Tales From the Crypt

It seems each year that the closer we get to coming home, the harder it is to sit down every evening to post to the blog. We have such a luxury of time when we travel in the summers that it is easy to feel like there will always be time later to see this and visit that but once we’re within days of our return flight, we realize that there is precious little time left. 

Sunday morning, we went to Riordan’s for breakfast and then for a last walk through the Latin Quarter and then our neighborhood. We revisited some shops and tried to get back to a music store where Chris had looked at a bouzouki. Alas it was closed on Sunday. I’ve not ever been, but the Latin Quarter had a look I imagine the French Quarter has in New Orleans after Mardi Gras—if a street can be a little bleary-eyed, it certainly was. At 11 a.m., barkeeps were dumping buckets of water onto the sidewalks in front of their establishments, sweeping debris into the street and looking a bit haggard after the thrill of an 80 degree Saturday night with a full moon. We got to the station just in time to purchase tickets for the 2 p.m. bus, and, while I’m glad that we had the car for the week in Donegal and the week in Galway, the buses in Ireland are easy to navigate, clean and have wifi so our trip from Galway to Dublin was pleasant.  

Within steps of the bus station, it is apparent that Dublin is a major metropolitan area and gorgeous. The skyline here is textured, every building is from a different era, a different color stone, representing a different architectural style. In order to get to our B&B, which I probably would not recommend anyone else use, but which has given Chris and I multiple opportunities to laugh out loud in the last few days, we needed a cab because it is outside the city center. Lemonade: It’s interesting to see both the bustle of the commercial district and a more residential area. We arrived after 6 and there was some confusion—perhaps only on our part—about en suite arrangements: we thought we had them, but our host, Allan, did not. Our room is hilariously small. Chris doesn’t fit on his bed and we also probably thought we had arranged for a room with one bed, not two.  There isn’t a chair or a table so we’re using the sink for all different purposes than it was originally intended, and there is a small area in the clearance from the door that we use to stand. Whatever. We’ve had a good run in this country with our accommodations, and this room is sufficient. Allan told us there was a single restaurant within walking distance and then told us about a “short cut” to get there. We followed his directions to the best of our ability (“take a left and then take another left”), but it took us so long to find the restaurant that the kitchen was already closed. The bartender took pity and said he would find something for us to eat and then all of the air was sucked out of the room when the waitress who had to stay after her shift ended found out. There was some slamming of plates and we had to pay for our meal before we ate and we were never shown a menu. So our Sunday evening introduction to Dublin, what with our B&B not being quite what we had in mind and our server being actively mad at us in the restaurant, was rocky at best. The city redeemed itself on Monday.

A bus to the city center stops right in front of our door and we took it downtown after breakfast. We walked through the Temple Bar area, up and down streets as narrow as corridors looking for music shops where Chris could purchase an instrument. We found a few shops and he played octave mandolins and bouzoukis and settled on a bouzouki with a pick up to bring back to his teaching. There was some question about shipping or carrying and he decided to carry so I’m glad I had one airport experience on this trip that was unencumbered and easy. In any case, the end result will be worth it with more music at home. We had lunch at a place called Crave Pitta Café (because they call pitas here pittas) and had a nearly perfect lunch. Chris had beef with picked cabbage on brown bread and I had a pitta with gorgonzola and parma ham with relish.

After lunch, we spent the bulk the afternoon in the medieval district, where we visited Dublin Castle and Christ Church Cathedral. We didn’t tour Dublin Castle, just meandered around it and into the Revenue Museum which was the littlest bit interesting because, of course, the oldest records the town has are from the Custom House, but it didn’t hold our attention any longer than doing our own taxes would. Maybe our accountant would find it more of a thrill. An interesting note about the castle is that it is in municipal use today. We did tour Christ Church which was incredible. Like the city itself, the building is a collage of styles and movements. The oldest parts of the building date back to 1030: Strongbow was buried there in 1170, Henry II attended Christmas mass there in 1171 and in 1742 Handel’s Messiah was sung for the first time. There are 63 different medieval mosaic tile patterns throughout the Cathedral floors and a Gothic chapel will abut a Romanesque chapel so that in one view a visitor sees both pointed arches and rounded ones. There is a Cathedral Crypt dating from the 11^th century and it is the largest crypt of its kind in Ireland or England. It was unlike anything that I might expect—they use the space as a museum for the treasures and artifacts that remain from 1000 years of the cathedral above. There are gifts from kings there and books with ancient church records, tabernacles commissioned for special use (and a series of costumes from the show The Tudors, which was filmed there).  

