31 March 2006 - Friday
So far, this trip certainly is building itself! And as far as plans go, that was the only plan, so I guess I'm on course!!

Sionainn (Shannon) Airport was built in the 30s and 40s, and the old architecture from that period survives - a boxy, Frank-Lloyd-Wright-looking set of buildings and tower. Outside of that minor detail, though, it's just a rural airport with many convenient connecting busses. So, I took one - to Ennis. It's inland, in County Clare, and it is the hub of the county.

I spent all (rainy) afternoon Thursday in the Clare Museum - FREE! - and it was excellent. The exhibits are divided into four themes: household & land, politics, religion, and the importance of water. The household theme included lots of archaeological finds, which appealed to me - lots of neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age stuff - as well as traditional farming tools and a reproduced cottage hearth. The political theme included a clear outline of how the Celts, Gaels, Vikings, and Anglo-Normans had held power in Ireland, and particularly, Clare. The religious theme, obviously, ran the gamut from henges and dolmens and mysterious pre-Christian ritual artifacts to the troubles between Catholics and Protestants, with some basic insights as to "why." And water, well... Ennis is on the River Fergus, which spills into the Shannon, and not too far to the west is the sea. The water exhibit covered currachs and fishing techniques and the Spanish Armada, and ended with a display on emigration, including that caused by the Great Famines of the 19th century. I'm so glad I went to this museum instead of trying to read some book about Irish history! All is clear to me now... well... at least it will be until I move on to some other country.

Thursday in the day, I had stopped at Custy's, the local traditional music shop (a fabulously packed-out narrow closet of a place, with a clearly audible accordion lesson going on in the back room), and asked if there were any singing sessions that were open to all. The clerk recommended Brogan's, that very night. So off I trotted at 9:45 - they don't begin sessions until 9:30, and there are 2 or 3 different pubs holding sessions any given night. Clutching my Beamish Stout (€3), I perched myself on a corner barstool near the musicians. There were four - fiddler, bouzouki (also played fiddle), a sitting-in American banjo player, and a singer named Willie. After Willie had sung two songs that involved choruses (one of which was Stephen Foster's "Hard Times" which he said was very well-known in Ireland), with me gaily singing harmony along with the choruses, the bouzouki player started talking to me, and asked if I wanted to sing a song. Well, what the hell did he think I was there for?! HA! Just kidding! So I sang "a song from the land of my people," which was "Wagoner's Lad." The people from the youth hostel where I'm staying practically fell off their bar stools. I suppose American tourists don't burst into song where they're from. Probably a good thing. So the rest of the night was a screaming success with the other singer buying me a pint, and lots of chats about travel with a local couple in their 40s. And nearly unbelievably, at about 11:30PM, in walked a guy I used to know from set dancing lessons at The Burren pub in Somerville!! He lives over here now. I wouldn't complain too much if the rest of my pub-going experiences turn out to be more-or-less similar to this one!

Waking up in the absolutely silent 12-person dorm after a sound sleep - and that's shocking right there! - I found that I had mis-remembered the bus schedule. I was hoping to take a day trip down the coast, just to view the scenery. So I made another cup of tea and sat in the lounge with my Lonely Planet guide, thinking about what else I would like to do today. I struck up a chat with a Brit named Paul, who is a young men's rugby team coach. He's only over from England for 24 hours, scouting out some locations for his team to visit and has a hired car and four hours to kill. Suddenly, my missing bus and his four hours to kill collided - at noon, we're going on a tour of the coast in his hired car. He said, "I'll drive and you can navigate - probably best that way!" HA! Ya think?! So off I go, after only one day on this island, to my Next Big Adventure!! I love this life! It's the best one I ever had!!

2 April 2006 - Sunday
My ex-RAF radar technician rugby coach companion turned out to be great company, an excellent driver, and very interested in stopping along the way, so we polished off five hours easily, in a grand tour of the west and southwest of Clare. We visited the famous Cliffs of Moher, which, don't you know, were Under Construction. Seriously! They're building a gigantic new visitor centre, right into the very cliffs themselves. So though the View was extraordinary, the Visit was somewhat compromised by chain-link fencing, heavy machinery, and piles of construction debris. No matter. We turned south along the coast and took small roads for hours, stopping at wayside beauty points, beaches and small towns, for a look-see.

