yell, so I speak through clenched teeth, which is something I do only when I’m really mad, and I’m mad tonight because everything is going wrong and I want to be home.
Eventually she calls me a stupid, and I call her a smart one, ironically, and this is when she throws my bra at me! It sounds funny, I now, but I am so shocked and I can’t believe it, and I have a vision of her stamping on my feet last year in London because I wanted her to respect the rules and stand behind the line as the policeman at Buckingham Palace had told us ten times already.How come I always make her so angry and push her to these reactions? What is wrong with me? I am so upset and when she goes to the bathroom to prepare for the night I enter the bed and pretend to sleep so we don’t have to argue anymore for tonight.
Everything has crumbled and all my tension is back, redoubled. And it’s only the second day.
On the third day I wake up because my mum’s mobile’s gone off. I hear her getting up and going to the bathroom, and that’s when I switch on my mobile to check the time: 7 o’clock.
I have a vision (yes, visions are my subject) of her asking me to take her to the airport and send her home, and then she’s out of the bathroom and I feel her looking at me to see if I’m still sleeping. I believe she touches my head or something, so I mutter “Where are you going?”, and she asks me the time.
It turns out that she didn’t know if I had set the alarm clock, last night, so she had set hers, only she hadn’t changed the time, so she was an hour early. We laugh in our beds and look out of the window where the clouds have gathered but there’s no apparent threat of rain. Maybe we can have a good day in Dublin, today.
And we do, eventually: first the National Gallery (actually, first there’s a picture to be taken to the statue of Oscar Wilde), then, since we’re not interested in the Castle and she doesn’t care about James Joyce, it’s shopping.
Shopping at Trinity College (where we discuss about the differences between our universities and English/Irish/American universities), then in and out the shops in Grafton Street and Nassau Street, looking for what we had in mind to buy in Ireland. The daily argument over where to eat is soon settled and we end up in an elegant place where I have my first (and only) Irish stew.
As we are sitting and waiting, I see two women, who soon become three, two on our left and one on my right: they are sitting and have just ordered, or received, their lunch.
And I realise that I’m looking at my future me. They are what I’ll become.
Alone, independent, with no close friends that would come on holiday with me, and no partner or husband, so here I am, eating a chicken sandwich and writing on a notebook or reading a book.
I am speechless, really, it is so clear and simple.
As the evening approached, Grafton street becomes larger, people are going for dinner or for a pint, we walk in St. Stephen’s Green park and to the georgian part of the city, then we sit on a bench with muffins and coffee, waiting for the time to go to the Gaiety theatre, because the big event of the day is Riverdance.
And Riverdance is great.
It is music, and dance, and people screaming and clapping and standing, and “bravo” floating in the air, the dancers are so great.
I love two bits in particular: the flamenco part, all orange, which mingles and explodes with the silver of the Irish dance, and the American tip tap vs Irish dance, when they dance-fight and each group tries the other’s dance, and we’re all laughing and applauding. It’s fantastic.
The last day begins with the sun shyly peering in our room.
We go to Malahide, which is more beautiful than we had expected, and we walk on the beach, in the sea, we take pictures, we go to the park and see the Castle, and walk endless miles around.
Back to the marina, we buy two mugs (no, not for me…this year I’m not into mugs that much, and it must be one of the reasons why I’m not entirely satisfied: I’ve always bought mugs or cups as a memory of the place, but this year I only got this cheesy green mug which is meant to look like a Celtic-medieval cup, and it’s got “Ireland” written around, and all in all it’s….ugly), so we buy two mugs and then have a fantastic lunch before going back to Dublin.
We think we’ll go see the Cathedral one more time and wander about, which we do, but then it begins to rain. Suddenly and heavily.
We rush back to our B&B and spend the rest of our Irish time there, packing and watching tv, reading and chatting: the forecast for tomorrow says rain over Ireland, but I don’t care – it’s Wales, tomorrow.
What were my words before leaving, ten days ago?
“To relax and…”.
Yeah, right.
I hope that writing things down will help me put them into the right perspective, and give the right importance to all that’s happened; however, and it’s a wrong thought to begin with, I doubt it will help me at all. But as record of my adventures, here’s the story.
Forget the flight: check-in is on time, we take off on time, we have a pleasant journey except for my natural uneasiness at the idea of going to a country I have visited only once before, and I am terrified that I will not understand their accent, they will not understand mine, and then we are not going to enjoy it because Dublin is not such a big city and three days would have been more than enough, and where are we going to eat since I promised my mum that she would eat fish every day, and fresh, and good.
When we land I’ve already cursed this idiotic holiday a thousand times and I can’t wait for it to be over and to go home.
Dublin is a shock.