We came back to the tiny room after that to prepare for our evening. It will come as no surprise that Chris made lasting friendships at Blas and we were invited to stay with his friend Albert while we were in Dublin. We had already made our arrangements when he offered so we couldn’t take him up on that, but we were glad to agree to an evening in the city with him. He took us to a restaurant downtown for what he called real Irish cuisine, and it was lovely. It was a pub setting but it wasn’t pub food and we enjoyed his company more than anything else, but if I could remember the name of the place, I would recommend the restaurant, as well. After, he took us to Cobblestones, a pub famous for its trad sessions and we had a pint and listened to the music. From there, he took us to another pub where the session takes place in the snug and between the music and the pints and listening to Albert talk about his experiences growing up in and now living in Ireland, we had a rich evening. The day was full enough that though Chris’s feet hang right off the end of his bed, we both fell fast asleep.

And Then, And Then, And Then, And Then

Today was full. We used every minute. Our last full day in Galway, we got up and went to the Fort Hill Graveyard, called so because it was St. Augustian’s fort situated upon a hill. It’s a notable cemetery in that three hundred beheaded soldiers from the Spanish Armada of 1588 are interred there and, I suppose, just because of its age relative to other cemeteries. Its layout is chaotic. There are graves literally everywhere, with only one main narrow path through the grounds, and it is impossible to get elsewhere without trampling over the large stones. 

We also spent some time at the Galway City Museum which is free but could charge for admission. There are three floors of exhibition space. The first floor is dedicated to prehistoric and medieval Galway, a subject about which archeologists learned a great deal when the municipal roads were being created.  The second floor had an exhibition about dance halls in the mid-20^th century and Irish censorship of films. Humphrey Bogart couldn’t get a complete cut of one of his films seen in this country for a long time: Casablanca was banned (Ireland was neutral during the war!), and The Big Sleep was banned (Kissing is bad!) among others. The third floor was most interesting with an exhibition about Galway and the Wars of Empire, including Irish soldiers’ involvement on behalf of the British in the Crimean and South Africa. There were WW2 recruitment posters in the exhibit, as well, including one with the McMahon crest.

We came back in the midafternoon because we had to move today, because we decided to stay an additional night in Galway. Our apartment was needed for another party today, but Crescent Close had another unit available for the night—a four bedroom house, so here we are. It’s a treat, actually, because it lends us some insight about what an actual Galwegean home might be like. The street door opens into a narrow and steep staircase. And to the left and just ahead are doors, one opening into a sitting room with a fireplace and a picture window and the other into a country kitchen and the bedrooms are upstairs. The floors are thick planked and dark. It’s legit charming. 

After we settled in, we visited St. Nicholas’ Collegiate Church, built in 1320 and, not surprisingly, filled with history. St. Nicholas is more recently associated with Santa Claus, but at the time this church was built he was more commonly revered as the patron saint of sailors. Like other churches we’ve been to here, there were regimental banners from the Peninsular War hanging in the church, these from the Connaught Rangers, an army division formed in 1793. It reinforces the close connection between religion, politics and strife in this country. Trivia Bits: It is believed that Christopher Columbus worshipped at the church in 1477 and Cromwell—reviled in all parts of Ireland—used the building to stable his horses when he took the city in 1652.

Sometime and somewhere in our walks today, we passed a poster for the Galway Arts Festival and Chris said, “Doesn’t that guy look like Francis Guinan?” And we talked about all the plays we’ve seen him in and all the shows (most recently Boss—so, so good) and talked about how often he throws on an Irish accent. And then we looked at the poster again and decided it was Francis Guinan. And then we found our way to the Galway Arts Festival theatrical box office and bought ourselves tickets to tonight’s performance of Stella and Leo at the Town Hall Theatre. We’ve seen some rotten theater on vacation so the bar isn’t set terribly high, but this was a good performance of a good script. 