And that is how I visited a genuine shrine. It's called St. Bridget's Well. Just on a curve on a narrow country road is a border garden, enclosed by a rock wall with a Mary statue in the center. It's positioned at the foot of a bushy, weedy, overgrown cemetery set on a pretty steep bank. From the road, it looks like just a tiny roadside memorial set down a few steps - but on one side is a small whitewashed shed next to a low tunnel, and that leads to the shrine. The tunnel is about 20' long or so, and leads to the so-called well, a small pool being fed from above by a tiny stream trickling down a gully running through the cemetery and over a precipice about 10' high. There's nothing in any way extraordinary about the stream, the pool, the shed, or the garden - it's the tunnel that's amazing. It's a place of pilgrimage, for what reason, I never found out. On the walls and ceiling, and all around the door and the opening to the well, on a shelf made for the purpose, and hanging in the branches above the well are a fantastic assortment of items. People have left coins, photographs, commemoration cards, rosaries, letters of intercession, children's items - a bib, books, a pacifier, deflated balloons, flowers dried and fresh, a cane, ribbons, a tea towel, a sock, a belt, strips of cloth or rags, anything and everything personal or meaningful or even just some item they happened to have with them. It was a jumble of castaway objects that really looked like rubbish - some rusty, all dusty, some molding, some fading - but to all those people who left them behind, representatives and symbols of hope. There was at least as much magic and paganism to the whole presentation as there was religion and Christianity, and it was far more interesting to me than the over-crowded, construction-disturbed Cliffs of Moher.

I've been noticing quite a bit of curious slate-like stone in use around the area. It's called Liscannor, the name of a town where a lot of it is quarried. It's grey limestone, but all through the surface are these winding trails of some kind of sea eel or large sea worm that burrowed in the sand eons gone by. Their fossilized burrow trails give a random curvy pattern to the top of the stone. It gives a really cool texture, which could not possibly be replicated. They use those stones for everything - floor tiles, steps, upright as rural or garden walls. Except for the worm trails, they look exactly like petrified slices of mud, usually about 2" thick, and broken into irregular chunks, more or less kind of square, about 3' X 3'. They just jam the square of rock vertically into the ground, and place lots of them in a line or in a curving shape, overlapping each other like roof tiles, but vertically. It makes a pretty damned impenetrable wall!

Last night was Date Night in Ennis. The only people I saw out alone were men in their 60s and above, wearing the ubiquitous flat wool cap, long wool coat, wool trousers, sweater vest and tie, all with snow-white hair. I met one of those guys in a hotel bar called "Poet's Corner." His name was Jimmy, and he was a real Farmer's Boy!! I had come to hear the session, which started late that night - around 10PM. I arrived at 10:30, and there was a standing space near the bar and only just across an aisle from the musicians. Minding my own business and admiring the fine architecture of that room (woodwork galore, oil paintings of politicians gone by, a very lovely warm place) this fellow offered me a stool. I refused, based on some lie about my leg hurting (no one understands, I do not like to sit!). When he heard my American, he was off and running! Oh, he wanted to know everything - where do I live, how long have I been in Ireland, and the best: Is this your first time home? HAHA! He kept referring to American visitors as people who were "coming home." He said, "when you come home again," and so on. I never contradicted him, it was too charming. He had a happy talkative manner, sprouting Irish-isms right and left, such as: "Jeeminy! I'm not tellin' ye a word of a lie when I say..." Once I told him I was a gardener, he saw a kindred spirit and had to tell me all about how it's "not like it used to be," and then went on for an hour telling me how that was. He got himself quite excited describing buttermilk and haying and planting, milling, threshing, thatching of roofs, dairy work and all kinds of farm work. Apparently, this was all from his own youth, which could only have been... maybe 50 years ago, if he was a youth or young man when he began to work. Amazing. Until 20 years ago, this surely was The Land Time Forgot.

My fine Poet's Corner evening ended when my pint came to a close and the guitarist and a friend of his started to get into it with a big bruiser of a guy who wanted to create trouble. They were between me and the door, and after a bit of posturing and chins in the air and chests poked out, waiters stepping up to pull them apart, other friends joining in - allegedly to prevent trouble but very possibly hoping to encourage it - I managed to find a hole in the crowd and run out the door. No fists flew while I was there, but the next day, I overheard a girl on her cell phone telling someone that "they had to call the guard, yeah, they called the guard, yeah, it was at the hotel, yeah..." I'll make my own assumptions as to what that was about. And so, my time in Ennis came to an end, not at all as it had begun, but interesting, nonetheless!"

