Fáilte Annex, Part VI

(A whole month in Paris and I didn’t max out my camera’s memory card. One week in Ireland and I have to upload it all to Snapfish for safekeeping so that I can purge the card and start over.)

May 17, 2011

Dublin feels like a much larger city than it is. Even after the economic crash it is at every moment visibly, audibly international, and the bustle is Manhattan-scale. Today large swaths of it were an armed camp.

I knew Her Royal Dowdiness was coming; who could not, with The Visit occupying the news for days, now. The Irish Times had informed us before I left Limerick that the public would not be allowed anywhere near the Queeene at any time. Yesterday, trying to get into Trinity College, mainly to visit the Page of Kells (as it is drily known, since that’s the extent of the Book available for viewing), I discovered it had been closed to the public Sunday, not to re-open until tomorrow, Wednesday. Manhole covers were being sealed, my cab driver had told me. There were beginning to be an awful lot of Garda everywhere (their day-glo chartreuse jackets being a dead giveaway, though of course everyone realizes those are only the uniformed ones).

I stopped in a shop for a sandwich, then, and proceeded to the National Gallery. Which has a really impressive collection, Goya to Vermeer to Picasso—but of course the one I was most looking forward to was the lost (and re-found) Caravaggio, “The Taking of Christ.” And it did not disappoint. Just as the Mona Lisa transcends the very best color photographs of it, this painting actually before you is breathtaking: so much color and light and power and emotion wedged so tightly into one small space.

But what is a trip without getting lost, losing all sense of direction (the sun wouldn’t stay out long enough—or at all, yesterday—to help with a sense of direction. The light seems to be from everywhere, hazy and diffuse, lingering until well after 9:30 P.M.)? Walking through St. Stephen’s Green in the opposite direction from that you think you’re going helps. Eventually I made it past Grafton Street, past Temple Bar, to Christ Church Cathedral, and past that to St. Audoen’s (“the only surviving medieval parish church still in use in Dublin,” named for the patron saint of Normandy), though by that time it was closed. There’s a beautiful little garden beside it, also inside the fence. By then, what all that country walking hadn’t done, a few hours’ pounding of city pavement had, and I was really ready to call it a day.

Today I got up planning to try to avoid the royal hoopla as much as humanly possible. Had a full breakfast in the hotel, trying also to atone to my body for near-fasting yesterday, as it turned out. I walked up O’Connell Street, already fully blocked off to vehicles and eerily quiet, pedestrians still allowed, but corralled by metal barricades into crossing it only at certain points. There were literally hundreds of Gardai out, massed in their chartreuse everywhere, eyeing every one of us suspiciously as we passed—particularly when I stopped to shoot a number of photos of the Easter Rising headquarters, the General Post Office, which they were blocking as much as possible. They lined the barricades, but there were plenty of them to form random clumps in various places as well.

I gradually left most of them behind when I walked east along the river toward the Customs House, where the “Famine” group of sculptures is located. Someone had laid bouquets of flowers at the feet of the haunting, emaciated figures. I crossed the Liffey and found the “Linesman” sculpture, too. As long as I had come that far, I tried—I really did—to find the statue of Patrick Kavanaugh beside the Grand Canal. With a woman’s assistance and a great deal more walking, I made it to the canal, but then I had still before me a bewildering amount of potential. I finally decided I needed that energy for the National Museum and the rest of the day (including making it back to base), so I abandoned the hunt.

And the National Museum (just the history and archaeology site; decorative arts are in another location entirely) was a high point of Dublin. I passed on ancient Cyprus and Egypt in favor of in-depth study of Ireland’s past. Whether wood or metal or stone or gold—or human remains found in bogs—it was thrilling (including the actual small, beautifully carved mace head—carved of brittle, flaky flint—found at Knowth, and only pictured there), Neolithic through medieval. Watching the locations of the finds, it was evident that the art, the technology, the social system were island-wide, for the finds ranged from the Giant’s Causeway on the north coast to Cork in the south, from Galway to Kildare. All the while I was fascinated by the elaborately beautiful old building itself, opened in 1890, its scrolled metal roof supports, ornate iron columns, and mosaic floors peeping around state-of-the-art exhibition set-ups.

Heading home, wanting to get off my feet, managing a few shots of the “Molly Malone” sculpture at the beginning of Grafton Street (having to have permission from the Garda to step behind the barricade to do so), I asked the policeman if it were possible to get to O’Connell Bridge, since that would have been my preferred way. He said yes, to go one street over. Well . . .

