5/24/06 - Changing Tack

Sligo Town, Co. Sligo, Ireland

First off, apologies for the delay in posting - I ran out of time in Dublin, then spent the past few days driving around the email-less wilds of Co. Donegal in my rented Nissan Micra (damn, i forgot to take a picture of the little thing). But that's not the only reason: while in Dublin, I found myself (after a few pints, of course) thinking about the blog, and a bit disappointed with the way it had unfolded thus far. It seemed a bit like i was just rehashing cliches or confirming classic stereotypes without really providing much original insight, not to mention the fact it also felt a bit forced and/or constrained.

so this entry is entitled 'changing tack' for a few reasons: first, travel-wise: going from the buzzing metropolis that is Dublin, to the vast and barren but beautiful stretches of bog, mountians, and coastline of Co. Donegal, but also because i'm going to try a new tactic when it comes to posting. it's going to be a little less structured and more free-form (although i'll still try to organize it somewhat into categories of thoughts). i'll keep the daily summary, but with less hum-drum details. Just because a day is scant on details, however, you shouldn't assume i just sat in my hotel room sucking my thumb; rather, that just means nothing super-noteworthy happened. generally, one of the tenets of my traveling philosophy involves arriving in a place, then simply wandering around on foot, maybe ducking into a bar or restaraurant if i'm thirsty/hungry/tired/frustrated/etc. sometimes this leads to interesting encounters or revelations, but more often than not hoofing it around just makes my feet hurt; however, i don't think you can get a better feel for a place & soak as much in in a short amount of time in any other way.

Daily Summary

• Mon, 5/15 - bus from Kilkenny to Cork. met some of the guys from Liquid Funding (company based in Dublin that I did a fair amount of business with while at Ellington) for a ... ahem ... "liquid" night out. the only thing that made tuesday less painful was the fact that it was a monday night, so not all that much going on.
• Tues, 5/16 - soaked up Irish culture: saw Trinity College & the Book of Kells, then a guided tour of the Irish National Museum.
• Weds, 5/17 - took in Irish history: walking tour relating to the 1916 Easter Rising, which laid the first concrete foundations for Irish independence. then tour of Kilmainham jail, where multiple irish patriots & thousands of ordinary citizens, were imprisoned until 1924. back out with the Liquid guys for the Champions League Final (Arsenal v. Barcelona). after the game, chatted up some irish girl whose boyfriend happened to be in the bathroom, but ended up hanging out with the two of them for a while. he was convinced i looked like thierry henry (i even posed for the obligatory cell phone snapshots), and she made it her goal to pimp me out to every irish girl i fancied, so a pretty good time...
• Thurs, 5/18 - standard Dublin tourist stuff: Guinness Storehouse. some traditional irish music in Temple Bar.
• Fri, 5/19 - bus to Sligo to pick up the car. walked around megolithic tombs at Carrowmore (3500-4500 BC), then hiked to the to of Knocknarea Mountain to see Queen Mab's Grave: a huge stone cairn at the top of the mountain that can be seen from miles around. drove to Ballyshannon in Co. Donegal.
• Sat, 5/20 - drove/hiked to tip of St. John's Point, a narrow peninsula that juts out into Donegal Bay. then drove/hiked to Slieve League, the highest sea cliffs in Europe (600+ meters, pretty impressive). stopped in Glencolumbkille to watch Munster hang on to beat Biarritz in the Heineken Cup rugby final. drove to Malinbeg.
• Sun, 5/21 - drove through Glenesh Pass, then hiked across a massive beach to caves near Maghera (luckily there right around low tide so everything was accessible). drove to Dunlewy & Glenveagh Nat'l Park, hiked around Lough Dunlewy through a beautiful forest known as the Poisoned Glen. drove to Dunfanaghy.
• Mon, 5/22 - drove around Horn Head, hiked around the sand dunes outside of Dunfanaghy, drove around Rosguill Peninsula & up the Inishowen Peninsula to Malin Head (northernmost point in Ireland). stopped in a pub for a pint or two and had to withstand having the piss taken out of me by a local toothless farmer i could only half understand (the fact that i was a 'wee lad' whose mother apparently didn't feed him enough came up multiple times)... but all in good fun, and ended up having a decent (if occasionally incomprehensible) chat with a local fisherman, first about football, then the state of the irish fishing industry.
• Tues, 5/23 - saw a recreated Irish Famine exhibit in the Isle of Doagh, then drove back to Donegal Town, stopping on the way to play 9 holes at Cresslough "Golf Course" (actually just a par-3 in moderate condition, but for EUR 6, I wasn't expecting much - my swing actually felt good & I played as well as can be expected with a rented 8-iron, wedge & putter...
• Weds, 5/24 - returned car to Sligo, bus to Londonderry (aka Derry City)
  