I've had a last-minute hostel experience with a foreign fellow named Sam. This is a guy who I thought was a German perhaps, trying in his very best English - which was excellent - to find out how the bed arrangement was done at the hostel. I was very helpful to his poor, struggling foreign self. I kindly and carefully explained the dorm room and how to claim a bed and the curtain-shutting and how the sunlight came in here and the motion-sensor light shone in there. I double-explained so that the poor foreigner would be really clear on the concept... when he told me... he was from Wales! Damn! Who's the fool now??? HAHA on me!!!

6 April 2006 - Thursday
The Burren: well, I didn't get to the main part of this. The very edge is in Doolin, though, and I walked into it. MAN! What a strange, other-worldly unexpected rock extravaganza! It's limestone, it looks like petrified mud, and it appears suddenly. One footstep is green grass, the next footstep is The Burren. There are endless grey rocks, cracked, fissured, dimpled, creviced, some standing up in the cracks of others, many, many fieldstone walls running everywhere, made of collected Burren rocks, but mainly, it's a fairly flat landscape. The roll of the land is gentle - it kind of undulates - but all of it is rock. Utterly unworldly. It's beautiful, but it's so entirely bleak, too. There are lots of wirey plants, insisting on taking hold where they have no business taking hold, lots of Alpine and even Arctic flowers, I hear. There are wirey grasses and low, fuzzy, broadleafed plants, and tiny blooms tucked into rocks. All the walls are neat piles, no mortar, of course, but not drystone walling as I know it. They aren't carefully and neatly lain so that they fit. They are roughly stacked and piled, lots of gaps and holes in the walls, lots of daylight - but there's a sense of arrangement, too. First there will be horizontal stones, then there will be a stretch of vertical stones, then more horizontals. The walls don't fall down, so I guess they know what they're doing! And WIND!!! Forget about it! I never saw anyplace so windy as this seaside edge of The Burren! I took my sunglasses off because I thought they might blow right off my face! I thought my very hair might blow out from the roots. It was incredibly windy! It was approaching dangerous windy!!

8 April 2006 - Saturday
In Saint Nicholas (patron saint of sailors) Church, Galway:
"His lamentable death was occasioned by want of lights on the docks, into which he fell and was drowned, during a dark and tempestuous night, on the 21st of March, 1843, at the early age of 22."
"His death was occasioned by his Top having fallen from him and in stopping to regain it a Car rolled on him in the Street." 1837, he was 11 years old.

I met two little Irish kids in the Galway Library toilet - the boy about 7 or 8 asked me, "Where are you from!?" when I spoke to them. I said the States, but he didn't know that phrase, so I said America. He said, "Oh, I thought you were Italian or something!" HAHA! My accent must sound really weird to little kids!

The Hilarious Falling Mattress!
Don't you know, this would only happen to drunk girls who came into the dorm at 5:30AM. They had chosen the bunks nearest the door (thoughtful!), but they did not know - no one knew - that those bunks didn't match the others, and the mattresses didn't fit. They were too large. The drunk girls, as quietly as drunk girls can, stumbled into their cots, and the girl on the top rolled towards the wall - taking herself, her belongings and her entire mattress right over the side!!
Everything slipped noisily off the wall side and onto... the only heater in the room! Her mate was laughing hysterically, unable to conjure up the strength to pull her out, while the fallen one, in muffled tones, kept saying, Get me OUT of here, get me OUT of here, I'm getting burned! Which she was not, though it was warm. The one was bent over double laughing while the other begged and struggled, and finally said, I'm crawling out the bottom. She pushed everything away somehow and crawled out from under the bunks, strewing the floor with all of their remaining possessions.
I was laughing pretty hard by this time, but some other hostellers Were Not Amused. They kept muttering, Shut up, would you! Shut UP! I was laughing and the drunk girls were really laughing, uncontrollably!! They were off their heads with the giggles. I finally helped them rescue the tumbled mattress, mainly because my own sox and underwear had been drying on the heater, and now were lost in the jumble. But that top girl refused to go back up, and in the morning, I saw the two of them in the one bed, with the entire floor covered in sheets, pillows, duvet, clothing, shoes, backpacks, purses, makeup - like an airplane hold had exploded!! What a riot!!!