We hadn’t time for dinner before the show, but afterwards we stopped at a little pizzeria on the way back to our neighborhood where the waiter was beside himself they had such a rush today. Normally on Friday, they sell 50 pizzas but with the festival in town today they had sold 175. Ours was the last bit of dough; the kitchen told him he could take no more orders after ours. We sat in a big open window right on the street and people watched as Saturday night got off the ground, because remember that the sun doesn’t set until after 10:30. Walking through the Latin Quarter after dinner was like Grant Park on the Fourth of July. All of Galway was outside, throbbing with terrific energy. It was alive and bright from the huge full moon sitting over Galway Bay. Now, though, we’re back in our enormous house thinking about the good bits of today and thinking, too, about tomorrow. Tomorrow, we leave for Dublin.

Banoffee = Banana + Toffee

Today was a simple perfect day. It was our last day with a car so we decided to drive in a direction we hadn’t yet been: east and then south around Galway Bay. The car was due back midafternoon so we actually only made one stop in our drive and that was in Kinvara. We saw a sign just before town that we don’t see every day. It said “Drive Carefully—Castle Ahead” so we drove carefully and visited Dunguaire Castle, named for Guaire, the King of Connaught who died in 662 A.D. ^th century, the castle welcomed notable Irish literary figures to come and associate and share their work. In that tradition, the castle continues to host medieval banquets in the evening and at those banquets anachronistic Irish poetry is read. Alas, we would have to return the car before such a banquet could be attended.

The castle was not built until 1520 and is not a military castle, but a tower house or fortified residence that remained in use as a residence until the mid-1960s. In the early 20

We continued down the road, intending to drive on a bit, but the village of Kinvara was just around the bend. While it seems every town here is charming, this one had a certain atmosphere and a Friday’s farmer’s market so we stopped. The first tent at the top of Main Street sold gooseberries and Wexford strawberries. Moving on from there were tents with kelp-based bath salts, homemade lanolin soaps, kale, pea pods as long as my forearm, teas and sweets. We decided quickly we would forgo driving further and settle in. There was a trio of musicians playing—the Fair Weather Band, the singer of which mentioned that this was the single best day of the year so their name didn’t have the same ironic appeal it usually does. We choose a Sri Lankan tent from which to get lunch and while the woman was making our curry and pancakes, Chris asked a man where he had gotten his beer. There was a bit of a laugh and the man told him he had gotten it from the pub. Here, you can walk right out of the pub with your beer and drink it wherever else; please return the glass. Chris went in for a shandy—an idea to which bottled American beers do not do proper justice. In Ireland, a shandy is a beer with lemon soda poured right in. I don’t know how popular they are in the winter, but on a day like today it is totally refreshing. 

Returning to Galway was a pleasant drive, although on the way back we had to find the Enterprise office which, now that we’ve done it, I have no idea how Chris found it the first time when he was there by himself earlier this week. It’s in an industrial park and you can’t see it from the frontage road and it’s in a location that makes you believe you’re not in the right place the entire time until you pull up in front of it. We negotiated a fair-ish refund for the troubles we had with our rental and the whacky day Chris spent at the mechanic and Colin and Padraig brought us back to the Spanish Arch in the Latin Quarter. Along the way, they regaled us with their stories about being pizza delivery guys in a city with no street signs, making us feel better about how difficult it was for us initially to find our apartment. The Irish language is confusing and, according to Chris who took two weeks’ worth of classes in it, difficult to learn because there are no pronunciation rules. Padraig explained that his name is pronounced Porrig and the Irish think it’s funny that Padraig Harrington is called “Patrick” in international golf coverage. We asked them if there was a minimum wage in Ireland and there is. At one point recently, it was lowered, but had to be raised again for the politicians to be re-elected. 

There was a pottery fair in the plaza along the quay when we got back to our neighborhood which was fun to window shop our way through. When we headed out this evening for dinner, we had a destination in mind. Last night, we passed a tiny three-booth restaurant named The Pie Maker and we wanted to return there for a meal. It was one of the better meals we’ve had here. Perhaps obviously, they make pies. Chris had a pie with chorizo, mozzarella and pesto and I had one with chicken and mushroom and both were delicious. They came with salad with tomato and beets and it was a treat to have something other than carrots and cabbage. They also have sweet pies and we had a banoffee pie for dessert which was terrific. Again, everyone should go to The Pie Maker.  After dinner, we walked in and out of shops and then along the quay, where it seemed all of Ireland had come to drink their beers and ciders in the sunshine. I’m sure it’s always a busy spot on a Friday evening, but something about this weather is calling everyone out of doors (we’ve seen a lot of badly sunburnt red heads in the last few days) and something about this place makes it seem like everyone is relaxed and having fun. I like it here.  