Yes. It was possible to get to O’Connell. It was even possible to inch one’s way across it, squeezing through a rapidly packing crowd. Unlike the Ha’penny Bridge, to which access was blocked completely. But when one reached the other end of the bridge, it was not possible to cross the street there, Bachelor’s Walk. My hotel was right there, half a block away, and I could not get there. I’d seen the motorcade making its way down that very street from the other side before I’d crossed the bridge, then turning to go up O’Connell Street to the Garden of Remembrance. The police told us they’d be able to let us through in “twenty to twenty-five minutes.” After about twenty minutes, the motorcade in fact came back down O’Connell, passing across the bridge in the opposite lane, the poor dim old thing waving her little robot wave, apparently under the impression we were all there willingly. Pity she couldn’t hear what was actually being said. One woman was relaying cellphone updates from her sister, who was watching “on telly.” Over an hour and a half later, the Garda was still keeping hundreds of increasingly irritated, disgusted, angry people behind the barricades for no comprehensible reason. Mutterings had become shouts, vulgarity, and open derision. One tiny old lady with a shopping bag was permitted through for some reason, and hobbled off up the street. “It’s the Queen!” a man shouted. One angry Irishman shouted it was all a load of bollocks, and called the policeman directly in front of us (who seemed to be barely keeping his tongue, as well; several policemen were seen to be rolling their eyes at the stupidity; at least they were being paid to be standing out there) a wanker. “Are we Irishmen or what?” he yelled. “Nick me if you like; you know I’m only telling the truth.” No one contradicted him; in fact quite a few of us agreed. One large group of police squeezed through the crowd across the street, heading in the direction of where chanting had broken out. I asked (only slightly rhetorically), “while they’re off beating them up, can’t you let us through?”

The royal pain had by this time visited Trinity College, left, and, along with her vast entourage, driven up the opposite bank of the Liffey, behind us, and we were STILL not being allowed to cross. Hundreds of us (“hundreds were out on the street today!” as one man sarcastically predicted the evening news). The one policeman before us (the wanker) agreed we had been very patient; he was obviously very frustrated and also thought it was ridiculous, but was waiting for orders. (No more ridiculous, mind you, than that—AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER—the snipers were still on roofs along O’Connell, including the—one would think—sacred ground of the Post Office, and that a helicopter was still hovering above us, when the woman was long gone.) There were men beside me from Liverpool, in town for soccer; they were disgusted. The Irish were venting about the 30 million euros spent on security for The Visit. One American, yours truly, lost quite a lot of already tenuous patience with a useless, expensive anachronism. When, finally, the Garda began moving barricades aside, the only cheer of the day went up.

Fáilte Annex, Part V

Sunday, May 15, 2011

What to tell? It’s been a very relaxing twenty-four hours at friends’, with no timetable or much of an agenda, no particular responsibility for a change. Which has certainly been a welcome relief after the preceding night, the most wretched I have ever spent in any hotel anywhere. In the aftermath the hotel was very apologetic and cancelled all charges for the night; during the night itself sleep was pretty much out of the question, what with a large group of VERY LOUD people (mostly drunken men) partying at the top of their lungs—seriously, literally: yelling, laughing, singing—in the corridors from about 3:00 A.M. to just before 7:00, no one on duty at the hotel desk, and even the police unwilling to come unless the hotel itself requested assistance. I know; it sounds unbelievable to me, now, too.

But a train (two, technically, since most Limerick trains have to change at Limerick Junction), a cab, and another, commuter train later, I was in Leixlip, settled in, and walking into town along the River Rye for lunch. Before crashing for a truly marathon sleep.

Today was a long-awaited visit to Newgrange, including a tour of Knowth, another of the three major sites in the Brú na Bóinne complex, or area, at any rate (clustered near the River Boyne on high, windblasted hills with spectacular 360º panoramas of the surrounding countryside). Both are, simply put, amazing. Knowth seems more complex, more intricate, with numerous smaller burial mounds around the large one, and it had a long and evolving history of use. Precious Neolithic art and objects found there are now in Dublin museums. Inside the admittedly rather claustrophobic (if you have such tendencies) interior of the huge Newgrange mound (still open, towering, and breathable compared to the narrow, narrow passageway that gets you there), the guide points out that although it seems a small space, it’s huge by passage tomb standards. A cathedral among passage tombs (she didn’t say that; I did). Then she points out that the massive, interlocking dome over our heads, tons upon tons of stone, is simply a layered, balanced structure, completely without any sort of mortar or external bracing, that after more than 5,000 years still does not even leak. “Primitive,” brilliant engineers. It took my breath away. Then she turns off the modern electrical lighting, plunging us into total darkness, until another light demonstrates how the rising sun, for seventeen minutes, would illuminate the interior from the entrance on the winter solstice.