Irish Flora so far:
Gorse is in bloom. Apparently, it is in bloom roughly 10 months a year. It gives the predominant colour to the countryside right now. The flowers are a strong golden colour, lots of them on the ends of the many branches of the spiny plant. They smell lightly of coconut! They look like a pea blossom or lupine blossom. The spiny stems are a dusty green, though, so from a distance, the golden colour is muted and looks kind of bronzey. The gorse is also called furze, and those horrid spines make roses seem like daffodils - which are also in bloom. There is nothing to the gorse stems BUT spines. Each stem is a spine covered in spinelets that are covered in spine-ettes. Brushing past them, stepping through them, and most definitely, trying to take a pee among them is to be avoided!!
Also found in this area - palm trees, yucca and various tropical plants, unidentified trees so windbent that they have an east-leaning form at all times. The branches permanently look like a head of hair blowing back in a strong wind. Primrose, vetch, cowslip, orchids, cranesbill geranium, woodbine, burnet rose, sea pink (thrift), bindweed, stonecrop, gentian, harebell, and many different ferns. In many areas, everything is spiny or leathery or both - holly, bramble, ivy, scrubby pine, hawthorn, and... more gorse.

The Polish Invasion:
It seems that the Poles are the Central Americans of Ireland. There are thousands of them, they are in every town, they cannot speak English and they do all the manual labour. They have their own shops and church services and community structures and if there is a 2nd language on a sign in Ireland, it is not French or Spanish, it is Polish. Talking with them is exactly like talking with Manuel on Fawlty Towers - which is to say, bizarre and incredibly confusing... for both parties! Except the Poles are tall and round and they don't cower. In the Killarney hostel, they've got a Polish road crew living here. I don't think that's a really great idea. These places aren't for temporary worker housing. Here we hostellers sit, writing in our precious journals, while there they sit, sucking back hot coffee and making lunch packets of spam sandwiches on white bread with margarine. When worlds collide. Or don't! The two groups really just float around each other - like they're living in parallel realities.

12 April 2006 - Wednesday
These non-trad Traditional sessions have been perplexing me. Outside of Clare, wherever I've gone, I've seen Traditional Music listed at various pubs. Now sometimes, there isn't anything at all, because it's not summer season yet. But sometimes, I show up at 9:30 or 10PM - the standard starting-up time for entertainment - and am regaled with an amplified combination of Makem and Clancy songs, Irish Music Hall, 50s and 60s popular music, and trad instrumentals. There seems no distinction between a bar band and a session, between Traditional and Pop. It was Dympna, an Irishwoman living in London, who explained this version of Traditional to me.
She said that Traditional, to their crowd (families, friends, peers) meant that the specific tune or song in question was part of the player's or singer's repertoire - part of his or her "tradition." It did not mean that its composer was unknown - nothing of the type. She said her brother's special song was from Seven Brides and Seven Brothers - and that it was his Tradition to sing that song when they got together. In other words, Tradition to me means anonymously-composed ancient music, passed down in the oral tradition, while to them, it means the music we have chosen as our own, no matter where it comes from. Well, this certainly did go a long way to explaining the bad tourist sessions I've encountered. They know bleedin' well who wrote those songs - sometimes Elvis! - but they are in their personal "tradition" so they are Traditional.
Dympna's husband, Steve, said that the best (and hinted that the only real) sessions are spontaneous sing-songs in pubs or living rooms that move on to an instrument or two being produced and a night of random musical fun. One of the hostel keepers said that the Real Irish Music was not done in these public places, that, basically, they play it for themselves, and among themselves. It's all beginning to fall into place.

14 April 2006 - Friday
So here am I on the Dingle Peninsula, for Easter Weekend. I did know, but did not bother to take note of the fact that Ireland is closed during Easter Weekend. That's Good Friday (today), Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday. That's banks, bureaux de change, tourist infos, small shops, bakeries, and crime against humanity of all crimes - PUBS. OK, not all weekend. There are open slots here and there. So tonight, I shall, before 6PM, purchase myself a few cans of cider for the evening. And I shall sing all my folk songs on the 1.6km gorgeous walk back to the hostel, which was built in 1703 as a hunting lodge. During the Famine Years, it was a soup kitchen/hostelry for the emaciated, shivering, homeless local poor. And now, I sleep with 7 others in a gigantic room with high ceilings, a coal-burning fireplace (defunct, but hearth and mantel in place), and a deep double window with carvings around the frame. The kitchen is in a long back corridor that passes into the cobbled courtyard. It looks like one of those lovely enclosed yards from a Jane Austen-inspired film.