After queuing for a taxi, we find one with an eerily silent driver, who drives like mad and enjoys stopping at less than an inch away from the car in front. My paranoid me, who respects the distances between cars even more after the accident (when I was bumped into!) is obviously happy when we reach a street with no traffic at all.
It is our street to be for the next five days.
But the house isn’t there.
Number 61 is not after number 59.
Actually, after number 59 there is…number 229.
Which doesn’t make sense, right? Even the driver is puzzled.
It takes me a lot of self-control and bell-ringing before I can find a house and a couple of kind strangers who answer the door in spite of the hour (it is almost 11 pm, after all), and explain the right way to our silent driver. So eventually we reach the house, and here’s the big secret: the street begins half-way, then ends at number 59, and if you want numbers 57 and 61, you must go back all the way to its beginning.
Rationality must not be into Irish DNA.
We have a first night of good sleep and I manage not to think about the coming day and the problems that we will encounter.
Which start as soon as we are out of the door: we cannot find neither a bus stop with indications to where it’s headed, nor somebody who knows anything about it. All car-drivers? Or don’t they ever go downtown? It hits me that there is an exceptional number of taxis, around the block, by the way…
A blond girl with headphones helps us in a super kind way, and a small gesture like this is beautiful for me, because I’m a tourist and I am not comfortable in a place where I don’t know anything. So, thanks, blond girl who told us the way to the bus stop, which is hidden in a street we would have never thought of.
Ok, one thing’s out.
Next, I get the amount wrong from the bus driver, who’s mumbling , so I understand 2.80 when it’s actually 2.70, and I’m told off by the driver “I told you so!”, he says, and all I can think is that it’s only 9 o’clock…
The rest of the day is a perfect comic picture of two average tourists swinging the map in any direction and looking at the corners of the streets trying to understand the way: neither of us has any sense of orientation, and I fall from grace right away when my mum, who’s never been here (vs I who have been here three days, ok, only three days five years ago, but surely I should remember better? Then again, geography is not exactly my subject) understands and directs us everywhere all day long.
(I must say that the miracle of “Navigator Mum” lasts for only three days, and on the last two I RULE! It takes me time, but once I get the idea of the streets nothing can stop me!)
Like perfect tourists we catch the hop-on hop-off bus and go around Dublin, then we visit Dublinia, the Cathedral, we stand in the middle of the street and we look the wrong way before crossing, we spend a fortune (not really, but it feels like it is) on shirts and silly badges at the tourist office.
And all the way I’m thinking: is this Dublin?
Somehow I don’t remember these streets, these bridges, Bachelors’ walk looks like a sordid cheap shopping street, I cannot find any market in Temple Bar where I was convinced there was one, the one where I had bought my Angela Carter five years ago, so I get more and more frustrated and sad.
The evening comes, and with a lot of effort I make our way to a famous pub/restaurant/hotel, where I went to watch Irish dancing, five years ago, on the advice of a museum guide on our second day here.
We enter.
And there’s a couple on stage.
Dancing.
Irish.
Music.
Tapping and moving like in my videos.
We stand and watch and I must hold back the tears as the tension releases.
We sit, I get a pint of Guinness, the dancers end their show and a couple of musicians begins to play beautiful songs, mostly Irish pop songs, and I sing along with them and the public and smile. They conclude with U2, “With or without you”, and all I think now is that yes, I’m in Dublin for real.
The day after we have booked a trip to Wicklow and Glendalough. All I know about these places is:
- they are vague names on the map, somewhere outside Dublin.
- There are lakes, a monastery, and some more Celtic stuff.
- There is some weaving mill which is the oldest on the country.
It turns out I don’t need to know more than this…
It is a rainy day, today.
I mean, it’s pouring with rain.
No, I mean that the streets are flooded with water, and we’ve soaked before the bus arrives to pick us up.
Us and another 50 noisy Italian tourists…August is vacation-month for 90% of Italy, so what did I expect?
After all it doesn’t really matter that it rains, since we spend almost five hours on the bus while a guide tells us about Irish history and all that; in the meantime the bus stops for thirty seconds so that we could take a picture of the Blessington lakes, if only the weather weren’t so awful that all I’m wishing is a cup of coffee, an armchair and a book. And my room in my house facing my garden and my mountains.
Mum is wearing sporty sandals and she’s wrapped her feet in tissues to keep warm, and I’m telling myself off for being such an idiot and forcing her to come with the promise that the weather would be good and she could even have worn her summer dress, and I know that she suffers this cold climate a lot more than I do, and that she should have been on some hot beach now, close to the sea and ready to swim in it any minute she felt like it, because she waits for the summer only to go and have swims in the lakes or in the sea, and where are we now? Freaking rainy Dublin, 10 degrees and pouring with rain. Where are my brains, all of a sudden?
When we stop in Glendalough and wander about in the Celtic cemetery (romantic, huh?), it’s raining as if the sky had decided to use up all the water of the world, and I get more and more depressed.