Fáilte Annex, Part IV

Friday, May 13, 2011

Having walked over to the White House pub, not far from me, because it allegedly has poetry readings and live music, neither of which it apparently was offering tonight, I will therefore direct my wine-induced (enhanced, really, because exhaustion does a rather good job on its own) stupor to recording.

: D A left-driving virgin no more! I’m taking great pleasure in the knowledge that untold synapses were activated today. I haven’t been as scared of anything in a long time. Trip to stones and Celtic sites aside, I know that I DID accomplish a trip far—far—outside my comfort zone. Motorway, city, rural roads, country lanes: I’ve done them all. Decades of massive amounts of driving kick in (though it had also been over two years since I’d driven a stickshift at all). But then everything (bear with me if you live in the U.K., Ireland, or Japan) is reversed for a U.S. driver, not just the lanes. The stick itself; the way you go around roundabouts; and there are recurring waves of oh, my god, I’m on the wrong side of the road! Or else that sensation that it must be a multiple-lane highway and I need to be looking over my shoulder. Well, I do, but not that shoulder. Because the left lane is the slow lane (reversed, right?). A certain amount of swearing, shouting, and screaming did occur (some things are best learned alone). I had problems with third; it was rarely where it needed to be (this was a Fiat, mind you). One roundabout (early on, in Limerick) may have been circled twice because of missing the right exit the first time. The N20 became the M20 and appeared to be taking me to Tralee and Killarney (despite my having jettisoned them for lack of time before coming to Ireland), though shortly after I exited to try to correct that “mistake,” there was the turnoff to Croom. And then the country fun began.

I admire all over again the audacity of Gaël Audic’s country driving in 2008; I get as far over on a tiny lane as possible, then freeze in place like a rabbit, letting the oncoming driver figure out the rest (though this evolved slightly during the course of the outing). Without the decades of conditioning in the “other” version of driving, it’s hard to distinguish exactly where the opposite edge of your own vehicle is, especially while moving, especially along a high stone wall.

Lough Gur is gorgeous, in and of itself. The whole surrounding countryside is. The visitor center, for me, sat there uselessly locked up. I walked and walked and walked (yes; I’ve had about enough walking for a while; I’m glad I’ll be taking a train early tomorrow). And climbed. And sort of skidded in mud (because the weather came in full rotation, of course, from brief downpour to warm sun, and always with strong wind—not as cold as yesterday. Except when it was). And stood on a stone wall and seriously contemplated climbing over a barbed-wire fence to see what was up the hill from the locked center (I ultimately didn’t). I asked directions twice before finally finding the stone circle, which I came to last (had come to the eerie wedge tomb first, with no effort at all). I think it was a function of having come the way I had, which was intended to avoid the center of Limerick; the other route down, via N24, would have brought me in from a different direction.

And it was a good, profound conclusion. Dating to ca. 2100 B.C., its stones are not as huge as those of Stonehenge, but many of them larger than those of Avebury. The largest is most definitely cut. Most are not. There are 113 stones in all. There is an avenue of stones leading in. The summer solstice sunrise shines down into the center; two stones on the southwest side and the entrance are aligned with sunset on Samhain. I and a group of three were the only people there.

Fáilte Annex, Part III

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Two days in one. Maybe—if I don’t fall asleep first.

Well, the huge disappointment of NOT making it out to the whole Rathcroghan/Cruachan Ai area. The tour was cancelled: too new a tour, too early in the season, evidently. Going out without a guide seemed pointless, besides being moot, since a rental car was unavailable on same-day notice. Really, really grrr. Considering that had been my first motivation for basing in Galway, the first tour I’d booked, before the Cliffs. Finally consented to go on the afternoon tour out to Clonmacnoise they’d been offering as a consolation prize (with partial refund). In the spirit of How the Irish Saved Civilization.

So after walking around Galway a bit, snapping photos of the River Corrib (shortest in Europe) and its swans, at 1:30 or so I headed out of Galway (in a mini-van this time; even this isn’t the draw the famous Cliffs are—nerd tours, I tell you! (because speaking personally, it certainly wasn’t a pilgrimage of faith. Even though the decentralized form of Christianity that developed in Ireland is certainly more interesting than the extremely centralized version that was spreading from Rome)). Our guide, Fergal, a trainee guide about to be turned loose on the public, a German couple who spoke almost no English, and a—well, too abrupt, too bigoted, too ignorant Australian who’d offered to buy me a drink followed by quasi-propositioning me twice before the van left. Before it arrived.