Tomorrow, however, things open back up again for a day. So tomorrow, it's back down the road to Dingle Town, to hire myself a bike and helmet. I will pedal up hill and down, all day long, rain or shine - and I'm sure to get both - in search of antiquities. This is another of those Irish areas that are chockablock with ruined monasteries, ruined oratories, ruined 9th-c. chapels, ruined ringforts and ruined ruins. I LOVE THIS STUFF!!!! The deal seems to be this: If it is a major tourist point, then it is owned by Duchas (Irish Heritage, more or less), it has a car park that is generally full of busses, it charges admission, and it is safety-sealed for my protection - don't climb, don't go, don't cross, etc. If it is anything else - and some of them are just as incredible as the first variety - it is owned by the Republic, somehow, but has no car park, no admission, and no warning signs or Trespassers Will notices. It also probably has no instant access - across a cow field, maybe, or over some walls and through a gap in a fence. This is just the kind of thing I go for! And tomorrow, on my hired bike, I will go for as many of them as I can pack into a day. Because Sunday, everything is closed again.

Sunday, I intend to walk the approx. 20km to Dunquin, at the end of Dingle Peninsula. There's no transport going there, anyway, so it's walk, hitch, or do not go. I've got a day to kill. I may as well. Once there, I'll try to take in a different set of antiquities/views - if I have any energy left! Easter Monday.... what shall I do?? I do not know, but I'm now inclined to figure out how to stay on the Peninsula until next Thursday. The reason is that I've discovered a trad music shop here in Dingle, and they gave me some great tips. The shop just opened in January, and the retired schoolteacher/accordian player owner is totally devoted to trad. He told me to forget about pubbing tonight, that I'd have a lonely and disappointing walk around town, but tomorrow, there will be 3 trad sessions, of which he is a part of one. Before hearing this, I was ready to leave tomorrow morning. Then his clerk who doesn't play, but does dance, told me that on Wed nights, there is a set dancing lesson followed by dance in the pub down the street. Well, shoot. If I'm trapped for four days anyway, I may as well make it six days and take in a dance!

Who Writes This Crap?
From Michelin's Green Guide to Ireland (on Irish music): "The instruments played are commonly the violin - called the fiddle by traditional musicians, the flute, the goatskin drum (bodhran) and the free-reed instruments such as the accordian, melodeon and concertina; and also more recently the guitar and banjo." "The harp is now rarely played." But best: "A feature of Irish traditional music is dancing, particularly set dancing, which dates from the 18c. and is, for the most part, an adaptation of military dances to existing tunes such as jigs, reels, hornpipes, and polkas." Who knew?

Death plaque of the Parish Priest of Dingle, May 1849: "... and in the end died a martyr to his Pastoral zeal, having inhaled the Poison of death in administering the last consolations of Religion to the plague-stricken members of his flock, during the cholera visitation of the above mentioned year."

The Dingle topography is mostly like the Connemara topography, with a similar colour to the landscape, but with a longer, grander sweep to the land. The slopes are long, and they are very green in the valleys, with plenty of good-looking grazing ground. Outside of Dingle Town stands a magnificent sheep-dotted green headland sweeping out to a high cliff over the bay. Dykes outline the sea edge of every field. They seem composed of drystone and packed dirt heaps covered in grass - like an upside-down ditch. I saw a beautiful sight down below the cliffs - a redhaired girl wearing a green sweatshirt, barelegged on the rocks, learning to play her recorder - sheep fields above her on one hand, a broken stone tower on the other - lovely!!