Observations on Ireland:

• weather - the day i left CT, where it was 75 & sunny, i checked the forecast for ireland: 52, cloudy, rain. my first second thoughts, & i hadn't even boarded the plane. obviously you don't come to ireland for a tan (as the barman pointed out last night), but out of 24 days so far, i've had 2 nice ones, 5 decent (i.e. predominantly dry) ones , and the rest have been mediocre at best. however, i did hear on the radio yesterday that this may is shaping up to be the wettest ever on record. just my luck... but for the sake of everyone who has to put up with it year-round, i'm glad it's not this bad all the time.
• sports - the irish are mad for their native sports heroes. as noted above, Munster (one of the four regions of ireland, comprising the southwestern counties) played Biarritz for the Heinekin Cup (the pan-european club championship) in Cardiff, Wales on Saturday. The whole country came out in support of Munster, with a ton of people going to the game and at least 30,000 more watching on the streets of Limerick. During the build-up to the game, it dominated newspaper, tv & radio coverage, and even though i was in Limerick at the very beginning of this month (3 weeks before the final), flags, posters & jerseys were everywhere. I was also in Cork when Roy Keane, a native of Cork and widely considered as the greatest Irish soccer player in a long time - if not ever, played his testimonial game for Manchester United. Although widely respected as a soccer player, he's absolutely revered here. I have the feeling that the Irish are so proud of their great literary tradition (and rightly so) only because they haven't had all that many truly renowned athletes. Joyce, Wilde, Yeats, Heaney, etc. have somewhat filled that empty space in national pride.

Skirting Death for the First Time:
between driving stick, having to remember to stay on the left side of the road, and negotiating Co. Donegal's ridiculously windy (and often one-lane) roads, shortly after renting the car i would have put my chances of surviving the weekend at about 50%. but luckily got used to everything pretty quickly, and managed to avoid ending up dead in a ditch...

The Cult of Snus:

it's surprisingly common, it's a great way of making friends & influencing people, it's... snus??? for the uninitiated among you, snus is a type of mild chewing tobacco from scandanavia (equivalent roughly to nicotine gum). despite the fact that it's quite common there, and almost completely non-carcinogenic, it's legal only in sweden and norway (conspiracy by the major tobacco companies, anyone?). i was first introduced to it while working in germany, & then came across it again a few years later, and ordered a few tins on the internet. I meant to order a few more tins to bring with me to europe (it goes great with a beer, because unlike american chewing tobacco, you don't have to spit and the flavor is actually quite pleasant, almost salty), but the delivery time is 3-4 weeks, and it was one of the many things i meant to do but never got around to. i didn't really give it much further thought until i was walking around Cork one day and kicked myself for not having ordered any before leaving the states; you can imagine my surprise when that very night, as i was talking to an english guy and his girlfriend in a local bar, he pulled a tin from his back pocket and offered me a bit. he was as surprised that i knew what it was as i was that he had some, and he ended up giving me the remainder of his tin, since he had plenty back at his hotel. later on, in Dublin, just when i had gone through most of what was left, i had set the tin on the table next to my beer, and the guy sitting behind me (a norwegian, it turned out) tapped me on the elbow and asked me to 'change' one of mine for one of his of a different brand. once again, we got to talking, and he offered me the rest of his tin. so 2 weeks plus with a steady supply of snus, and now i'm half-expecting to be offered more any minute...

What I Miss:

• not having to ration q-tips. back home, i could go through a box of 500 in a few months, now a travel pack of 30 has to last me a reasonable amount of time...
• the daily show. i didn't realize this until last night, when the barman at the pub i was in in Donegal Town turned it on. whether you like his politics or not, Jon Stewart is both really f*cking funny AND really f*cking smart...

Random Thoughts:

• 15 months is a long time, but also not that long. there have been some places that i've wanted to stay longer (Dublin, specifically), but i've felt the pressure to keep moving in order to see more places. the past 3 weeks have flown by, and i've barely scratched the surface of Ireland. at some point, i think i'm going to want to hang out somewhere for an extended period of time, which means i'm either going to have to drop some places from my tentative itinerary, or extend the trip. i'm loathe to do either, but i'll cross that bridge if and when i come to it.

Reading:

• finished American Pastoral by Philip Roth (thought-provoking & highly recommended)
• finished The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett (quick & entertaining science fiction / fantasy as a break from 'real' literature)
• started David Copperfield by Dickens

Photos