Preliminary Walkabout

Tuesday, 3 June 2008 

Shanowen Square, Santry, Dublin 

I eventually did make it out of the airport, though only after sitting for a much greater time than I customarily enjoy spending in places where the primary business is the production of large, e

xcitable crowds of people. 

After my large and impressive breakfast excursion, I passed the remainder of my time in the Airport talking to two other girls from UVa that I had not yet met. After our conversation they prevailed upon me to tote their baggage on my cart, so I had 

to slog around appearing the over packed tourists while they, with their thin satchels, appeared the essence of ease. I feel so used. 

We finally located the rest of our party and were herded by a rather harried looking girl from the EUSA program office (the agency with which UVa has contracted to run the trip) we headed to the bus with our new friends from USC and Nebraska. My first taste of Irish air was not especially attractive: as soon as I stepped out of the door of the airport I was blasted by truck smoke. It was Irish smoke, though, so it smelled faintly of Guinness and four-leaf clovers. 

Most of our party was hauling several large pieces of baggage containing their necessities for the trip. This load was loaded with little elan into our turquoise minibus by a profusely sweating man with a strange aversion to allowing us to help and to stowing anything in its proper manner. Our bus, like any other, had large storage bays on its underside. Instead, we crammed the baggage of 40 people into a small trunk and the back four rows of the bus. I was the last to board and, sitting in the back, was compelled to place my body in the aisle so as to prevent the entire bulk of our

 collective equipage from avalanching forward. 

After a brief but harrowing period, I recalled that the Irish drive on the left of the road, and we proceeded on our merry, overburdened way. We arrived at our flats around noon, dumped our baggage, and trooped into an office where we were made to sign contracts promising not to soil the flats and not to join terrorist organizations or, if we did, to at least not bring them back to the Shanowen Square Student Residences (TM). Shanowen is a series of buildings (named "blocks" in an inviting post-industrial way) surrounding a green. It is surprisingly reminiscent of Lambeth Field, but nicer and newer. 

We were given "care packages" of assorted food staples and (as it turned out, faulty) modems. A

fter eating some Nutella I was ready to go to bed, having forgotten to sleep on the flight. Mindful of the warnings of my father and others about the deleterious effects of jet lag that were sure to smite those foolish enough to adhere to those adhering to the rhythms of their own bodies in a strange land, I decided to attempt to stay awake until the proper bedtime even though, by that time, I had not slept in about 24 hours. 

The only way to accomplish this trick was to leave the sight of my bed, and so I purchased a bus pass and set out with my flatmates - two girls from UVa, Veronica and Jessica - to attempt to find Dublin City Centre. 

I must be spoiled by the transport system in Washington DC because, in my home city, the system maps are comprehensible. The bus maps here bear no relation to geographic linearity and h

ave little to do with busses or geography. I found a bus headed the right way only by walking to several stops and asking somewhat meekly "excuse me, but could you kindly help me remove my head from my ass?" Eventually I found and boarded a bus for City Centre. 

Santry, my neighborhood, is three miles north of the Center of the City and, to access the latter, one must pass through the humorously named but otherwise unremarkable "Phibsboro". 

As soon as I debarked downtown on O'Connel street, Northside, my fatigue was immediately vanished upon finding myself in the heart of the Dublin of postcards and dreams. After reading somewhat glumly about the destruction of Dublin's Georgian architecture in recent decades, I was surprised and elated to fi

nd much of it still intact. Here is my first look at Dublin: 

I spent the next few hours wandering about in a rather pleased haze, taking in as much

 of the center of Dublin as I could handle in my somewhat depleted state. There is much to see in Dublin and, at first, I didn't want to see everything in one day, so I tried to restrain myself. I failed, however, and ran around to as much as I could, snapping a few hundred pictures. After seeing a portion of what the most famous part of the city has to offer, I think that I needn't worry about experiencing it all in one year, let alone a day. 