17 April 2006 - Monday
How about this scene I observed today? Outside the tourist attraction, Gallarus Oratory, a farmer was trying to herd his two dozen young cows out a gate - alone and with a cellphone in hand! No dog, no switch or stick, no companions. Of course, the cows wouldn't listen, and kept getting distracted/spooked by the tourists. The farmer was running around in his Wellies, talking into his cell phone, running and talking, clapping his hands, chasing cows, getting winded, running some more, talking on the cell phone some more. What was the deal with this guy?? Didn't they used to make 8-year-old kids herd cows? Eventually, one of his three companions joined him from outside the field, and two happy tourists got in on the act, too. The cows ran out the gate and the tourists all cheered!

Backtracking to Saturday... once the sobriety of Good Friday had passed, I trotted off to the Marina Bar, where Michael Herlihy, the trad music shop owner, had told me he was playing that night. Well! It was a real session, just like I expected (hoped for)(have been seeking). There was Michael on squeezebox, and he kicks ass!!!! Oh, my god, can this guy play! He was like Sharon Shannon on speed! But still hitting all the notes. There was a woman named Clare, who played guitar only once, but mainly sang, and had a really beautiful, sweet Irish sound, without that breathy, showy, drawn-out quality. There was a butt-kicking guitar player named Tommy, who could play jazz and blues and did some of his own songs, and comped brilliantly. He told me that Tim O'Brien was helping out with vocals on his (Tommy's) upcoming album. There was a fiddle player named Philip - details kind of forgotten about him. There was a woman on holiday with her man-friend, and they started by requesting a song ("Hard Times" as luck would have it) and ended by sitting in and singing songs themselves. There was me. I lifted my hand and volunteered to honour the Hard Times request, and it was off and running with the Babs after that. We sang and yakked and had a pint (well... it seems the others were having many more than "a" pint) and music was played and it was random and spontaneous and je ne sais quoi and just exactly what I wanted! Unamplified, sitting 'round a table, musical and social fun, with a jovial crowd and a lot of, as they say, Good Craic!!!

Easter Sunday in Dunquin, which is a nowheres kind of stretched-out collection of houses and no post office, I went to the only pub, which is part of an inn or guesthouse. What a bad room! It was one giant overbright box of a room, panelled in fake wood and floored in linoleum, pool table right inside the door, and a giant throng of young men hanging about it. At first, I didn't even hear the music, for the crowd of guys yapping away, though there were 8-9 musicians around a table. Well, they were quite good! And it was a real family affair in there - like I see up in Cape Breton - children, teens, all of the ages of adult mixing and moving through the big room, no one concerned about the presence of other generations, no one acting bratty (kids) or uppity (teens) or impatient (parents), everyone happy to socialize and hang around and hear tunes. The hostel keeper later told me that one of the players at that sesh is in the band Lunasa. There was an older guy sawing up the fiddle, and right next to him, a 9 or 10 year old boy, doing his best to keep up. There were two box players, two wooden flute players, a bodhran, and I don't recall what else. No songs whatsover, not even Wild Rover! Nothing was sung! And I was perfectly happy to while away a good hour there.

On the road from Inch to Tralee - Now whatever would possess someone to name his pub "The Randy Leprechaun???"

Groups, groups, groups. There is an Irish social standard that is all about the Group. "Do you have a family?" was asked me twice, and what it turned out they meant was "Do you have any children?" This is so very important. They are group-oriented, clannish, family-centered; they are not solo types. It's been commented to me several times that I am "brave" to be "on my own." I experienced this in England in 1993. It was weird then, and it's no less weird now. What the hell is so brave about going to a developed nation where English is the first language, and taking public transport, and seeing tourist sights? Geez. I'm not paddling down the Amazon, or bush-whacking with my machete through malarial regions, or spending a winter in Lappland! I'm just poking around Ireland, going to museums and for long walks!

