Dublin; Counties Galway & Clare – Friday, May 28th to Monday, May 31st
One wrong step and I would be a greasespot on the Atlantic. A slick patch of grass, a rogue gust of wind, and that would be the end of everything. I inched my shoe closer to the edge so that I could clearly see all the way to the bottom. Waves crashed against the stone some 600 feet below. I told myself that physically I was in an indistinguishable circumstance from standing near the edge of my porch steps, I’m not Gerald Ford where I encounter random stumbles just while ordinarily walking, so just as long as I wasn’t suddenly grabbed by a suicidal impulse I remained perfectly safe. Of course when you’re staring over the edge of guaranteed death at the Cliffs of Mohar in Western Ireland, it’s hard to keep that all in mind while maintaining a steady, calm heartbeat.
“Have you taken the picture yet?” I enquired of Dan, who was keeping more safely inland as he tried to work the exposure on my camera.
“Just a sec, I don’t think that last one took.”
I managed another inch or two of a closer vantage point, appreciating the full force of Kant’s aesthetic theory of the sublime, that sensation of being in the presence of something boundless, beyond all rational numerical quantification, that which is so imminently threatening and yet beyond the realm of touch that you’re simultaneously repelled and attracted to it. This attraction is what made the prospect of inadvertently stumbling forward seem all the more plausible. My brief attraction ended as soon as I had the all clear from Dan, and I quickly scurried back far enough such that if I were to randomly fall over I would have solid ground in all directions, and checked the results on the screen of my incredible fucking stupidity, which I now share with the world.
The five of us were in Ireland for an extended travel weekend placed in the middle of our philosophy program hosted in London. Being the experienced European traveler I had warned Dan, Mark, Evan and Courtney to plan early but it was tough to coordinate everyone who wanted to go until the week before departure, at which point all the nice £5 airline tickets were sold and we were stuck going via rail and ferry, a longer, more expensive way to get to Ireland, but more earthy and interesting as well. After a second train ride from Dublin to Galway that evening we were warmly welcomed to Ireland after a blind man we were helping to disembark from the train noticed our American accents. The first night involved only checking into our hostel and grabbing a pizza at a nearby shop, and then later getting a beer at a local pub (which sparked a debate on the epistemology of God and science with Evan until some local pub goers wanted to know where our accents were from). Even in this short time frame it didn’t take too long before I noticed that nearly every sentence spoken by the locals ends in either “there” or “yeah?”
“You go down this road, cross the River Corrib there, and you’re at Eyre Square, yeah? Then you just go round the corner to the left yeah and there’s the tour station there.”
While Galway itself I wouldn’t call an international destination location, the natural areas surrounding it were, and so a number of competitive tour companies have popped up in the city offering some fantastically good all-day tours for fantastically low prices. This first day’s tour started with a drive out of the city,
through small villages with hay-thatched roofs, and eventually deposited us to take a walking tour of some guy’s backyard (really). Of course that would be failing to mention that his backyard includes a cattle farm plus an entire mountain… the result was a spectacular introduction to the Irish countryside, and finally a chance to see a part of Europe not just for its cities with historical sites and tourist hotspots. The landscape of western Ireland is without a doubt some of the most beautiful I’ve seen anywhere in the world: the emerald green hills and trees interrupted only by the occasional stony grey limestone mountain or castle, with a calm quietness and a clean mist that seems to hang permanently in the air, giving this world an immediate tactile presence even when you close your eyes. My shoes after five months of European traveling were well worn through and this walking tour certainly didn’t aid matters, my socks completely drenched by the grass’s morning dew by the time we returned to the house for homemade pie and ice cream.
Further south was the Cliffs of Mohar. While Mark, Evan and Courtney ventured along the right side of the cliff where a large barrier and clean pathway for the tourists had been erected along with a photogenic lookout tower, Dan and I elected to take the less traveled route to the left, where the walkway eventually terminated with a broken fence and several signs reading things like “Private Property: Do not go beyond this point”, “Extreme Danger: risk of death”, and a memorial for “those who have lost their lives at the Cliffs of Mohar”. Rather than turn back Dan and I (as well as everyone else!) simply hopped the fence and continued our stroll down the unpaved, unbarricaded open cliff side. Ah, Ireland.
