Ireland

I just got back yesterday from my unforgettable trip to Ireland.  It's taken me until today to begin composing this blog post because I fell so much in love with Ireland that I'm having trouble finding the words that will be eloquent enough to describe the experience of being in such a beautiful place.  But here I offer my attempt.

Nadine and I left very early Sunday morning and took a taxi to the airport in Birmingham.  We flew a cheap, absolutely no-frills airline called Ryan Air.  (Nigel said they charge you to breathe.)  I wouldn't recommend this unless one is going somewhere for a weekend or is a kid who can live out of a backpack.  You can only have one small carry-on that has to pass the "cage test" of fitting into a small cage at the check-in counters.  Mine didn't fit (as much as I tried cramming it in) and had to be checked, and Nadine had her big suitcase since she wasn't coming back to my house before returning to Colorado, so I think for us it turned out just about as expensive as a "regular" airline.  Lesson learned.  But it did only take about 45 minutes before we had crossed the Irish Sea and landed in Dublin.

We checked in to our b&b which was a quaint and charming Victorian row house right near city center.  We wanted to be where we could just go out the front door and walk around the city, and as soon as we deposited our bags in our room, that's just what we did. 



The Liffey River

  The Liffey River divides the town into the south side and the north side.  It didn't take long for us to discover that there is an observable difference between the two sides of Dublin.  On the south side of the river are high-end stores, beautiful parks such as St. Stephen's Green, the famous Temple Bar area, lovely restaurants, charming pubs, expensive flats, street musicians, bustling tourists and people with money.  The north side, though also charming and interesting, is the gritty opposite of the south side.  Among the hard-working people hurrying to their jobs or whatever, homeless people live on the streets, beggars beg, hustlers hustle, drunks stumble about, young people engage in loud public arguing and you're always warned to "mind your handbags".  But the north side is also known for its famous writers the likes of James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Jonathan Swift, and Oscar Wilde.  I suppose the gritty side of life can be more inspiring for a writer to explore.  This is the side of the Liffey where we lived.  After one night in our hotel we asked to be moved to the other side of the building because the noises of buses passing every three minutes and intoxicated people hanging out on the sidewalk below made sleeping a challenge.  The friendly people working at the hotel accommodated us and our subsequent nights were quiet.  Don't get me wrong--we felt pretty safe on this side of the river.  We just saw a different side of Dublin life there, and observing differences is fascinating.  Nadine and I also found lots of humor in our situation.

As we made our way to touristy Temple Bar to check out the very expensive shops and pubs, we noticed the sea of green and yellow all around us.  The sidewalks were flooded with people wearing green-and-yellow athletic jerseys with some Gaelic words on them.  We learned that there was a semi-championship game of Gaelic football in town (don't call it soccer or football--Gaelic football is completely different) between the two rival Ciarrai (Kerry) and Maigh Eo (Mayo) teams.  Nadine and I were curious so we decided to try to get tickets and see what this game was all about.  When in Ireland,



Ciarrai fans

 after all!  After a lunch of Irish fish and chips (very different from English fish and chips because they fry up the whole fish, skin and all), we followed rowdy groups of green-and-yellow shirts up to the stadium and discovered looooong lines of people at the box office.  We decided not to wait.  But we did keep our eye on the score whenever we passed by a pub that was showing the game on telly--which was everywhere!  Ciarrai won.  Nadine was thrilled.



It's always Guinness time in Dublin!

 The next day we took a hop-on-hop-off double-decker narrated bus tour.  We saw all the sites of the city and learned a lot about Dublin's fascinating history.  These tours are a great, inexpensive way to get around an unfamiliar city where you can hop off at any of the sites you're interested in going to.  A couple of the places we hopped off at were Dublin Castle and the Guinness Storehouse (which absolutely everyone highly recommended).  We thought we would be touring the actual brewery which would have been really interesting, but that was not the case.  The brewery is in an old building across the street from the Guinness Storehouse which is really kind of a museum erected to honor Guinness.  It's huge and interesting and features an amazing 360-degree view of the city from the top of the building where I learned, by the way, that there is an actual little ritual and protocol to drinking a glass of Guinness.  The Guinness Storehouse is basically just a big money-making advertisement for Guinness. It was a so-so experience.  Though the Irish economy is in serious trouble, capitalism is alive and thriving at Guinness!  We liked the gift shop.

Later that afternoon we spent a very pleasant hour or so in St. Stephen's Green, the most beautiful city park I have ever seen.  We walked around the whole park, marveling at gardens and trees and ponds, and then sat on a bench and people-watched as the sun rained down its dappled light.  What a great way to get a picture of a tiny bit of Dublin life.  On the way home we passed house after house all with pretty little gardens.  Even in the shabbiest of houses or buildings, if there was a square foot of earth in front of it, there was a garden, and almost every window was adorned with window boxes of flowers dripping with floral color.  The Irish and British love their gardens.  Maybe it's my Irish/English/Scottish heritage that explains my love of gardens and gardening.  We stopped in Temple Bar and shared a dinner of a boxty and salad.  A boxty is a potato pancake filled with stuff (ours was chicken and mushrooms).  Yum!!

