Laundry Day

It’s been dizzying. We made an offer on a short sale property several months ago and nothing happened and nothing happened and we heard nothing and nothing happened and then there was a flurry of activity in the last few days when our offer was accepted but we had so much paper work to process remotely. That required three separate trips to the County Donegal Stationery shop, where the lovelies there could not have been more helpful as we printed and signed and scanned and emailed and did the same three days in a row.

Over breakfast yesterday, Eugene shared some of his thoughts about the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants. It was clear talking to him and one of the girls in the stationery store that many of the Irish in Ireland would like to cut Northern Ireland loose and say no fare-thee-wells. 

We repacked our bags and left Letterkenny for what may or may not be the last. On the road we talked about what might bring us back; it’s a beautiful part of the world and it very well might beckon.

We stopped in Donegal Town on our way south and toured Donegal Castle, built by the O’Donnells in the 15^th century and donated to public works in 1898. It sits right above the River Eske and is a lovely site for the small market running on the grounds while we were there.  Donegal Town is bustling on a Saturday, and there are people everywhere. We stopped into a music shop, and Chris bought tin whistles for his students and chatted with the owner about traditional Irish music.

We stopped again in Drumcliffe to see St. Columba’s Church of Ireland. There is a 10^th century round tower there on the site o
f another of Colmcille’s monasteries, established in 547. The round tower was struck by lightning in the 1300s and has suffered some other wear and tear since then but still stands. There is a high cross there, as well, with hand-carved depictions of bible stories. We stopped not for these things, however, but because W.B. Yeats is buried in the graveyard beside the church, where his grandfather had been pastor. His epitaph is taken from one of his final poems about the area and reads: “Cast a cold Eye / On Life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by.”

The day was growing long and we drove straight from Drumcliffe to Galway. Galway is a large city compared to the places we’ve been so far while in Ireland, and there just aren’t that many roads so we found the city easily. Imagine arriving to a major metropolitan area—Chicago say—with only an address and no further instructions. But Chicago is laid out in a grid and Galway is not. And Chicago has street signs, but Galway does not. And remember that we’re still driving on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road. And we don’t have a terribly detailed city map. It took more than an hour driving around the city center and realizing we were on the wrong side of the river before we found ourselves in what we hoped was the neighborhood we were staying in and then some time more to find Sea Street, which we actually never found a sign for although we did eventually find ourselves in front of our rental. Thank goodness there was a sign for the establishment. It wasn’t my finest hour(s) as navigator, and I’m amazed by Chris’s patience.  

Our apartment is bizarre (no doorknob on the front door and a dial-operated shower) and thoroughly suitable. We settled in quickly before heading—on foot—to the market for necessaries. When we got back Chris threw in a load of laundry and we made some dinner before he headed out to see what he could see about our neighborhood. I mention the laundry not because I feel the need to remember the most mundane details of our travel but because it is a European machine that both washes and dries the load and at jack-hammer volume, but our understanding of the knobs and buttons and dials is not complete and it took several hours for his laundry to finish, after which I put in a load before bed and it still wasn’t finished when I woke this morning. We had one more load to do today and we still don’t have a handle on the settings because it took the rest of the day to finish, so laundry has been a backdrop to our adventure here in Galway.

We had breakfast in and a relatively slow start to our day what with the laundry debacle and Chris giving me a tin whistle lesson, but then we walked our neighborhood. We’re a very short distance from the water and walked up Claddagh Quay to Nimmo’s Pier and out to the lighthouse, before doubling back and walking Grafton Road to the beach. It was a beautiful day, sunny again and likely in the low 70s and on the pier the wind whips and it seems like the birds are suspended in the air despite their will. On the way back, we moved inland and hoped to orient ourselves to the streets, but on foot it is no easier to see street names or markers and we had to take in landmarks instead. We wandered up and down streets and street markets and spoke with a little girl who was making us crepes in her cart about how she had come to work there. Her mother originally made the crepes and she stood outside the cart while her mother worked but her hands would get so cold in the winter; finally, her mother let her in the cart to warm her hands but it seems the trade was that she must learn to make the sweet crepes. Now her mother sells hand-crafted wooden jewelry several carts down the road and it seems the girls is on her own.

There is a pub famous for its sessions almost across the street from where we are staying and each time we passed it today there was music spilling out of the doors and windows. Late this afternoon, Chris grabbed his violin and we went across for a pint. Unfortunately, the daytime session had just ended, but we passed the time talking to a man named Peter about his experience growing up in the projects in London and he was versatile enough to fit Kinky Friedman and William Blake into the same conversation. It was a bit before we realized that he was angrier about having to pay taxes than most people we customarily fraternize with, but something I like about it here is that someone greets us and chats us up in every pub we enter.  Peter was a little pushy and tried to get us to sign on for a whole evening of drinking with him in one pub after the next and told us we shouldn’t be like New Yorkers by suggesting we needed to eat dinner and told the bartender to get us two more. The bartender, who I suspect has been burned by Peter’s orders in the past, said he needed to hear it from us before he poured another pint. We extricated ourselves, had some dinner just like New Yorkers (and I think people from all other cities who realize that drinking from afternoon into and through evening without some sort of a sponge for the alcohol is kind of toxic) and Chris has just gone back across the street with his violin for the evening session. I am enjoying the relative quiet of not doing laundry.