The Burren is a region south of Galway featuring large expanses of limestone terrain that can resemble a lunar landscape. As if one journey close to a cliff’s edge was not enough that day, when the bus made a stop for us to explore the alien terrain it was conveniently close to yet another unprotected sheer fall to the Atlantic (although this one was only 300-400 feet deep… presumably meaning that it will kill you even faster after you fall off the side). The tour concluded some seven hours after it began with a stop at Dunguaire Castle, a small 16th century stone fortress overlooking a small lake, not entirely unlike the one Graham Chapman and John Cleese had animal feces dumped upon outside the door (it’s not the same castle, however).
If our second day’s tour to the Connemara region north of Galway was lacking in the same amount of mortally dangerous landscapes, it came with a much deeper humanism. I was aware of a long-standing animosity the Irish have had towards the British, but never realized the extent or indeed creativity of prickishness that caused that animosity. During the time of British rule, a rule was put into effect that when a father dies he must divide his land between all of his sons rather than give the entire property over to just the eldest and let the others go into different lines of work. After a few generations of land division the large farm range that was once capable of feeding an entire family for a year had been sectioned off with stone walls
into land sizes barely capable of fitting a house. Thus when the potato famine came along (which affected all of Europe), the Irish suffered by far the worst because they had no other food to survive upon. The British did do a few nice things like offer paying jobs for some Irish families to prevent the country from falling absolute destitution. These jobs mostly consisted of building rock walls up and along the sides of mountains. Why? No reason other than it being work that would ensure nothing of use-value is actually accomplished and the country never becomes an independent economic power.
In fairness the Irish do make it a bit easy for them to get picked on. My favorite story was when wine was first introduced less than a generation ago a wife found her husband sick in bed after visiting a wine festival.
“How much drinkin’ must you have been doin’ to get a hangover? I can’t fathom the last time this has happened to ya.”
“No, it couldn’t a been the wine that caused it, I only had a couple o’ pints!”
This would explain why in a land that has few trees or other natural obstacles it is still near impossible to find a non-weaving road over open countryside. The traffic signs make even less sense;
at one point we came upon a small gravel driveway that was marked for 80 km/h while the main paved two-lane roadway it was attached to was only 60 km/h… provided you turned left out of the drive, going the other direction on the same road would have a 65 km/h limit. One interesting thing I learned (and indeed this fits a hypothesis I made back in my Erlebnispark Tripsdrill report regarding what it means for something to be culturally real in this day and age) was that the Celtic music heard and appreciated around the world would have died out a while ago had people from other countries not discovered it and told them it was something special they should try to preserve.
Connemara was, like the rest of western Ireland, incredibly beautiful; treeless mountains and still ponds everywhere. A stop at a small rapids cut in the stone from a creek offered a chance to risk spending the rest of the day in soaked clothing should any of our feet have slipped on a rock. Most entertaining however was stepping onto a raised bog. It looks like just a normal patch of grass from the road, but the water underneath protected by a dense layer of peat meant that it would bounce like a trampoline when we all jumped on it. Crazy stuff, too bad they’re becoming increasingly rare. I think Ireland could solve a lot of their political-economic problems if everyone had a bog to bounce on each day.
The centerpiece of the tour was Kylemore Abbey, a modern castle, monastery and botanical gardens open for tourists. The first view we had of it from across a small lake looked like something you’d see on a postcard or puzzle. It was much too easy to take a good photo, so once inside we headed off to the botanical
gardens to flex our photographic muscles some more with a plethora of flower, landscape and still-life shots. The nearby castle was more amazing to look at from across the water than up close, its clean stone and small stature giving it away as a relatively modern product from the late 1800’s compared to the much older and larger structures built centuries earlier around Europe. The story of its original inhabitants, I think an English philanthropist drawn by the peace and beauty of the Connemara region and hoping to help the Irish people, ended rather tragically with the early death of his beloved wife whom he finished building the castle a year before to live with, and he soon left (although, full disclosure, it’s been a while since I took the tour and I might be getting it confused with the backstory of Disneyland’s Phantom Manor.)
Towards the end of the tour we made a stop at a small Irish pub, where we had advice from the driver that it was one of the few places that makes a good Irish coffee. Dan and I agreed to take the opportunity to each try one. What’s an Irish coffee, you may ask? Well, as I discovered it basically coffee mixed
with whiskey (figures) that in this case tastes like liquid gold.