And a very interesting contrast in guides this was. Fergal (who is, oh, in his forties? Maybe 50-ish?) has lived in the U.S. and Australia (briefly), and has a huge and comprehensive knowledge of history. Very interesting to talk to (um, yes, speaking history nerdishly, though he is not dry, but quite funny as well). But had a whole different style, which did not include stopping at little out-of-the-way views or obscure objects like Desmond, but whizzing right across the medieval bridge, past another of the (over 14,000 in that area, he said) little ancient ring-forts.

Clonmacnoise I won’t tell you all the stuff about you can read anywhere, either. (But walking down a street in Limerick today, a young mother exclaimed Ciaran! and grabbed her little boy’s hand; it all keeps coming full circle.) It was eventually sacked many times by Vikings, by Irish kings, finally utterly destroyed even before Cromwell (a bad word and a curse, in Ireland). What they were all after, in the vast ecclesiastical center Clonmacnoise had become at the literal crossroads of Ireland (the Shannon and the Esker ), the monks left behind when they climbed into their towers for safety (which didn’t always save them). Their treasures, the ones they tried always to save, were the manuscripts, the copies of ancient documents and the newer writings. For Clonmacnoise was also a center of learning in the Dark Ages and medieval period.

The backstory of the crossroads was very interesting. The Midlands of Ireland are the basin that is one vast peat bog (and we passed a couple of peat—harvesting, mining operations). The ancient roadway across it, east to west, was the Esker Riada (Highway of the Kings), a high glacial moraine. Clonmacnoise was built, quite deliberately, near where the Shannon, a great north-south means of transportation, and the Esker intersect. If there had been no ruined churches, high crosses, walls to see, the view across the Shannon and its marshes from the higher ground would have been worthwhile. As were the base of a high cross inside the visitor center (some of the most important ones have been moved indoors, replaced on the grounds by replicas, since they’re made of sandstone and are already very eroded) with a representation of Cernunnos carved into it, or the sheela-na-gig in the “Nun’s Church” a little outside the grounds. (And that’s a whole amazing “Helen of Troy” sort of story I knew nothing about, a queen whose “taking” (probably not) led eventually to the beginning of English invasions of Ireland; so that she is also a despised figure to the Irish, her building of this chapel in penance notwithstanding: Fergal told me the Gaelic name there on the sign translates more nastily to something like “Hag’s Chapel.” He’s of the opinion the sheela-na-gig was not original, but added by—someone.)

On the way back we stopped at Killeen’s Village Tavern in Shannonbridge (home to the aforementioned medieval bridge and a Napoleonic-era fort: you know, so that the French couldn’t attack England by sneaking into Ireland first), a tiny, funky local completely unspoiled by gentrification. There’s a tiny general store through a door, worn unmatched chairs, people of all ages coming and going.

After resting a bit (not that I needed it), I made myself go out to hear a little Irish music—which I found, on a Wednesday night, at Taaffe’s. The three musicians were young and played very well, I thought, though I also eventually thought their selections were a tad boring (picky, picky). The place was packed, of course—I’m sure largely with tourists. Had my half of local Hooker ale (named for the little sailboats that carried most of the trade around Galway Bay and the Aran Islands; one of the buildings of Galway Technical Institute is faced with large panels supposed to be a tribute to their sails, sort of à la Sydney Opera House. (I also loved, at the Cliffs, how inside the visitor center, a railing on an upper level was made of irregular plexiglass panels that beautifully referenced and updated the vertical slabs of limestone used as barriers outside.)

So. Anyway. Made it to Limerick in an hour and a half on the express bus—leaving the newspaper I’d bought to read on the hotel front desk at checkout; having the (rather cranky) driver point out that the woman in the station had issued me a ticket that said Galway Airport instead of Limerick (though she’d then told me the exact number of the Limerick bus—which I already knew—to look for), though he relented and let me ride if I was sure Limerick was where I wanted to go; and the backpack zipper that appeared broken as we arrived in Limerick—though I finally managed to get it to reclose, fingers crossed—aside. In the rain. (There’s an ad campaign I’ve now seen on the side of a Dublin bus and on a small billboard, I think for ice cream, that says “Feck the Rain.”)

