I'm in love. With Ireland.

I’m in love.  With Ireland.

Cannot say it was love at first sight, that first step onto Irish soil was not the most endearing.  Actually, my first steps were not on Irish soil, they were on Irish concrete tarmac as I disembarked from the ferry that sailed me here from Wales I walked off onto the footpath to Dublin.  Walked the one hour walk from the port into Dublin city, all on concrete and asphalt, alongside all the giant, articulated trucks and caravans that had come over from Holyhead on the ferry and were then motoring from the port to disperse all over Ireland's roads.

Am trying to do everything over here in the least costly way possible, so that meant walking from the port to my economy hotel in central Dublin, whilst all other passengers either drove, bussed or taxied into the city.  One would consider the walk could add to the experience of enjoying arriving in a new country.  It would do, if the scenery or surrounds were enjoyable.  But that walk was less than welcoming or interesting; it was through busy, loud, port roads, semi-industrial roads, commercial roads and roads that showed signs of the previous decade of economic slump in Ireland where there were half built industrial buildings that had been left as derelict for the past seven or so years.

GPS Segue

And bollocks to the two smug chaps back home who, during our lost walks in Italy in June, dared to suggest I should have taken a GPS with me to prevent being lost.  

I actually do have GPS on my phone but chose not to utilise it in Italy as our lost walks were through private vineyards and farms, not routes the GPS would have known about.  Plus, the fun of doing walking tours is working out the instructions given, not leaving it up to technology.

On this occasion I decided to utilise the GPS system on my phone for my Irish landing and walk, so the night before I logged it all in then wrote on a notepad the exact step-by-step instructions Mrs GPS gave me for my port-to-hotel walk.  

I got lost. It was wrong.  It sent me totally up the booai. I got lost due to the smart GPS.  

Same again when arriving in Belfast.  I wrote the GPS instructions down exactly as they were given, and yet again Mrs GPS got it all wrong.  I got lost.

So bollocks to you two!

Back to being in love with Ireland

Once into my 2 star Dublin hotel, I went out and explored the rather grey and old looking city.  

Within a very short while the grey began to become interesting and the old looking city began to look vibrant.  By the end of my first afternoon I found Dublin to be a city of much history, much character, lots of parks, a river (which I had forgotten it had), statues, monuments, interestingly tatty shops, hundreds of pubs of varying quality, busyness, cyclists, goals, graveyards, distilleries, breweries and a million-zillion pretty hanging baskets outside pubs, shops and hotels, of varying qualities (the pubs, shops & hotels that is).  I really liked this new city.

It has an amazingly big city park, according to one tour guide it is twice the size of New York's Central Park.  According to my afternoon guide, it is three times the size of New York's Central Park.  Whatever, it was a pleasure for me to run around a small part of it on my morning run.  And later in the day when I rested on a park bench it provided the funniest Irish situation story I could possibly have had.  I repeated the story on Facebook as being on my own had no one to share it with, Facebook gave me the sharing.  Will cut and paste it here.

Quote of the day:
In a park here in Dublin this evening, on a park bench watching people. There was a dad reclining in his deck chair near my park bench reading a paper, with cigarette in his mouth - while his kids and a bunch of others were playing on the grass in front of us with cricket bats and balls. Then a young 7 or 8 year old son comes running up to the father in the deck chair and with tears in his eyes exclaims to his father, "Daadee, Liam's pinching ma balls!" To which his father, without even dropping his newspaper or taking the cigarette from his mouth, straight faced replies, "Mother of God son, get used to it! Ya mammy's bustin' mine every day."

I chuckled all afternoon at that.

Meanwhile:

During the wanderings and exploring felt it was the right thing to do to go and have a Guinness in an Irish pub somewhere, so stepped inside one which I thought looked quaint.  It was a case of two steps in, two steps out.  That old, stale pub aroma was enough to put me off and besides, Guinness was never high on my list of delicacies I must have before I die, so the retreat was hasty.

Plus, it’s not easy being a one-person tourist at times like that.  It’s no fun going into a pub alone.  There is no one to share the pub odour with, no one to chat with over the pint of whatever, and most of all, no one else to pay the tab.  So it was to the next tea house for tea and sticky buns.

Another segue

One of the many negatives about travelling on your own and travelling when you are skint, is where to and the cost of evening eating.  There are only so many Subways one can literally stomach before that aroma of Subway baking bread becomes nauseating.  And there are only so many meals of fish and chips one can have each month before one begins to explode.  Am over the heading to the local Tescos or Sainsbury’s for bread, stale pre-packaged salads and cheese.  So on my first night in Dublin I asked the landlady of the cheap hotel if she had any suggestions of where a woman on her own could go to have something reasonably nice, something reasonably inexpensive and something reasonably healthy to eat for her evening meal.  She directed me to the pub across the road, O’Sheas.  And informed me it was as good as any other good eating place in town.  With that settled in my mind I spent the afternoon walking and sightseeing and looking forward to popping into O’Shea’s for my nice, inexpensive and healthy evening meal before walking across the road to my hotel to bed down for the night.

By the time I finished all my touristing around it was nigh on 8 pm and my stomach was letting me know if was refill time, for both food and drink, so I headed into O’Shea’s.  Yet another little pub with many beautiful and well flowering hanging baskets outside.  They look beautiful, the hanging baskets, and cover a multitude of ugly building facades with their brightly coloured pansy and petunia faces.