Gaeltacht Islands

To the west of Galway are tiny coastal towns situated on bedrock shores that seem unbelievable and uninhabitable. We drove along the northern coast of Galway Bay towards the Atlantic. About 30 kilometers out of town, the road splits and we chose the leg that brought us to a small series of islands beginning with Leitir Mohr. The island is connected to the mainland by a long stone bridge and, after passing over it onto Leitir Mohr you no longer feel you’re part of the world. The buildings are ancient and far removed from one another.  The next stone bridge brings you to Garmna, which is more desolate, and the last bridge ends in Leiter Meallain, where we spent some time. The roads are narrow, barely a single lane, and it’s amazing to think about them being paved when there doesn’t seem to be two inches in a row of flat land that isn’t interrupted by crags. It appears that the glaciers receded on Tuesday, just before our arrival. There are huge boulders, The topsoil is shallow, it can be as little as six inches, but grasses and wild flowers take root in between those rocks and the contrast is lovely. The soil must be acidic, because hydrangeas grow here and the blooms are vibrant peacock blue and plum purple. On this last island in the string, it’s possible to drive a distance without seeing another person, although there are homes here and there, with captivating views of the ocean.  There’s no apparent commerce on the island and Chris and I wondered what people did for work.
taller than me, and more of every other size between that and a pebble. In some places, it looks like winter because the hills are capped in white rock that looks like snow from a distance.

It didn’t seem possible that there could be a brown sign on this pin prick of an island, but at the farthest point on Leiter Meallain there is a Heritage Center. It is one man’s collection of anthropological and sociological artifacts from the area that he accumulated over a lifetime. There are ration books from World War II and rosters from famine ships. There are photos and newspaper clippings and commemorative JFK decorations. There are squeezeboxes and wooden phones. And there is a charming young girl who is out there by herself manning the Heritage Center, who explained that there isn’t much possibility for work and while people come to the island to study Irish language because it is a Gaeltacht area, people are suffering the high level of unemployment. She pointed us in the direction of a must-see Tra (beach) and a Napoleonic tower on another island just offshore. 

We were able to walk to the beach from the Heritage Center, and it was a special little spot, with sand enough for several people to lay on with their toes in the surf, surrounded by craggy, impossibly grassy fields and there were horses all about grazing and neighing. Again, it didn’t feel like we were any longer in the world I live in but had been transported somewhere idyllic. Occasionally, you find yourself in a place that feels like a threshold and this was one of those: just special and quiet and natural and reminiscent of the geological past. 

The farther one drives on these tiny islands, the more narrow and less paved the roads become and I didn’t know if we would make it to the tower, but we got close enough to walk over the bedrock to see Golam Island and the tower that was built in case of a French invasion. On Chris’s tablet, it is possible to take 360 degree panoramas and this was a fun part of the world to play with that feature. 

We retraced our steps, driving back through these tandem islands until we were again on the mainland and continued west. Connemara ponies are famous and they’re everywhere here, like sheep in Donegal. That said, all the shops showcase Aran wool and the Aran Islands are just off the coast of County Galway, so one is never too terribly far away from a serious lot of sheep.

Chris commented today that he thought he would probably dream of trucks driving straight at him for months to come. He’s done a commendable job keeping us both safe, but we return the car tomorrow and I don’t think either of us will miss it. 

We ended our day with dinner at The Front Door on High Street in the Latin Quarter and had piles and piles of food, including a bowl of carrot and coriander soup that was rich and delicious enough to have served as the meal itself.  There is a lot of good soup in this country. I could eat it every day. Oh wait, I do.

360 degrees of Sandra

This is at a Napoleonic tower on the island of Leitir Meallain in Connemara Co. Galway. We were alone.