The Railway Hotel is a historic (i.e., old) hotel directly across from the station. Which is exactly what I wanted, even though in listing it Lonely Planet said it “will remind you of a time when everyone smoked.” That it doesn’t; if my nose can’t detect tobacco in the room, it’s not there. What was there upon pushing open the front door downstairs was cabbage, in the pub/restaurant. How homey and funky can you get? The utilitarian room was freezing when I first arrived, and I couldn’t get the radiator to work (I expect it just doesn’t, in the daytime). The wi-fi doesn’t quite make it to the rooms (believe me, I’ve tried), so I went and sat at the bar for quite a while, checking email, looking up rental car places. Even with the apparent head woman there giving me dirty looks, having told me it was about to be the lunch rush. For which there was never any shortage of seating. And the young woman at the front desk had told me I could access their wi-fi in there.

Anyway . . . have a car reserved for late tomorrow morning. Because the visitor center at the Grange, the large stone circle, is not yet open, and may not be “for weeks,” despite its website saying it’s open May through August. Ireland tourism needs a little goosing. The lavish treatment given to the Cliffs of Moher, even to the Burren, never mind, say, all of Dublin, is utterly lacking at Rathcroghan and the Grange. There is literally no way at all to even get out to the Grange (and I’m using that as a shorthand for that whole area’s sites, as at Rathcroghan) except by private car. Limerick: why is someone not jumping on this and promoting the hell out of it? Even on an occasional basis, to start? Have you seen what goes on at Stonehenge?

I still have to get out to the car place, mind you; a woman at the tourist information center I stumbled across on my way to King John’s Castle and St. Mary’s Cathedral suggested the Shannon Airport bus, and just ask them to drop me off at Ennis Motors. We’ll see. If I can just survive getting out of the city, I think I’ll be fine in the countryside. What should have been a “get on one road and stay on it back across the bridge and all through Limerick” proposition is ruined by that major street being utterly torn up at the moment right downtown (I know; I had to cross it earlier). So will have to zig-zag around all that, leaving more room for error.

Lalala . . .

May 10, 2011

I’m in love. Ireland.

All the weather spring can provide, we had today. After some confusion, being at the coach station early—first—taking a brief walk up the hill to City Hall in the cold fierce wind, the original bus filling up and Desmond Malloy, the elderly gent who’d greeted me in the first place, asking whether I wouldn’t rather come on yet another bus he’d changed to, which was only carrying the sixteen passenger overflow (which I did), we set off. A number of American students, a couple of couples, plus two Irish ladies older than me, who sat behind me and knew ALL the words to ALL the Irish songs Desmond played on cd on the way back, and with whom I shared lunch. Desmond has been doing the tour for the company for eighteen years, with over thirty years’ experience driving tour buses otherwise, so is an actual, entertaining font of information. Says he kissed the Blarney (groan) Stone—twice. More like b.s. stone: corny, corny jokes, a bit of smut, a bit of leg-pulling. But actually a sweet and solicitous (he dropped each of us near or at our hotels as we arrived back in Galway) driver/guide.

No point in itemizing the itinerary; the photos will tell the story. The Burren, its inch or two of soil over limestone, hills scraped bare by an Ice Age. “Famine walls” that meander up mountains for no reason whatever except that the English made the Irish lay stone all day to justify the penny at the end of it, their only backhanded gesture at relief during the Famine. Ruins everywhere, from thousands of years ago to pathetic little clustered stone hovel famine villages; a haunting packed-clay-with-moat enclosure (dun) that protected a wooden farmstead 3,000 years ago; various castles and watchtowers. Lots of new construction. Tidy villages and towns (including Kilfenora, with its ruined 12^th-century church and high Irish crosses, and Doolin, just before the Cliffs of Moher, where lunch finally took place, in Gus O’Connor’s Pub (and the seafood chowder, brown bread, and pale ale were delicious, let me note). And stopped at the most famous of over ninety Megalithic tombs in the Burren, the portal tomb at Poulnabrone.

And with a time limit, albeit generous, much brisk walking was essential in the Atlantic wind at the cliffs (the “Atlantic Edge,” indeed). Quick climbing, or its attempt, was made even more challenging by facing gusts so strong and continuous I bracketed almost every photo I took, just in case the wind had blurred the first one (so I have ridiculous quantities of almost-identical shots, of course). Having had pointed out to us that fifteen or sixteen people die at the cliffs every year, most recently a Spanish fourteen-year-old, not a one of us I think was even tempted to venture past the barriers further out onto the cliffs—which really are unstable to some degree. Plus that wind, which blew me off course of where I’d meant to be walking more than once.