Up the steps and through the two sets of swing glass doors I went, and two strides in.  In the time it took for me to open the door, enter and take the two strides all the five men at the bar who had been heavily involved in conversation, immediately stopped mid-sentence and turned to look at whoever this was who was entering their sacred haven.  Seven sets of eyes on me, and silence (there were two barmen).  

Not able to instantly withdraw my steps due to the high scrutiny I was getting, I hesitated momentarily before my conscience had me move forward with my slow steps whilst my eyes were doing the million-mile-an-hour search around the bar to find where I could go and sit and blend into insignificance.  There was nowhere to blend, where ever I went I would stand out with my little back pack on, my walking shorts, running trainers and bright yellow Rotorua Marathon shirt on.  There would be no blending.  So went straight to the bar in the pretense that I am a regular walker-to-the-pub-bar-person while attempting to carry an air of nonchalance.

By the time I reached the bar the stale smell of two hundred years of deep fried cockles and muscles, and fish and chips, and battered anything that could be deep fried began to permeate my nasal passages.   And fill my lungs.  And invade every fibre of my clothing.

I guessed this would be a good time to order a pint of Guinness while I bided for time to figure out how to escape from this situation with some grace and without showing the awkwardness I felt in being in here.  So I looked straight at the barman and said, “Half a pint of San Miguel please.” 

Couldn’t bring myself to sup the dark stuff. Or to bear the time consumption a whole pint would take.

Then reached for the pub menu.  It was a large, laminated sheet that looked as though it had been around as long as the pub had been deep frying all those specialties and, as I had expected by this stage, had listed all the above plus more.  Delightful choices of cuisine – nachos – burgers – garlic bread – sausages and mash – pie and mash – and anything else that came with chips.

Fortunately the half pint of San Miguel was lovely, and cool.  And disappeared quicker than any half a pint I’ve ever had before.  

I left O’Shea’s.  I ate Italian.

And when the landlady asked me in the morning if I had gone to O’Shea’s the night before I said, “Yes, thank you very much, it was lovely.”  Then scarpered.

Back to loving Ireland

All that has side tracked me.  Despite my personal preference to not dine in O’Shea’s, it was still a quaint, little and very old Dublin pub that deserves to have many more centuries of customers drinking pints of Guinness and eating deep fried anythings.  It, like the other hundreds in the city, are rich with history and would have so many wonderful stories to tell, if they could.

           

There are a lot of people in Dublin.  More than I thought there would be.  However, I must remember it is high holiday season in this part of the world.  Which does account for all the obvious foreigners around.  Which makes it feel thriving.  I can see Dublin is coming out of the financial decline as there seems to be some building works around the town and quite a bit of road works and beautifying happening around the central city.  That tells me something is healthy in the city.

And the city is clean – as is Belfast.  Unlike Paris and all the cities in Italy where we were taken aback with the piles of rubbish, amount of street litter, smells of litter, graffiti and billions of cigarette butts everywhere, Dublin and Belfast are shining examples of people taking care.  Sure, little bits of graffiti but only spotted occasionally – and in Belfast there are all the huge murals (but they are not graffiti) – and no rubbish.  What a difference it makes to how one feels when walking around for hours.

Belfast – it was a real surprise.  It’s a really lovely, vibrant city.  I expected the doom and gloom feeling here and have been gratefully relieved to come to a city that makes me want to see more, to walk around more and to enjoy learning more of its history and cultural differences and clashes.  Yes, it is still a city divided, but they are working on.  But it really is beautiful.  In the morning I shall cross the road and run through the Botanical Gardens - the gardens that had the beautiful grass story which was posted on Facebook and I shall cut and paste here.

Was walking through the Belfast Gardens today - they are lovely - and there is lovely big square of beautifully grown, thick, lush, fine grass - when you see grass like this you are compelled to take your shoes off and walk on the softness and coolness of the green. Children would love it to play on. But there is a small metal, green painted fence surrounding the grass and it has a sign on it that says, 'No Ball Games' - to which someone has written with a marker pen 'Bollocks'

   

But it’s past midnight, in between these patchy paragraphs I have been watching updates on the Commonwealth Games.  It is fun watching a major competition like these when in another person’s country, or two, or three.  New Zealand never features, with one exception of a nano-second shot of our girl throwing for gold today.

More on my short love affair with Ireland another time.

Oh, one more classic Irish quote which I laughed out loud to today:

Was sitting at the rear of a crowded train when a man with an ugly American Pit Bull dog came on.  As expected the dog was pulling the owner in and constantly pulling on the chain lead. The man grabbed the dog (dogs reign in the Northern Hemisphere and are allowed on boats, trains & buses – another cultural difference) and tried to keep the dog still as he, the dog and 6 others of us were crammed in the end well space of the train carriage.  The dog kept trying to jump up on people and the owner was struggling to keep it calm. A woman and husband began talking dog talk to the owner asking what it was and how old it was.  The owner said the dog was only a 8 month old and he was trying to teach it obedience and was sure he would get there,  that, “the first two years are the hardest.”  To which a male Irish wit next to me responded, “And I tought dat was marriage!”

I burst into belly laugh.