After entering (and quickly departing) the Touristy Temple Bar Area on the South Side of the River Liffey, I walked around to  see the outside the Old Post Office and  Old Parliament Buildings, Tri

nity College, and the Haypenny Bridge over the River Liffey. I randomly met a friend from UVa in Parliament Square, a strange sensation since each of us were thousands of miles from home. 

Here I am in Parliament Square: 

Towards dinner, I resolved to eat and have a drink at a pub on my way home that I found in the Guidebook Dad got for me, The Flowing Tide. It was filled with men in business suits drinking Heineken, several young non-Irish drinking Guinness, actors from the nearby Abbey Theater eating their feelings, and old men discreetly sipping Gin and Tonics while their grandchildren gleefully sipped cokes from glass bottles. The atmosphere was so perfect that I couldn't resist completing it by reading some of the James Joyce I had with me.

I had a cup of Chicken Soup, a Ham and Grilled Cheese Sandwich, and my first cup of Guinness in Ireland. It was even more delicious than it was in the states: it could have been because of the general ambience of Dublin, or it could have been been because the beer travelled only 1.2 miles from the St. James Gate Brewery to my glass in the Flowing Tide Pub. Either war, a Pint of the Good Stuff is even better in Ireland: colder, creamier, and stronger. I couldn't resist the urge to surreptitiously snap the obligatory picture, even though the regulars looked at me strangely. 

After my meal I caught the Double Decker back up north to the flat. When I debarked, a nice looking man attempted to rob me by sticking out his hand with a smile and saying "hello, what's your name?" When I stuck out my hand to reciprocate his grasp, he attempted to slip my class ring off my hand. When I stopped him he stuttered and said "oh, uh, just wanted to see it, you know, no worries". We parted company shortly thereafter. 

I got back to the flat around 7 PM and collapsed until 7AM the next morning, when I got up and began to rustle around in preparation for our 9AM departure. I performed morning ablutions in my small transparent cube, discovering, to my dismay, that my extensive baggage hadn't included shampoo. 

We gathered on the Shanowen Green at 9AM to walk en masse to the bus station to go to City Centre for our EUSA "Orientation." One of the USC kids had become intoxicated the night before and was quite tardy. I think we should have left the blighter, but our Program Assistant was more tolerant than I. We finally made it to the EUSA program office where we were given a rather tedious rigamorale about health and safety, discipline, professional conduct, etc.

Dr. Kelley, who is the EUSA program director in Dublin, is an interesting man. At one point he noted that, since Abortion is illegal in Ireland, we might not want to be sexually careless. There was a visible sigh of disappointment in the room as hopes were shattered for the many students who were planning to have illicit, unprotected relations with a total stranger, counting on the availability of a quick and painless abortion. 

When the floor was opened for questions, someone inquired about the proper procedure for ordering an Irish Car Bomb (Guinness and Bailey's) in a Dublin Pub. "Should we just ask for a car bomb, leaving off the 'Irish' prefix?" We were advised not to try that sort of thing in Belfast. 

When we were released for lunch I was elated to find a Marks and Spencer grocery, about which I had read much in the Bill Bryson Book Notes from a Small Island. It was a charming, small, nice grocery that was very British. I acquired a banana, some Turmeric/Moroccan Cous Cous, and a Chicken Wrap. To wash it down I got a two liter bottle of Sparkling Water, since it was inexplicably cheap, even less costly than the still water. The EUSA people had kindly provided us with tea and biscuits. 

After Orientation, I wandered around the city for several more hours, moving south of where

 I had been Yesterday to the Grafton Street area, the tony Shopping district below College Green. I went as far as St. Stephen's Green, and turned around. I went into 7 or 8 bookshops before finding a simple map that wasn't accompanied by superfluous material. 