So I Thought He Was Dead Again

Today, I thought Chris was dead and at just the same time he was ready to kill someone. It was a bit of an off day, the kind of day when you realize you’re absolutely blessed to have so very many days of vacation. One of the things that was so stressful about nearly running out of gas in the middle of somewhere not on a map yesterday was that the car was wheezing and limping along like a soldier who can only drop to his death but wants to free himself of the actual battlefield before he actually lets go. When we were finally pulling out of the gas station, it sounded as if we were pulling along Oscar the Grouch and his garbage can behind us and when we made the tight turn into Crescent Close the terrible scraping noise resumed. It was loud enough and of enough concern that Chris and I both got down on the ground to see if we were, in fact, dragging ironworks behind us but there was nothing visibly obviously wrong with the car. Chris decided, for safety sake, that we should return it to the rental agency in exchange for another car that worked and he took off this morning to do that. He mentioned that the office was on the way out of town, but Galway City is small, so I anticipated it might be an hour or so before I saw him again. I took a shower, practiced the tin whistle, read my book, tidied up, looked out the window, wondered where he was and read my book some more. An hour passed and then two. We only have one key to our apartment and he had it with him so I wasn’t able to leave. I looked out the window some more and wondered some more where he was. A played through a number of scenarios: one in which he was lost because he didn’t have a navigator in the passenger seat; one in which he  experienced irreconcilable differences with the rental car agency and had to take public transportation back to the apartment; one in which he was distracted by something shiny like traditional Irish music; one that looped and looped again: that he had run into car trouble before he even reached the car rental agency and was either desolate on the road somewhere out of town or—of course—dead. A third hour passed and I wondered how one contacts the authorities when one doesn’t have a phone (or a key to their own apartment, for that matter). A fourth hour passed and I wondered if my sister would come to Galway to help me with the body, even though she was just in Ireland last month and it would be an expensive proposition. And when there was a knock on the door, I thought perhaps the authorities were alerting me and dreaded to answer, but Chris was on the other side of that door, though he no longer had the key to the apartment and he was no longer as happy as he was when he left.

His time had been different from mine because there was no reason for him to think that I was dead. He had made it relatively easily to the car rental agency, only taking one wrong turn or two, but when he arrived, he wasn’t met with the kind of customer service he had hoped for. Every day here, we’ve talked about how stunning and simply soothing people’s kindness here is, but that isn’t what he experienced. Instead of doing an easy switch of cars, the agency had Chris bring our rental to a service station, where he had to wait while the mechanic replaced the brakes on the car. The mechanic mentioned that he has the rental agency contract and the car was long past due for service. It was maddening enough that Chris was losing precious hours in Galway sitting at the Irish equivalent to a Midas, but the mechanic then took the car out for a spin with him to check out his work on the brakes and discovered that the unfortunate, grinding, ripping sound that motivated us to bring the car in the in the first place continued and the mechanic deemed it unsafe to drive. He dropped Chris back at the rental agency and drove away in the broken car… with the only key we had to our apartment on the ring. Only after several hours did the agency then give Chris a different car, and they drew him a map to get himself back to the service station to pick up the key to our apartment. Unfortunately, the map was a straight-ish line, a curved line and a line that ended in a hook. The verbal instructions didn’t help and Chris never made it back there so our key was lost, probably quite a bit after he lost his good mood.

Luckily, he found some humor in our attempt to get an additional key from our host, Ugne, who wasn’t home at the time, and her worker George asked us for our key so that he could run out and make a new cut of it. We finally got that settled and, with new car parked in the lot and new key in our hand, we went for a walk to re-start the day. And it was a beautiful afternoon, full of sunshine and breeze. The Galway Arts Festival is currently running so there are musicians playing everywhere in the streets and music spills out of pubs, so a walk through the neighborhood is like a progressive concert. We went to music stores searching for bouzoukis for Chris to bring home and found a bakery from which we could buy brown bread and raspberry muffins that we started to eat even before we crossed the threshold back to the street. We had dinner at a tiny place with pub food and Chris had shepherd’s pie and I had bacon and cabbage. The meals started with seafood chowder for him, which had huge chunks of fish in it, and vegetable soup for me, which was delicious and between our two entrees we had six scoops of mashed potatoes and probably an entire head of cabbage. It was good comfort food after a stressful day, even if we did leave behind four scoops of mashed potatoes.

We ended the day at the pub across the street for the session there, in which a fiddler played, a squeeze box, a flute and a drum and then another fiddle when Chris joined in; I love it that the music is communal and anyone can play, and I’m sure Chris likes it all the more. Tomorrow we’ll go somewhere outside of Galway to take advantage of having the stupid car that we have… maybe southwest. We’ll see.