In Avoca we stop for lunch, and she eats a scone and coffee, which she enjoys, and I have a delicious soup, but I cannot stop repeating to myself mantra-like that the end of this holiday is nearer than I imagine, and then we will go to beautiful Wales which is usually decent at this time of the year.
I don’t know exactly what happens when we go back to Dublin, that evening: well, we go back to the pub of the night before, but we don’t like the group playing there, so we go home and everything explodes.
As usual, for a trivial matter.
My shirt is slightly stained on the back, and I’ve never noticed. Apparently she’s told me, but in such a way that I misunderstood, and so I get angry because I kept using it to go to work, and it makes me furious to feel that we haven’t been able to communicate over such a simple subject like t-shirts, and then I’m furious because we’re arguing over such a stupid, stupid, stupid matter, and I don’t want to yell, so I speak through clenched teeth, which is something I do only when I’m really mad, and I’m mad tonight because everything is going wrong and I want to be home.
Eventually she calls me a stupid, and I call her a smart one, ironically, and this is when she throws my bra at me! It sounds funny, I now, but I am so shocked and I can’t believe it, and I have a vision of her stamping on my feet last year in London because I wanted her to respect the rules and stand behind the line as the policeman at Buckingham Palace had told us ten times already.How come I always make her so angry and push her to these reactions? What is wrong with me? I am so upset and when she goes to the bathroom to prepare for the night I enter the bed and pretend to sleep so we don’t have to argue anymore for tonight.
Everything has crumbled and all my tension is back, redoubled. And it’s only the second day.
On the third day I wake up because my mum’s mobile’s gone off. I hear her getting up and going to the bathroom, and that’s when I switch on my mobile to check the time: 7 o’clock.
I have a vision (yes, visions are my subject) of her asking me to take her to the airport and send her home, and then she’s out of the bathroom and I feel her looking at me to see if I’m still sleeping. I believe she touches my head or something, so I mutter “Where are you going?”, and she asks me the time.
It turns out that she didn’t know if I had set the alarm clock, last night, so she had set hers, only she hadn’t changed the time, so she was an hour early. We laugh in our beds and look out of the window where the clouds have gathered but there’s no apparent threat of rain. Maybe we can have a good day in Dublin, today.
And we do, eventually: first the National Gallery (actually, first there’s a picture to be taken to the statue of Oscar Wilde), then, since we’re not interested in the Castle and she doesn’t care about James Joyce, it’s shopping.
Shopping at Trinity College (where we discuss about the differences between our universities and English/Irish/American universities), then in and out the shops in Grafton Street and Nassau Street, looking for what we had in mind to buy in Ireland. The daily argument over where to eat is soon settled and we end up in an elegant place where I have my first (and only) Irish stew.
As we are sitting and waiting, I see two women, who soon become three, two on our left and one on my right: they are sitting and have just ordered, or received, their lunch.
And I realise that I’m looking at my future me. They are what I’ll become.
Alone, independent, with no close friends that would come on holiday with me, and no partner or husband, so here I am, eating a chicken sandwich and writing on a notebook or reading a book.
I am speechless, really, it is so clear and simple.
As the evening approached, Grafton street becomes larger, people are going for dinner or for a pint, we walk in St. Stephen’s Green park and to the georgian part of the city, then we sit on a bench with muffins and coffee, waiting for the time to go to the Gaiety theatre, because the big event of the day is Riverdance.
And Riverdance is great.
It is music, and dance, and people screaming and clapping and standing, and “bravo” floating in the air, the dancers are so great.
I love two bits in particular: the flamenco part, all orange, which mingles and explodes with the silver of the Irish dance, and the American tip tap vs Irish dance, when they dance-fight and each group tries the other’s dance, and we’re all laughing and applauding. It’s fantastic.
The last day begins with the sun shyly peering in our room.
We go to Malahide, which is more beautiful than we had expected, and we walk on the beach, in the sea, we take pictures, we go to the park and see the Castle, and walk endless miles around.
Back to the marina, we buy two mugs (no, not for me…this year I’m not into mugs that much, and it must be one of the reasons why I’m not entirely satisfied: I’ve always bought mugs or cups as a memory of the place, but this year I only got this cheesy green mug which is meant to look like a Celtic-medieval cup, and it’s got “Ireland” written around, and all in all it’s….ugly), so we buy two mugs and then have a fantastic lunch before going back to Dublin.
We think we’ll go see the Cathedral one more time and wander about, which we do, but then it begins to rain. Suddenly and heavily.
We rush back to our B&B and spend the rest of our Irish time there, packing and watching tv, reading and chatting: the forecast for tomorrow says rain over Ireland, but I don’t care – it’s Wales, tomorrow.
posted by Peggy @ 11:35 AM
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