It’s noon on Saturday, 16 February 2008, and I’m sitting in an expensive pub in Dublin (it is not fancy, just everything here is expensive), and they don’t have the Bailey’s cheesecake that caught my eye on the menu, so I have to settle for strawberry flan. As I watch the waitress pull up the dumbwaiter (minus my flan, please note), I hear the familiar opening chords to “Flashdance…What A Feeling” in the background. On impulse, and because I want to initiate a conversation with this group of relative strangers, I make some quick remark to the effect of “Hey, this is a pretty good song” and start tapping away with my fingers. Unfortunately, my three companions are likely engrossed with imagining the taste of the large stew and fish-and-chips heading our way. Oh well, I think, enjoying by myself the memory of Jennifer Beals cycling towards a hazy Pittsburgh skyline one 80s morn. Afterwards I realized that, given the time difference, it was just about sunrise on the east coast when I finally devoured my pitifully-small strawberry flan.
The reason for my presence in Dublin this past weekend was for a meeting with other students from my study-abroad program and our Irish coordinator. After classes I caught the 2pm bus from Belfast, and enjoyed some freshly-baked bread and cheese during the remarkably fast trip. Before 5pm I was walking the boardwalk along the Liffey, heading south past Trinity College and towards the hostel on Aungier Street. None of my fellow students had arrived yet, so I enjoyed more bread and cheese and read more about Germany since 1945 for a few hours. I finally met up with a student from Limerick and two from Cork, and we walked around the bustling downtown searching for a suitable (quiet and uncrowded) bar. After several tries, we eventually ended up just off Grafton Street at Davy Byrnes (Bloom visited it in Ulysses) and enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere for a while before returning to the hostel for a snore-filled restless night in the room of 26 people.
At least the hostel has a wonderful breakfast! I am now resolved to find a good recipe for brown soda bread, make lots of it, and eat it with delicious Irish butter and Nutella. Mmm! The four of us didn’t have to meet up with the coordinator and Dublin students in our program until 6pm, so we spent most of the day walking around Dublin and searching for James Joyce landmarks. O’Connell Street was bustling with people around the General Post Office, the Spire, a Joyce statue, and the Parnell Monument. We searched in vain for another Joyce landmark along Little Britain Street before heading to a pub for the previously-described lunch.
The afternoon was spent first strolling along Grafton Street: people watching, watching dancers, and unobtrusively photographing the alley from the opening scenes of “Once.” St. Stephen’s Green entertained us for a while as well, as well as a colorful shirtless character who warned us of our doom and compared himself to Elvis Presley. From there we entered the free National Museum of Ireland – Archeology for some interesting but exhausting learning about all things Ireland, from gold earrings and bog people to Viking ships and Egyptian mummies. I’m still not sure what the last one has to do with Irish history, oh well!
That evening we met four other students for dinner and a play. The dinner was delicious: bruschetta, seafood spaghetti, and (finally) cheesecake. The theatre was not quite as good: an aggravating tale of class, sex, and love, involving a semi-loyal male servant and a confused coquette called Miss Julie. Several of us went out to another pub that night before getting to bed fairly early.
Sunday morning was rather uneventful: a quick breakfast, a quick stroll over to the bus station, and a quick ride back to Belfast. The last thing I did in Dublin was count the number of cranes I could see in one area of the city: twenty, and that was only on one side of the bus! My biggest impressions of Dublin (besides the transportation ones: slick streetcar, double-decker busses, really long tolled tunnel) were an incredible sense of growth from the numerous buildings popping up, and a wonderful diversity of people, languages, food, etc. The streets were even busy on a normally-quiet Sunday morning. Dublin is much more cosmopolitan and “happening” than Belfast, although a clear tradeoff is that it is also much more expensive.
I should tell you about one more thing about Dublin, about when we went out to a pub Saturday night. As the bartender poured me a small glass of whisky, once again I heard a familiar tune sound beneath the chatter of Irish voices. This time I kept the recognition of “Maniac” to myself, so as not to burden my comrades with further dead-end conversation. I passed over my five Euros as Michael Sembello sang “Just a Steel-Town girl on a Saturday night…” and a thought passed through my head. I can’t get away from it! Immediately I knew it was just a premature and half-hearted thought, because it implied my trying to escape that city. And that is certainly far from true.
No comments:
Post a Comment