Is e ‘n t-ionnsachadh òg an
t-ionnsachadh bòidheach
(The learning in youth is the pretty
learning)
2:45 a.m., and there's the sun through
the window, a burst of morning light across a field of white cloud. I
hadn't adjusted my watch yet, but the red-eye Westjet flight was
slowly and simultaneously syncing to the natural light outside the
cabin, somewhere just west of the coast of Ireland.
How have you been? A few more lines, a
few more grey hairs, a few more footsteps down the path and fresh mud
on your boots. I know the feeling.
This time last year was a lifetime away –
or maybe the right way of looking at it is to say that it was a dream
in the dawn, right before waking up. The kind of thing you actually
remember, and maybe part of it was real, because you were actually
changed by it. My last experience in New Zealand was when I got to
the terminal queue at the airport in Auckland, the girl at the desk
took my ticket, checked my passport, and confirmed that the names did
not, in fact, match. It was almost like all the dumb decisions that I
had somehow gotten away with since I walked through the desert in
Tongariro were finally cashing in.
Anyway, I made it on that flight, made
it to the East Coast of Canada, and went to law school. I know what a
tort is, the importance of mens rea,
and how if David Oakes had decided to leave his hash at home that
day, the Supreme Court of Canada might still have no idea how the
Charter works.
I also
know this: the law is interesting, and it can be a fulfilling
pursuit. But 5 o'clock comes around every day, and you have to have
something that means
something to you, outside of that bubble. I've been blessed to have
that, and to be able to take part of that to live and breath in a
place I've dreamt of visiting on a subconscious level since I first
heard “Fields of Athenry,” “The Woman from Wexford,” or a
hundred other songs.
This morning, at a
time that still felt like 3:30 a.m., our flight landed in Dublin,
Ireland, and the next two weeks will be a sensory overload of music,
countryside, and beer culture. I say our,
because this time I'm not going it alone.
A full contingent of this family may be more than this place can take, but we'll let the next two weeks play out before we jump to any conclusions.
This then shall be a brief soujourn, a
reprieve from a summer in St. John's that has been the best of my life (so far) and a slight exhale before
school starts up again in Fredericton. When we showed up in Dublin and made it
through customs (of all the countries I've been to, by far the
easiest to get into) after uncramping our legs from their contorted
position between rows 7 and 8, we hailed a taxi and made our way to
Howth Road, just a short drive from the city centre. Bellgrove B&B
is just off the main road, squat between a church and a long stretch
of European suburbia.
That's what it is,
and that's what it feels like. Once we passed the jutting box of a
Tesco store and walked along the sidewalk between bike lanes and
manicured hedges on a brisk, late summer day, it didn't feel like a giant stretch from a little
place called Harlow, which isn't too far away from here, all things
considered. The only thing missing was Don Nichol, absentmindedly
fooling around on his iPad to the point where you wonder if he's really all there . . .
Nevermind.
We went for a walk
in the morning complete with breakfast at a cafe (sausage sandwich
and cappuccino), waiting for our room at the B&B to be ready, and
by the time fresh sheets were on the mattress, the sun was starting
to gain strength. I went for a longer walk through this quaint area,
taking in the patterns of the streets and the homes, peppered with
the odd lilt of a lyrical Irish accent.
Around midday, we
put together a few things, stuffed our wallets with Euros, and got
the bus into the city centre of Dublin about 20 minutes away, disembarking by the 121 m
high Spire of Dublin, a vertical needle shooting off the bustling thoroughfare of O'Connell Street
into the sky and reputedly earning its place as the world's tallest
sculpture.
Even from flying over the harbour, you get the sense that
this city of just over half a million people is fairly manageable,
with most of what we wanted to see within relative walking distance.
We made our way along by the massive, columned General Post Office, a major
site in the 1916 Easter Rising, and down along the shores of the
Liffey, one of the main pulses in Dublin.
What better place
to go looking for a pint of Guinness, handy to the cobbled alleyways
and bustling Friday afternoon pub-goers throughout the Temple Bar.
People have always told me that Guinness tastes better in Ireland, so
this was all in the interest of science. And guess what?
Man, it's pretty
good just about anywhere. If I closed my eyes, I could have been down
on George Street rather than crammed into a nook at Oliver St. John Gogarty's Pub, but I kept my eyes open, realized that I was in
Dublin and the band playing were real Irish musicians, and said that
even if the beer technically tasted the same, I still preferred this
taste. Next door at the Old Storehouse we had some Bulmer's cider, and that's something
I can't remember ever choosing in a North American bar. So there.
Our visit to
Trinity College, pinnacle of esteemed learning in the heart of the city
centre, was a bitter learning experience for me—public washrooms in Europe
are hard to come by. Like, really hard. I ended up weaving my way almost back to Temple
Bar in search of an elusive urinal, and even then it was in a
“Customer Only” zone that I had to use like a ninja who came dangerously close to soiling himself.
Back on the street,
one more band, one more bar. By now I don't know what I was running
on other than cider fumes, but there was a band playing at the Temple
Bar (the actual bar, not the area) with fiddles and accordions, so all there
was to do was to convince yourself it was barely supper time back
home, and this was a vacation after all.
Throughout the
evening were plenty of familiar tunes: “The Wild Rover,” “Sam
Hall,” “Dirty Old Town” (apparently set in Manchester, so I
heard tonight), and “Whisky in the Jar.” It's no wonder just
about everyone in Newfoundland went for the direct Westjet flight
this summer—there's an obvious kinship to this place that you can't
help but see. Speaking of which, part of me legitimately thought, beating around the streets of Dublin, I'd run into at least one familiar face. As it turns out, Molly Malone and James Joyce is as close as I came.
The clock on my
computer is still set to Newfoundland time, and it's telling me it's
just after 6:00 p.m. Not exactly the usual time to crawl into bed,
but it's been a long day, crossing the ocean and drinking with Irish
people on their home turf. A full Irish breakfast is going to be on
the table first thing in the morning, so the last thing I want is to
sleep through that.
Cheers,
rb
Have fun, Ryan!
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