At one point I stopped in a side alley to catch a break from a the bustle and to have a drink of water. I noticed a gold statue of an angel and walked down to investigate, and discovered it was the entrance of the Convent of the Sisters of the Carmelite Solitude (or something like that). Tucked away in a quiet stone alley amid thousands of people nearby was a quiet, cool, and enormous church of great peacefulness. It was very interesting to discover such solitude so close to such writhing humanity. Then again, this sort of thing is facilitated by the unintentional dual effects of modernity and antiquity. Dublin is more than 800 years old, and medieval street designs could not have been designed to handle the burden of modern commerce and increased population. As the city has grown and become more wealthy, the old infrastructure has been hard-pressed to keep up. The new has been built on top of the old, resulting in a city that is hurtling forward while remaining strangely, irrevocably, and visibly in touch with its past. There are the wide throughfares that can handle trolleys, double deckers, and cars, but they are interspersed with cobbles stone alleyways that are hundreds of years old that weave back and forth, connecting the whole thing together. The unpredictability creates a number of exciting possibilities, like discovering a cozy cafe in a hidden stone courtyard, or a convent down a back alley, like the one I found. I sat with several nuns in the sanctuary for awhile before heading out and back across the river to catch the bus home. 

Riding the double decker is a harrowing experience at the same time as it excites. The height above the ground at which you sit creates the constant impression that one is about to careen into - and wreak significant havoc upon, by virtue of superior girth - pedestrians, bicycles, buildings, and pigeons. 

When I arrived back at Shanowen I realized that I had no dinner. There is a a small market in front of our gates, but it only has a few things, and I suspect that the prices are significantly elevated: they're counting on their close proximity to induce students to purchase the inflated goods instead of walking elsewhere. 

I decided to take a jaunt to explore the neighborhood and find the other grocery of which I had heard. Santry is a Northern neighborhood of the city with many townhomes and a distinctly industrial feel that comes from several aging factory sites. I walked about 25 minutes and was nearly dissuaded from my quest by the tantalizing aroma of a Chinese establishment but, deciding that the fiscal sobriety would be more pleasing than short-term gustatory gratification, I passed it by. I arrived at the Tesca grocery in the Omni shopping center at 6:58, only to be rudely denied entry by a woman claiming the store was closed, even though a sign clearly indicated a closing of 7:00. Distraught at the thought of walking so far on tired feet without getting food, I resolved to reason with the woman. Conventional dictates of rationality and decency did not apply to the trollope, however, who turned me away with not a small degree of satisfaction. I believe that she and the airport line tenders I have earlier mentioned have probably formed some sort of cabal. 

When I asked A kindly security guard if there was another market in walking distance, he indicated  something with an impenetrable brogue and a vague wave of a hand in the direction of the setting sun. I surmised that there must be something "o'er yonder" and set off through a series of unpromising industrial yards with names like "McFogarty/Gettigan's Scrap. We Crush While You Wait". Ignoring the dangerous possibilities of the insertion of another pronoun before "while", I hopefully proceeded on, futilely checking my papers to make sure my tetanus vaccination was current. 

Eventually, mercifully, impossibly, I happened upon an Aldi that was still open. In it I acquired Soap, Shampoo, Cheese, Soup, Chicken, Mustard, and Chili, before heading home. All of the stores in Ireland have implemented a policy that I have supported for quite sometime: they've eliminated bags. Either you have to bring your own or pay extra to acquire a reusable one at the register. This sort of thing effectively disincentives the use of environmentally disastrous plastic bags. 

I walked what seemed like a great distance home and wrestled with the internet. After fiddling extensively and cluelessly with various numbers and acronyms in the network portal, I was able to gain access to the Local Area Network and catch up on the political news, praise be.

I made Lasagna and beer for dinner, and here I sit. Tonight Barack Obama wraps up the democratic party's nomination for President of the United States with the last two primaries, and tomorrow I venture forth to attempt to find my place of employment. 

Here I am with James Joyce. More Pictures to come soon.