We wanted to see more of Ireland besides just Dublin, so we booked a two-day bus tour for Tuesday and Wednesday.  Unbeknownst to us, the company we booked through was a very popular one in Ireland that caters to a lot of young travelers who stay in hostels along their way.  So, there was a nice mix of ages on the bus, (though mostly young), and I found myself admiring the adventurousness of the young "hostelers".  (I was actually grateful that it wasn't one of those geezer bus tours!)  We had three different tour guides (drivers), and one of them made the long drive so much fun.  Besides educating us with facts, history, and legends of the places we were seeing, he told stories and sang off-color Irish folk songs--all in that wonderful Irish brogue.

Every postcard, painting, film, photograph we've all seen about the Irish countryside is an accurate depiction . . . but none of it can ever do it justice.  Only being there can.  It is that splendid.  Rolling hills in variegated hues of green dotted with sheep and cattle, multicolored patchwork sections of farm land separated by hedgerows, ancient stone churches and thatch-roofed country houses--all iconic Irish realities.  Pastoral, peaceful, idyllic.  And we were lucky enough to get to absorb it all so that it will always live in our mind's eye.

We also saw many, many long, low stone fences that snake through the landscape and seem to serve no purpose.  We learned that they were "famine fences".  The fences were built by thousands of Irish men and women during the potato famine of the 19th century when it is said that around a million Irish people died of hunger.  The fences that literally go nowhere were part of some work relief projects.  Suffice it to say that those fences are the haunting evidence left over from a sad Irish history.

We traveled around to the west coast where the Irish landscape meets the North Atlantic Ocean.  The narrow country lanes that our bus driver skillfully negotiated seemed incredibly impossible.  But they sure were pretty.  When we finally glimpsed the sea, my heart skipped a beat as it always does when I near the ocean . . . that's how much I love it.  Galway Bay is a quaint, romantic sight with still waters reflecting the blue Irish sky.  After a lunch stop there, we winded our way to the breathtaking Cliffs of Moher where we walked up a path and stood high above the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean.  The awe inspiring cliffs that rise out of the sea to heights of 390 feet to 702 feet are reportedly vying for the position of Eighth Wonder of the World.  I don't know who makes these decisions, but the Cliffs of Moher has my vote!  And what put the experience over the top was a girl sitting at the top of the path playing an Irish accordion.  Heavenly! 




The beautiful Cliffs of Moher

As we made our way to our hotel destination, we passed through the city of Trylee where they were having a huge competition called "The Rose of Trylee" which, evidently, had every single person in Ireland wildly enthralled.  The competition was an international beauty pageant in which girls of Irish descent from all over the world competed.  They were called "roses" (like the Sydney rose and the New York rose, etc.).  An Aussie won the competition.  Our bus driver was surprised that we had never heard of this very famous phenomonon.  Was it just us??

We spent that night in the sweetest, most picturesque little village of Annascaul.  We stayed in a thatched-roofed b&b.  (Some of the young ones stayed in the hostel next door.)  After dinner Nadine and I took a walk through the cozy little town even though it was raining and getting dark, the smell of wood smoke from fireplaces scenting the chilly night air.  It reminded me of the Oregon beach towns I loved as a teenager.  I was ready to move there straight away.  Sigh.

Wednesday morning, after chatting with fellow travelers from Australia, South Africa, New York, South America and Italy over a traditional Irish breakfast, we set off for Kilarney where we stopped and got to explore for about an hour or so.  Then it was on to the village of Blarney near the city of Cork to find Blarney Castle where we would kiss the Blarney Stone.  Blarney Castle is a medieval ruin that rises something like 90 feet above beautiful gardens and verdant countryside, a fairytale setting.  There is a whole legend about the Blarney Stone, but basically it is said that if you kiss the stone, you will be rewarded with the gift of gab.  To reach the Blarney Stone, you must climb 127 narrow old stone steps that spiral up to the top of the battlements.  The Blarney Stone is underneath one of the battlements, and to kiss it, you need to lie on your back, reach your arms over your head to hold on to two posts while a man is holding your legs, then scooch up closer to the battlement wall, lean your neck back to position your head underneath the Blarney Stone (with nothing but air between your head and the ground 90 feet below you), and kiss it.  I am proud to say that after much self-talk and contemplation, I did conquer my fear of heights and climbed up to the top.  I was terrified.  That was a huge accomplishment for someone who is as scared of heights as I am, but I did it!   I got as far as actually lieing down to scooch underneath the stone . . . but that's as far as it went.  There was no more scooching for me, and my lips did not make contact with that stone.  However, my friend Nadine did it!  She's gutsy, whereas I could not get the picture of me falling to my medieval death out of my head.  But I'm good with what I did accomplish.  Maybe next time I go to Ireland I'll actually kiss the Blarney Stone.  But probably not.

