Ireland This Week

This is a long one, so read at your own risk. Also note that Amy was in Poland during part of this, and her post is included on the blog below as well. You’ll want to be sure and check out the pictures from her trip there, too.

The last week has gone by in a flash. Where to begin…Has anyone ever heard of Service Merchandise? For any of you who know what I’m talking about, it seems that in Ireland a company similar to Service Merchandise is one of the only fast means of procuring electrical products such as alarm clocks and extension cords. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Service Merchandise, it is a store where you go in and peek through a catalog of what they have to offer. In this similar store in Dublin called Argos, you pick your item, determine if it has the features you want (which is usually somewhat unclear in the catalog) write down the catalog item number, take it up to a cashier at a desk to pay for it, then someone from out back brings your item up, stamps your receipt, and you leave. It’s weird though. As in my previous post, the consensus here on accessibility to goods and services is very different from the US. You wait, and they take their sweet time. The motto of “the customer is always right” apparently hasn’t reached these distant shores.

For example, they do not build several stores of the same kind in close proximity to each other inside the city. In other words, there is a grocery store in one area of town. There is a clothing store in another part of town. There are small convenient stores and pharmacies at regular intervals all over town, but these are the exception. And of course, there would never be three Starbucks at the same intersection, as they don’t even have ONE in the entire city. Coffee drinkers beware before coming to visit. Bring your own grind if you come to stay and must have your daily coffee fix. You’ll have a hard time finding it here.

In the first few days here I had walked like 11,000 miles to get all the stuff I needed because we don’t have a car, and the cabs are expensive. There are benefits though! All this walking is wiping out the extra weight I might be gaining otherwise. Plus, it’s a really cool way to get to know a city. I grew up in a small town, and by the time I was 13 or so, I had covered every square inch of it on the seat of a bicycle, and so I remember the streets of my home town with crystal clarity. So walking such long distances in Dublin is actually pretty cool too. I don’t know the statistics on this, but many people here don’t even own cars, as is true in many other larger cities. Public transportation here is actually pretty good considering the size of the city. Seattle, for example, pales in comparison (although I will give them credit for the bus system, which works adequately most of the time). For a fairly monetarily poor country, the Irish are way ahead in this area compared to many of the vastly larger cities of the U.S.

It seems that most places of business are not REALLY in the business of making money, the same way companies in the U.S. are. The vast majority of stores and businesses close shortly after 5pm. THEN, the pubs open. The American in me gets a little frustrated that I can’t go to get whatever I need whenever I need it. So, I am forced to prioritize my time in a completely different way. Amy and I were discussing the fact that for the average working adult, it would be difficult to get all the normal errands of life done because the stores would be closing just as you are leaving work. Which then means that you would have to wait until the weekend to do all of those things, but if you do other things on the weekend like sports or travel, you would really have to save a large amount of time each weekend to get the rest of these things done. Fortunately for us, my wife is rich and so I don’t have to work, allowing me to get all those things done during the weekdays.

Now for our exploits during the last 8 days: Last weekend, Amy and I went with several other people to visit Kilmainham Gaol (Jail). This was a jail also built several hundred years ago. It held somewhere between 250 and 2000 prisoners depending on what year it was. When crops were down and hunger or war were up, there were many more prisoners to be found. This jail held several of Ireland’s famed rebels who fought against English rule during the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. Depending on the population of the jail, there might be as many as 11 prisoners occupying each 8 by 8 foot cell. They showed us the chapel, and the “exercise yard” (which was a small stretch of gravel in a walled area this size of a racquetball court. The prisoners were allowed to walk around this area. For most of the time this prison was used, when inside the prison, the prisoners were to be silent at all times. There were strict penalties for disobedience. There were also many executions on site, most of which were achieved by the use of a firing squad. There is now a small cross in this area of the jail to signify the loss of so many lives on that very spot.

Last Monday morning, I decided I wanted to go someplace during the day and my traveling companion Joy was hanging out with some other friends that were in visiting her and her husband from Seattle. So I went by myself up to visit a small town 20 minutes northeast of Dublin. I hopped on an electric train that runs all over the place. As the countryside flew past, I found myself wondering what it would be like to ride one of these to work everyday. A few minutes later I got off and walked into a small town called Howth (pronounced Hoath). It is a small town which derives its income mostly from the fishing trade and from tourism. I got to walk out onto a tall sea-wall that protects the harbor from any large waves. Howth is on the east coast of Ireland just across the harbor from Dublin, which both, of course, face toward England. I also happened to stumble in behind some other tourists who were walking the streets that day. I was in search of the remains of one of Ireland’s many castles, but my map wasn’t very good and I never found it. However, in trailing these other more savvy tourists, I found myself on a road that ended in a trail at the far end of town out towards the water. It was a fairly slow, steady climb around away from the town and up into some hillcountry. I was climbing and the water to my left was getting farther and farther below me. There were some fantastic homes below to my left as well built into the hillside. As I wound further out away from Howth, the cliffs also got taller and taller. The weather was amazing and there many kinds of birds flying around above the water. After about two hours, I had covered about 4.5 miles and came around the back side of the hill above the town and arrived back in town from the other end. I got on my train and came back home.