Hostel Complaints
OK, here we go. Irish hostels are absolutely terrible. I'm so disappointed! They are generally cold and uncomfortable. Only at Clifden and in Killarney did they heat the dorms to a reasonably comfortable temp, and only Killarney heated the building throughout. Most rooms in most hostels are just too bleedin' cold.
But, they do supply duvets, so you'd think you could at least sleep warm. Let us talk about those duvets... and bedding in general. SKEEVY!!! None of the hostellers use sheets! There's a fitted sheet covering the mattress, but Hello!, this is the Mattress Cover. There's a pillow with a case on it, but Hello!, this is the Pillow Guard. There's a duvet. A duvet that your naked, drunk, stinky body is not meant to touch. Every morning, however, without fail, I wake to see naked arms and naked legs protruding from sheetless beds. They sleep in their u-trou, in a bare bed, in a freezing cold room. The women, at least, are wearing my style of pj - longjohns or flannel trou and a t-shirt. But they don't use sheets either. Well, it skeeves me to the max. I know for a fact that the staff does not wash the mattress cover or pillow cover, and most certainly not the duvet cover. One hostel only was a washing-hostel, and that was the first one, in Ennis. They had a great staff who spent from 10-3 cleaning, mopping, laundering, all kinds of making things fresh, and they worked fast! In all the other hostels, though, they fold the duvet and walk away.
I have yet to encounter a locker for my pack and possessions. Luckily, I'm travelling light, and have nothing of value outside of my passport, wallet and money. So I take my chances that no hungover, smelly, naked guy will steal my underwear and sox, and I leave my pack on my bed.
Only in Doolin and in Galway, did I get a good shower. The shower rooms are frequently the worst rooms - cold tile, cheap curtain tearing off the rings, thin trickle of water or water not warm enough - or both - one hook for all of your clothes, towel, etc, and no freakin' heat! Damn. Coming from a person who really likes cold, this is the oddest complaint, but it's my most frequent complaint, too.
In fact, every hostel is kind of busted, in one or more ways, and the prices are not cheap for this lack of comfort. The kitchens are dreadful, with leaky faucets, handleless pans, bent lids that don't fit, filthy and worn kitchen sponges, stained, damp, suspicious tea towels, no hand soap, watered-down dish soap, no drying area for the towels - no room heaters are the norm. The food storage space available is random. In some hostels, no one seems to bring food, and the shelves are totally bare. In some, everyone and their many cousins are bringing their food in, and the shelves are so crowded that I keep my food in the dorm.
Lighting is always dim and I can't see a thing in the buildings after dusk. Not with glasses, not at all. It's just too dark. And they insist, with all this cold, on keeping the windows open! All the windows open! What's with the freakin' open windows thing?? It's COLD. Why the helling hell would anyone want it any colder? But that's what I see, again and again.

However. Internet access is widely available and many places give a "free breakfast," which is really loaves of bread and pots of jam put by the toaster for everyone to help him/herself. I ask me: why the hell can't they buy kitchen sponges and suds, instead? Maybe shut the windows and turn up the heat and ditch the freakin' Internet and the toast brekkies? There's an odd focus on "extras" without providing the basics first. Irksome.

22 April 2006 - Saturday
Here I am in Cork City, having just discovered my favourite thing of the past... I dunno, month? at least week. There's a real covered stall market here, and I just about went out of my mind there today!
It's one of those old-fashioned places like Fanueil Hall pretends it is, but it isn't. It bears the unfortunate name of The English Market, and dates, I believe, from Victorian times. It's in downtown Cork, set in the center of a block like a huge covered courtyard, with tunnels leading to all four streets around it. You enter via an archway between two shops on one of the perimeter streets. You enter, all right, and go back 100 years! There's blood on the tiled floor and puddles of water, where they sort-of washed it away. There are butchers galore, and all of them in clean white suits with cute, perky little hats. There are fishmongers who have artfully arranged their fish (a langoustine in the mouth of a large fish, medium fish circling to grab their own tails). There are piles of giant oysters, and mussels and scallops and slabs of smoked salmon and mackerel. There are imported products and olives and greengrocers and bakers and flower stalls. There are chicken butchers who sell eggs of every type in every size. The butchers have meat I've only heard of, or never heard of - green ham, pig's trotters, tripe, black pudding, Clonakilty pudding, lamb's parts (kidneys, livers, hearts), drisheen, rashers, and oddly named cuts of meat, like "chump chops." And at one stall, they sold "pees." Happily, they were in the veg case, so I knew (hoped) it was only a misspelling!

It's incredible, and I freaked! The colours, the noises, the scents, all the people looking and poking and tasting and talking, everybody with their carrybag from home - me, too! It took me one time, paying .15 for a damned skinny disposable plastic bag. I bring my own hefty sack each time. And I loaded that baby today! I bought five kinds of farmhouse cheese to have a little sampling. I bought a huge loaf of buttermilk brown soda bread. I bought duck eggs and fresh bacon rashers and a fruit custard tart. I bought lamb's liver for dinner, which I cooked at the busted hostel with fresh thyme, white mushrooms and yellow onion, and served it up with spring potatoes and carrots. The Polish guests were watering at the mouth at my meal, but I didn't even make eye contact. Too much like teasing the puppy!