As we dined by the riverside in Galway that night we seemed in uniform agreement that the two days in Galway were a success beyond even our highest expectations. Feeling obligated to see just a bit more before setting sail back to London the next morning, the guys went out to do a bit more sightseeing around the city, setting off to see something called the “Spanish Arch” which was supposed to date back to the 1500’s. We discovered we were not the only people interested in the arches, as a handful of local revelers were already gathered underneath. The fact that we were tourists was hard to conceal and so we quickly got drawn into a long, erm, conversation, of sorts.
“You all are obviously tourists ’cause you all like this old historical shit. You all from Canada or America?”
“Michigan.”
“I’ve no idea what that is. You’re Canadians aren’t you?” He pointed out Mark and me. “I know a French-Canadian when I see one, and these two are definitely French-Canadian.”
Evan started to interject, “Well I don’t think you can really say that…”
“-Oh my God, you know what you sound like? Sorry, I don’t want to offend you but say something again.”
“Uhh… what? Something?”
“You sound exactly like the American cartoon mouse! I’m being completely honest, I always thought that was a TV thing, I didn’t know it was actually real!”
Evan had no further comment. Our new friend turned his attention to the gangly long-haired Dan.
“And you, you’re from Hanson, aren’t you?” A drunken version of Mmmbop followed.
“And actually,” he pointed to me when he finished, “I take it back, you’re not a French-Canadian.”
“Oh, well that’s a relief to find out…”
“No, I’ve been looking at you and I’ve decided you’re actually a German porn star!”
“Oh.”
“I vill bust through ze vagina vith my five-meter ramrod! I swear to god that’s you!”
After acknowledging that he was drunk off his feet he offered some final parting words of wisdom and solidarity, then sent the French-Canadian, cartoon mouse, Hanson and German porn star back on our merry way, trying to get far enough out of earshot before finally doubling over in laughter.
We had one final morning in Ireland before our afternoon ferry was scheduled to depart, which we decided to use to see a bit of Dublin. Courtney had a friend studying in Dublin who we were hoping could give us a tour of the city but had to drop out, so we decided to go with another guided tour. The first thing we saw after arriving at the train station was the large chimney belonging to the Guinness brewery,
hiding behind enormous closed gates like a soot-black Wonka chocolate factory. Compared to Galway and western Ireland, Dublin seemed unfortunately flat and dirty. The historical walking tour we booked began in Trinity College and took us around various locations of the houses of Parliament and historical Dublin. It seemed complete but almost too complete, lots of stopping to give us endless historical monologues I should have taken notes on as I can scarcely recall any of it, partly as I was scouting for any locations I might have recognized from the film Once. We did get a recommendation on a good place to get some typically Irish fare before our ferry left, where I was able to order a Guinness stew pie with a pint of O’Hara’s Irish Stout. I wasn’t a beer drinker before I left for Europe and indeed in the months since my return
my intake has averaged less than a glass a month, but during the time spent in England and especially Ireland I probably consumed more of the substance than I will over the rest of my life, as seemed mandatory with any meal less I miss out on an opportunity to partake in the local ‘culture’.
The journey back to London was a bit of nightmare. First of all (we had originally discovered this on the way in) the receipt issued to us by the ticket desk had departure times and seat numbers for a company called Irish Ferries, but then the actual ticket itself was simply for the competing Stena company with no further information. We arrived in the port at Holyhead, Wales shortly after 1:00am, where we then got to sleep the rest of the night in the ferry/train station as we waited for our morning train.
I slept anyway, being the old pro after two previous overnights on floors or hard metal benches in Switzerland and Italy; by comparison the heated interior and ample room to stretch my legs was a luxury accommodation. We were forced to split up midway through the journey after a stiff upper lip insisted he had a reserved seat at our table, despite the presence of numerous other single unclaimed seats nearby. We arrived in London Euston and immediately went back to the apartment to crash in our beds… or so we wished. In fact we had to go directly to our 8:00am morning class which we were an hour late for. Our professors were more angered at the other five in our class of ten who elected to stay behind in London for the weekend and not miss the hour of class, so evident was it what a once in a lifetime learning experience our weekend in Ireland was.
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