My First Day Alone in Dublin

I had a few orders of business to finish before I could start my first day alone in Dublin.  After seeing all my friends and comrades off to their taxis, I returned to my room for a shower.  After that, I dawdled for a while, finishing packing, and getting myself as prepped as possible for my flight in two days.  I tried to structure my things in a more efficient manner for both space and practicality, putting things like my suit much deeper in my bag than they once were.  I also had generously offered to take Dale's suit home with me, since he will be traveling in Spain and France for a few more weeks, and has no need for a suit.  I also managed to find space for his couple of souvenirs, including a rather cool flask and funnel from Jameson that he bought for his sister's husband (?).  I took my time doing all of these tasks, resting often to nurse my cold, and also to drag my feet in deciding what to do all day.  I needed to be out of the room by 10:30, with my luggage downstairs in the luggage room until my new accommodations would be ready at noon.  At about 10:20, I was successfully checked out, and back in, to my all girls dorm for 12.  In the meantime, I needed to charge my tablet.

I spent perhaps just over an hour sitting in the hostel, watching my tablet charge, messaging no one because it was 3 am in the states, and not blogging because I just couldn't bring myself to type anymore, and not eating because breakfast was long since over, and not really doing anything for an entire hour.  I sniffled, I coughed, I very very thoroughly read Rick Steves and Lonely Planet for recommendations on what to do with myself.  Eventually, around 11:30, I decided that it was no longer worth moping, so I best get out and do something with my day.

I took off for Dame Street in search of nourishment.  I ended up wandering into a place called Crackbird, which just happens to be a sister restaurant of JoBurger, the place with the off-beat burgers where I had a small meltdown in front of Leta.  (Remember all those weeks back.)  This JoBurger guy must have a specific style of waiter that he prefers, because the JoBurger and Crackbird waiters were all skinny, artsy type men with that very hipster hair cut, rings on their fingers, and a slightly gay air about them.  I don't know what that says about the company or its owner, I merely report, as your humble correspondent.

I was slightly duped into going in, because I didn't realize that the lunch menu that was featured on the pasted menu outside was a Monday through Friday sort of deal.  A pair of older women walked in and suffered from the same mistake, but when you are old, you have the privilege of having the intestinal fortitude to walk out again, while much less confident, younger people feel obligated to stay.  So, as sad as it is to sit alone in a restaurant, I did anyway, and typed half-heartedly, and read Rick some more, to pretend that I am a travel blogger, and thus a legitimate human.  I ordered something called chicken brochettes, and I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.  I also ordered some cous cous.  From the appealing 6.95 lunch menu sandwich that drew me in, I knew a bill twice that much was coming my way instead, so I kept with water to cut costs.  The brochettes ended up being skewers of chicken.  I chose the bay and lemon chicken, which was quite a good choice.  It was actually very very delicious, but far more than I could eat in one sitting, especially in my weakened state.

When I first arrived, just before noon, there was one couple in the restaurant.  I sat down.  Two old ladies came and left.  A husband, wife and young child came in, followed by another husband and wife, and a pair of girls.  Eventually, I felt that it didn't look so sad that I was sitting alone, as it had when I was in the middle of a completely empty, moodily dark restaurant by myself.  At that moment, I felt the sting of being removed from my herd, and it was quite an abandoned feeling.  Having a cold only served to tighten the sadness screws further.  By the middle of the day, I was feeling quite terrible about Dublin, and sorely regretting not leaving earlier.  (I tried to remember why I booked my flight so late:  I had been certain that the trip ended on Saturday, not Friday, thus making our departure date a Sunday.  By that logic, I thought I would save a bit of money by flying out Monday instead.  This is all very funny when one recalls that I caught that Virgin flight to San Fran, and spent whatever savings I had allegedly accumulated in trying to save myself a 22 hour layover.  It is also funny, because looking at the calendar of events, it obviously says "Leave for Home" on Saturday, and nothing else.  So I am just illiterate, obviously.)

I took my box of leftovers back to the hostel to keep in the fridge, and to put my things in my new room.  Just to annoy myself further, Crackbird is quite far up Dame Street, so when you look at it on Google Earth, I did a ton of walking that day.  I could not have picked a more distant restaurant from which to bring back leftovers.  I stuffed my food in a dubiously tepid fridge, and hauled my crap up the stairs from the luggage room to the elevator.  Because an elevator that goes all the way down to the luggage room would be silly.  Anyway.  The dorm room seemed fairly civilized, decently roomy but pretty tight, with a bathroom with two toilets, sinks and showers for our dorm.  I found out the next day that there is actually another door in our room that goes to another dorm of 12 girls.  Basically, we were a sardine tin of people in there.

I made my way back out into the city, resolved to find the National Library of Ireland, where they have an extensive genealogy department, and a good exhibit on W. B. Yeats.  It was quite a walk, all the way down Dame Street, past Trinity College, and toward Stevens Green.  I don't recall if I have remarked already on my superior jaywalking ability, but I have become quite proficient, and can successfully not be hit by cars no matter what direction they are coming from.  I jaywalk all the time in Seattle, but I feel that adding Dublin to my list is an achievement.  I made it to the library, doffing my sweater because as usual, it warmed up in the afternoon.  The genealogy department was annoyingly closed, so my only point of interest was the Yeats exhibit.