Time to discuss Peat: This is known as "turf" here. I've seen two museum exhibits that went into great detail explaining and describing the Turf Story. I have also found out that if you want to invest in some turf, you should not bother going to a turf accountant. For that is a bookie - horserace betting!
Back to turf. It seems that it's mostly only there because of human destruction. Ireland was heavily forested at one time, but when the hunter-gatherers became settled farmers, they got a bit over-eager in their land-clearing. They destroyed the forests, and the bare land left behind became eroded grassland, then super-soaked (it's a very rainy place) eroded grassland, which turned into acidic rotting matter, which eventually becomes peat. Enough years of this and the peat becomes very very deep.
To use it as fuel, it needs to be dried again. They have special cutters called slanes, which are like a sharp straight spade with a right-angle of metal jutting out at one side. They scrape off the sod on top and then start cutting strips of turf, which come out the size of the spade. These damp log-looking things are tossed around on the surface as they dig them out, then stacked up into tiny cone-like piles to air out and dry. All the work, in former days, was done by hand, including hauling it away sometimes, in giant wicker baskets on their backs. In other places, donkeys were loaded with a pair of these baskets for carrying away the turf.
It seems to burn steadily for a long time, making a good heat, but nearly no flame. It burns almost like coals. The smoke is rather insignificant, but burning peat sure does smell good - like earth plus Scotch whiskey!

26 April 2006 - Wednesday
Everyone's so hooked up! The cellphone/walkman/ipod headset is ubiquitous. They're all travelling with their little worlds revolving right around their little heads. If I had a headset on, imagine how much I would miss! I would not hear the Irish, English, French, German, Polish, Swiss voices around me. I would not overhear funny, enlightening, interesting or mundane conversations and turns of speech. I wouldn't hear how sirens differ or what kind of music they choose to play in a shop, mall, museum (yes!), bus or hostel. I would miss the amazing, LOUD and abundant bird songs, the sound of people watching the match as I pass in the street, or having a quarrel or playing their music, or listening to radio. If I had headphones on, I would miss the whole sound of this country, the sound of bells - church, bicycle, next-stop-on-the-bus, and the different ringtones of all the cellphones!

The most beautiful sight in Ireland - leaving Cork from the ferry port at Cobh... starboard shone green and port was glowing red as we slipped out of the harbour in the dark. I felt like a real emigrant, standing on the open deck, high above the men casting off the lines on the quay below, acrid oil-smoke pouring from the two stacks, out over our heads and up our nostrils! Every window on the shore twinkled and sparkled with the reflected lights of our bright ship as it passed by. Cobh is a terraced town, on an extremely steep hill, almost a cliff. The windows and doors of each higher street appeared above the roofs of the street below, stacked up and up and up, until the cliff seemed to be a huge vertical sheet of glimmering glass. Looking like a toy town, all the places I'd seen and visited the day before were viewed in miniature there on the shore as we sailed quickly past, and out into the blackness.

Oh my god this ferry is freakin' GOURMET!! OK. It's not gourmet. It's really rather spare. But, since everything is comparative, compared to the hostels in Ireland, it's GOURMET!!! The seats are bigger than airplane seats and with more leg room - though, they barely recline. There are about 200 of these giant seats and only 3 of us sitting in them. I got a window seat with a magnificent view. In fact, I could have had 15 window seats!
This ferry has the most spacious washroom with the most floor space, the largest sinks, the tanks all filled with soap, both air dryers and paper towels available, and, this damned ferry washroom has a shower! A good shower with hot water and a soap dish and a flexible hose to direct the spray, and real knobs, not some losing push button, and a drain that works and a real door that really shuts! Ohmygod, it's so gourmet - and all for we poor third-class steerage travellers. All... 4 of us! HAHA! Everyone else wasted their money on a cabin, but not me and Ms. Cheapskate over there dining on her sandwich, and Mr. Silent in the Corner and Mr. Dog Man, sleeping on the deck with his kenneled beast. We paid €32 for all this, and a 10-hour passage and I say we made out like bandits! I sweartagod, this is the life!!