On our way back to Dublin we stopped at a couple of other Celtic ruins.  Though the ancient stone castle and monestary were amazing to behold, my eyes were drawn to the quiet pastoral surroundings haloed by the most vibrant rainbow I had ever seen.  How iconically Irish is that!  I just knew there was a pot of gold at the bottom of that rainbow.

On Thursday we took another tour south of Dublin through the magficant Wicklow Mountains to Glendalough (valley of two lakes).  We had a couple of hours to hike through beautiful Glendalough, passing through an old grave yard and monastic ruins in search of the two lakes.  We found one of the lakes, obscurred by thick fern growth and eerily beautiful woods.  It started to rain as we turned off to a woodsy path that Nadine was sure led to the second lake.  As we hiked the path, it started getting very steep and narrow with exposed tree roots and slippery rocks.  It was what I called a goat path, and as my fear of heights began once again rearing its ugly head, I tried persuading my fearless friend that this was not the correct way to the second lake.  But she was resolved that it was . . . until she saw the barbed wire fence ahead and decided that maybe it wasn't.  We made our way back down the goat path and determined that we needed to head back to the bus because there was no time to find the other lake.  Another thing to go back to when I return to Ireland.

The views along the way to the medieval town of Kilkenny were stunning.  The hilly landscape was flooded with the purples and yellows of wild flowers that grew in effortless abundance.  The low-growing purple flowers I liked to imagine were heather, like in Wuthering Heights.  It probably wasn't heather, but I liked thinking that it was.  And still there were the sheep and cattle.  I couldn't believe my eyes when we passed by a couple of cows that were sitting upright on their haunches like dogs!  A very strange and funny sight!  We also noticed large patches of coniferous orchards that we learned were planted by Norwegian companies who contracted with Ireland to plant their pine trees in the rich acidic soil of Ireland and then harvest them.  The agreement between Norway and Ireland is that for every ten pine trees planted, the Norwegians need to plant one oak tree to reforest Ireland's depleted oak forests.

We had a couple of hours to spend in Kilkenny.  That was cruel because we wanted more.  After we went shopping for a while I asked a lady passing by if she could recommend a place for lunch.  (You know it's always good to go where the locals go.)  She was so nice and actually walked us to where there was a tiny tea room downstairs from a pub.  It was warm and cozy with marble table tops that we found out was black Connemara marble that used to be mined in the area.  (Kilkenny is nicknamed the "Marble City".)  We chatted with the lady who sat at the table next to us who made us feel welcome.  We both fell in love with friendly, charming Kilkenny. 

When we got back to Dublin we packed up for our flight back to England the next day. Then we went to see a Noel Coward play at the theatre right across the street from our hotel.  Neither one of us had ever heard of the play called Hay Fever which is a farce that pokes fun at the old-moneyed establishment of the 1930's. We were tired, but we thought it was such a lovely novelty to see live theatre in Dublin!

We still had most of Friday to do some more exploring before we had to leave.  We decided to once again get out of the city, and we took a train south up the Dublin coast and got off in the upscale area of Killiney where Bono and Enya live.  We asked a nice couple who were taking a walk where the town was, and they told us there really wasn't one--(only astoundingly spendy homes)--and they suggested the next town over called Dalkey which we could either take the train to or walk to.  Even though we were short on time, we couldn't resist the urge to take a beautiful coastal walk to Daulkey.  It took almost an hour and was mostly an uphill climb, but passing by the palacial Italian villa-style homes snuggled up in unimaginably lush gardens and woods and backdropped by the Irish Sea was well worth the time.  As we found throughout Ireland, the people we passed were so friendly, uttering "Good morning, girls" and "Lovely morning, isn't it?"  An older gentleman walking his grandchild in a stroller talked with us as we walked along with him up the steep street past Bono's front gate.  He pointed out Enya's castle on a hill above and told us how reclusive she has become.  He turned into his daughter's magnificant estate, wishing us a fine day, and we continued on to Dalkey where we had a nice lunch and then caught the train back to Dublin.

We collected our luggage at our hotel and headed for the airport.  We boarded our Ryan Air plane (virutally a flying pub) and found out that the man sitting next to us was a construction contractor who framed the new construction on Bono's house!  Being the typical friendly Irishman, he bought drinks for Nadine and me (a water for her and diet Pepsi for me) when he found out we were all out of euros. Then he told us that actually, all airlines will take any kind of money during in-flight service.  Whether that was true or not, it was nice of him to treat us.

Our trip to Ireland was just an unforgettable experience.  We crammed everything we could into our five days.  I am sure that I will go back while I am in England.  And I might even fly Ryan Air again since it probably would only be for a weekend once school begins.  But I know I will go back to the Emerald Isle.