The cliffs themselves, it’s belaboring the obvious to say, are magnificent (yes. They stood in for Tom Riddle’s cave in the film of Half-Blood Prince. You can spot the exact place—surely Dumbledore and Harry were put on that rock by computer.) There are good interactive informative panels inside the visitors’ center (centre), too; the center itself is completely green, and sympathetically built unobtrusively into a grass-covered mound (which also makes it look very like the burial mounds elsewhere).

Coming back down from the Cliffs, Desmond picked up a young German couple backpacking, who hitched with us for miles, though when he finally let them out at a requested bridge, they were about to hike up the mountain and camp for the night. They were with us when we stopped to take more photos, at a whole huge sloping field of cracked and eroded limestone running from the top of the hills to the edge of the cliffs, scooped-out hollows of all sizes holding water from a recent shower, wildflowers sprouting everywhere in cracks. The green stuff covering it in places I stooped to touch to be sure, and it was not grass, but some sort of—lichen, I suppose; not enough soil (no soil) for anything else. To get to the part above the road, we went (those of us addicted enough) single-file up a narrow walled trail, though at one point it came to a wall, which we could slither or hop off coming down, but which had to be detoured around going up by climbing onto a little narrow causeway of stone for a little way. I’m not in any way exaggerating this; if anything I’m downplaying it. At the moment I was thinking, “why on earth am I doing this? One wrong move and my trip could be painfully over.”

I’m in love. (Whitethorn—the white-flowered plant everywhere.)

Fáilte Annex. Part I

Monday, May 9, 2011

Haven’t yet succeeded in getting online, though I have been technically connected twice. But it dawned on me I could go ahead & begin a sort of journal (& oh, my, how out of shape I am at typing on this little keyboard), without the internet. And perhaps that will help me stay awake, which the book (The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse) does not, wonderful though it is.

Because I am dying for sleep, famished for it. The book hit the floor when I dozed for an instant. And at the same time I really don’t want to sleep, not until the hotel in Galway, in a bed. Here I am passing through Ireland, who knows whether ever again. How—quiet, how deceptively boring (& as I type that there us a chime and the announcement comes on in Gaelic for Athlone (for it’s always the Gaelic first: wonderful to learn). How unusually prosperous the land has finally been recently, witness all the bright new housing and light industry. Lush, lush the green, cliché though it is to say, and something blooming spring white in shrubs and even trees everywhere; fields here, too, of rape blindingly yellow, hedged pastures, cows, sheep. Thickets and chimney pots and church spires and sudden slopes of heartbreaking beauty. All of it worth cherishing, dying for, I see that firsthand now, in its quiet homely splendor. I grew up in just such a place, and understand perfectly that dramatic California/Colorado-style landscape is not at all required for passionate loyalty (though Ireland even has all that as well), for a place to be home. All of it cloaking with a fierce pride the long centuries of misery and suffering, the way the music does, the happy music, the dancing that always, always transcended, defied the poverty and bleakness.

But, yes, the Gaelic everywhere first (we’ve just crossed the Shannon, starting up again & passing through Athlone after the stop): on every sign, in the announcements on the train, and I really do regret not speaking any of it, though if I listen very closely I can decipher the names of the towns, at least.

And I’ll know Tulach Mhór, & need to remember, not Tullamore Dew, but the way it began to rain lightly just past there, streaking the windows for a few minutes, before the sun broke through..

(First bit of gorse I’ve seen here, tufting a low rise in a pasture.)

Though after that, suddenly, gorse was everywhere, invading pastures, mingling with the white-flowered plant, topping hillsides, lining the railway. I knew how sweet it would smell, but as a gardener realized it was a pretty weed.

In Galway, standing eating fish (locally-caught whiting, allegedly) and chips, the radio behind me in the shop suddenly blasting “Keep the Car Running.” Forty-eight hours ago, more or less, my daughter was hanging out with Arcade Fire after their performance at the New Orleans Jazz Fest. Small world? Homogenization? Still.

The stiff wind smells of the sea, of Galway Bay, here a few blocks from it. Walked around a bit in the old, pedestrianized area, bought a few minor groceries (a Large bottle of water!), to be able to have breakfast in in the morning, before heading off to meet my tour to the Cliffs of Moher and The Burren. If the weather holds the way it is right now, I will be able to see the cliffs after all : )