I know that as a person with a lot of interest in history, and Irish history especially, I should probably read every word of these sorts of exhibits.  But like the 1916 exhibit (which, please recall, Yeats was alive for, and commented on rather frequently), I am by now quite acquainted with Mr. Yeats.  I casually read the highlights of each section, looked at his handwriting, and at his family portraits, and passed over his oft-hoped-for, never-realized affair with Maud Gonne, one of the female ringleaders of Irish independence pre- and peri-rebellion.  He wrote at least one play dedicated to her, and one specifically about Irish independence where Gonne was to be the female personification of Ireland.  I sympathize greatly with Gonne, in that it is hard to be both smart and pretty, and there are always a few men who hold out hope that one day you will fall in love with them too, but you won't.  Unlike Gonne, however, I have never entered into strange, occult marriages with these poor souls to make them feel better, because that is crazy.  Yeats was apparently quite fascinated with the occult, faeries and whatnot, and Gonne had a certain appreciation for those things as well.  One story says that when her first son died as a toddler, she was so distraught that she attempted to reincarnate her lost son by conceiving again on top of his grave...  She was also very tall, nearly six feet.  (BTW.)

Anyway, I did have the pleasure of listening to the entirety of the poem 1916, about the rebellion, and the poem from which comes the phrase "A terrible beauty is born."  For those who know, the last Irish restaurant I sampled before leaving for Ireland was A Terrible Beauty, in Renton, opened by the daughter of a Northern Irishman named Colin.  (Hi Colin, if you're still reading, after all those horrible things I said about Northern Ireland...)  After Yeats, I walked across the courtyard to the National Museum of Ireland: Archaeology.  I walked rather briskly through the exhibit on prehistoric peoples in Ireland, as Stone Age people seem to be basically the same everywhere.  I found the section on Viking forts in Dublin and elsewhere to be fairly interesting, and the little piece of a copy of the bible that they pulled out of the peat bogs a few decades ago.  I also walked through some sections on medieval Ireland and the battle at Clontarf, where Brian Boru, the high king of Ireland who fought the Vikings and was beheaded in the last throes of battle, was alleged to have waged his war with the tyrants from the North.  The story is as much legend as fact, but Brian Boru is a very big deal to Ireland.  The harp at Trinity College in the Long Room is called the Brian Boru harp, and is the harp on which Guinness modeled its logo. 

(How's this for a very funny aside, Guinness had been using the Brian Boru harp, with the straight edge on the left, since approximately 1759.  When Ireland became a nation, they also wanted to use the harp as the symbol of Ireland.  Guinness said no.  Why Guinness wouldn't want to share its symbol with its own nation, I don't know, but Ireland decided to just flip the harp, and use it anyway.  So Guinness faces right, and the Republic of Ireland faces left.)

After my museum tour, I was going to stop at Stevens Green to get a picture with the Oscar Wilde statue in the park.  But it seemed worth my while to walk around the block to the natural history museum instead.  That block ended up being much, much further than I realized, so that by the time I reached the history museum, I did not feel up to meandering through several floors of more exhibits.  I instead went in search of the Liffey.  Once you find the river, it is very easy to orient yourself within Dublin.  The river runs east-west (ish), and since I mostly stick to south of the river, I know that once I find it, I just need to head west until I come to the hostel.  I started to poke my head into a park, but decided against it, and pressed on for the river.  I had absolutely no idea where I was, but I just kept heading north, and was eventually rewarded with a view of the harp bridge over the river.  This put me very close to the Jeanie Johnston, a famine ship in which I had much interest, but I couldn't bring myself to head further from my hostel.

As previously mentioned, my jaywalking skills are quite good.  The reason they are so good, is not just because I am a total rebel, and I live on the edge.  No, it is also extremely practical.  The pedestrian crosswalks are extremely slow to change.  They also have a very strange system of red, yellow and green lights like for cars, with inconsistently long yellow lights, so you have no idea how much longer you have to cross the street before these Dubliners will mow you over (because good God, they have no qualms at all about vehicular manslaughter in this country.).  Since it is difficult to know when (if) you the pedestrian will ever get to cross, it is your responsibility to look around and cross whenever you feel you can.  What this means for my long march back to the hostel is that I did not stop walking for 25 solid minutes, because I was either on a sidewalk, in a green light crosswalk, jogging across a yellow light crosswalk, or confidently striding across a red light crosswalk.  By the time I finally did arrive in my hostel, I was absolutely exhausted, and completely parched.  I parked it in a spot by an outlet for my tablet, and set about Facebook messaging people and blogging for the next three hours.  I ate the rest of my chicken from earlier that day, had a Coke and a Mars bar (I've developed quite the affinity) for dessert, and turned in early.

Staying in the dorm room was not so bad, and the other people in my room were actually more respectful of other people than most of my group mates.  Lights went out around 11, and I was honestly probably the most annoying because I kept waking up to cough and sneeze and be completely horrendous.  I feel bad for the girl in the bunk below me.  Hopefully she was not too bothered.

I had a very strange dream that I was checking in for my flight out of Dublin, and I kept stealing candy from the food stands in the airport.  At one point, I became convinced that I just needed to get to a Chase bank, and then my credit card would start working again and I could stop stealing candy.  I know that everyone says that you are really fluent in a language when you dream in it, but I don't know how that works for dialects.  Everyone in my dream, including myself, had a pleasant Dublin accent, and when I woke up in the morning, I definitely had a brogue.  I had a man's voice with my sore throat, but a brogue as well.  Maybe the raspy throat helped with the accent.  I don't know, but two days later and I'm having a hard time shaking this accent.  I have heard myself say "tree" instead of three while counting, and I am saying Seattle weird (with ts instead of ds.).  Very peculiar...