The middle of the week, the weather turned more rainy, and much like Seattle, it wasn’t a good soaking rain, but more of a light mist that lasts all day. I didn’t do much else during the week, but Friday I went with Joy and her husband Chad and their friends (Chad works with Amy at PWC and is also from Seattle. They live in Burien.) again heading north of Dublin. After another brief train ride, we detrained in Malahide which is the site of Malahide Castle. It is an old castle built in the late 1100’s. It is on an absolutely ENORMOUS (250 acres, to be exact) plot of land which must take a full grounds-crew 24 hours a day to maintain. It was gorgeous. There were huge rugby and soccer (they call it Football here) fields, picnic areas, grassy meadows, shrubs and rows of trees everywhere – all soaked in a light mist of fresh rain. The breeze was cool and wet and everything smelled of fresh-cut grass. It smelled and felt fantastic. We decided not to actually tour the castle because we were somewhat short on time, but the outside of the castle was a site on its own.

Friday night, Amy and I again went out with Chad and Joy and and their guests on a “Pub-Crawl”. You pay a small fee for the tour and are assigned two tour guides, who are also local musicians. You start at one pub, walk to another, and then one more. While stopping at each pub, the “crawlers” may purchase a pint of beer, cider, or other beverage while the tour guides perform different kinds of music with a small variety of traditional instrument (not bagpipes, those are originally Scottish) and talk about the history of the Irish musical tradition. There are two or three other types of “crawls” that include a Ghost crawl, a history crawl, and a literary crawl. It was a lot of fun and the musicians were very talented. At one point they invited anyone from the audience who wanted to come and sing or play to come forward, “give up their coolness for a bit”, and give their gift of music to the rest of us, as is part of the original Irish way of passing down and passing around music from village to village. A couple of brave souls from the audience took them up on the opportunity. Pretty cool. Until the last 70 years, the world had only this one way to give the gift of music to their progeny and it is sad that this tradition is now all but lost.

Then, this last Saturday morning, Amy and I went and played golf. We played a course just on the outskirts of Dublin. It was a chilly morning and the grass was soaked, as were our shoes by the end of the first couple of holes. The course was very well kept and we both had a very good round of golf. Amy was really playing well. She has never hit the ball as hard, far, or accurately as she did then. It was really fun. Neither of us are expert golfers and Amy ended the round with quite a few quadruple bogies, but it was great fun nonetheless. As soon as we wrapped that up, we got back into our little black Hyundai rental car and headed out west. We drove all the way across the country of Ireland in 4 ½ hours. If you think that is impressive, consider the fact that the speed limit was only around 60mph, we were on small two lane roads in pretty bad traffic, and went through about a dozen small towns. If Ireland had a major 4-lane highway running east to west, one could probably cross the country without traffic in about 2 ½ hours. We went to visit the city of Galway, which is Ireland’s second biggest city of only about 80,000 (Dublin only has about 1.5 million).

We arrived in Galway at around 7pm Saturday night and found a Bed & Breakfast for 30 Euros each (about $75) and unloaded our gear. We walked about half a mile back into the city center in search of some dinner. Galway also has a Street Mall much like the Grafton Street Mall here in Dublin although not as nice and containing many more pubs and junk shops. We did manage to find a restaurant and much to our surprise, the food was fairly cheap compared to what we have been paying elsewhere and was VERY good. Sunday morning we took a bus tour and drove all around western Ireland’s excellent countryside. It was actually very much like you might have seen in the movies – rolling hillsides covered in tall grass populated only by rough stacked-stone fences, sheep, horses, and cattle. We drove up and up through a limestone hill country to the Cliffs of Moher. I can only come up with one word: in-freeking-credible. It was one of the most amazing vistas I have ever come across. I hope the pictures do it justice. We also were able to visit a set of small caves that were carved out by a river running down through the mountain for what the guide told us must have been the last several million years at least. We saw some other older, ruined castles along our route, several old cemeteries and abbies, and had a really good lunch in a tiny hill-town.
I have to add a side note here. We were on a tour bus with approximately 45 other people, so it was a large size bus with big mirrors that stick out fairly far to give a good view for the driver. I only add these details because we were on the absolute skinniest roads you could imagine. If two Suburbans had to pass side-by-side they would probably get stuck, nevermind a HUGE tour bus. What makes the roads so skinny is that they are hemmed in by really old stone fences overgrown with grass on either side of the road and the pavement literally extends to the bottom edge of the fences on both sides. At one point during an extremely harrowing pass of another bus in which the two enormous buses were literally less than three inches apart I said to the driver, “I sure do hope they pay you well.” He laughed and replied in his Irish accent, “They don’t pay half as much as they ought and as my grey hair deserves!” We ended the tour, got back in our car, and drove leisurely back to Dublin last night. By the way, we had great weather all day long, which the bus driver says is extremely rare where we went even in the midst of summer. All in all it was an excellent week and the upcoming one will be just as good. Until next week, I bid you all farewell.