I spent most of the day on an errand for  Memorial Hall in Rathmines. The Druid Theatre Company out of Galway is coming to UNC in the fall with two plays by Irish drama wizard J.M. Synge, In the Shadow of the Glen and Playboy of the Western World, the latter of which caused riots when it aired in the early 1900s to a conservative Irish audience. (It mentioned underclothes, which sent the crowd into hysterics; the Abbey Theatre kept showing it, only this time, with more policemen in the theater than actual audience members — 500, if I remember right.) I’ve been in contact with the Druids director to visit for a rehearsal and heard the company was working on Walworth Farce in Rathmines, a nearby suburb of Dublin, so I hopped a bus to see what all the talk was about.

For some reason I haven’t grasped yet, mentioning Rathmines elicits snickers from a lot of Irish people.  It sounds like some kind of cultural inside joke — not that I have anything against Nebraska or the fine people who live there, but I do the same thing when someone mentions Omaha. It must be a “What would you need with Rathmines?” sort of thing. And what indeed? It’s a pretty nondescript little place. I had to walk past a bike shop, around a cricket pitch, and through a small maze of buildings to a small shed the Druids had been given to practice in. It wasn’t a bad day for walking.

I might have been a strange presence at the rehearsal; I didn’t want to interfere with their work so I didn’t talk much, but I was a one-man audience all the same, and I thank them for putting up with me. They’re rehearsing one of the strangest plays I’ve ever seen, Walworth Farce, which apparently staged first at the Druid playhouse in Galway. Basically, a man lives with his two sons, and makes them stage a drama every day of the story of their journey from Cork to London after he murders his brother and his brother’s wife over an inheritance — and if the kids don’t get it note for note perfect, he flies into a rage and threatens to kill them. They’re never allowed to go outside, except to buy food, which is always an imitation of the last dinner they had as a whole family in Cork. Utterly bizarre. But surprisingly poignant.

It’s been too long since I’ve been involved with a production.  It was a pleasure just to sit and watch them build the thing from the ground up; the acting was so good that it was easy to forget I wasn’t watching real people, which made it all the stranger when someone blundered and had to call for a line. Fantastic way to spend the day. I’m going to try for a visit to Galway later, which should help me write a little piece for the Memorial Hall program that I owe Emil.

The walk home was one of the most memorable passages of the afternoon, and one of the most typical of Ireland. I arrived in sunlight, and left in slashing rain; caught outside without so much as a newspaper over my head, lulled into a false sense of security by the morning’s gray promise of sunlight. When I got to the intersection by the bus stop the storm had reached full blow already, the rain stabbing sideways like so many knives thrown parallel; and of course the light was red for me, and the 15-minute-running bus on the other side of the street was just getting ready to pull away from the curb. People driving by probably caught a glimpse of a soggy-looking American college student  with plastered-down hair, pounding the light-change button with the heel of his hand, maybe giving the traffic light pole a good kick as the double-decker pulled away and plowed off toward city center. This country. It has the rainy-city image down to the point of being disgusting.

And as I’m writing this, the clouds have peeled away to either side, leaving what remains of the sun to peep through the trees into my window, painting the desk in gold. Whoever’s in charge up there, I wish he’d give us a warning before he decides to pour out the bathwater.

It’s because Ireland’s full of bachelors.

This morning, my Irish roommate told me we were going to have a fry-up — a traditional Irish breakfast right there in our kitchen, with eggs, toast, rashers (bacon, for you folks back home), tea, sausages, and an intriguing-sounding dish called potato waffles. (He’d let me beg off from the black and white pudding, for obvious reasons). We ate the eggs. We drank the tea. I had a potato waffle, which reminds me of the waffle fries from Chic-Fil-A at home, only greasier, if you can believe it. Everything was going fine. And then my roommate told me to butter the toast, put a strip of bacon on it, and put in a dollop of ketchup, just for good measure.

Now, I have nothing against any of this. It turned out to be a good idea, and I devoured it without too much fuss. But you have to admit that a sandwich made of toast, butter, bacon and ketchup is special item number one on the Bachelor’s Nite In dinner menu. That’s what you eat when you have no wife or girlfriend to make sure you don’t kick the bucket before 30. It’s what you turn to when there’s a major kitchen crisis preventing you from actually cooking real food (no available microwave, for example). We’re talking about a concoction that would get you a raised eyebrow after a one-night-stand, maybe a slap in the face: one step above Hot Pockets, or a popcorn-and-peanut butter stew. It’s what one eats when he has no hope left.

Or maybe just no girlfriend.

Because what girl’s going to stick around for this nonsense for longer than a couple of mornings? An Irish fry-up is made to be eaten alone, or with male friends, which in no way encourages mixing with the opposite sex, an activity most scientists agree to be essential in the reproductive process.

So next time someone asks you why Ireland is an empty country, populated mostly by sheep and the occasional palm tree, remember this: You are what you eat, and a regular diet of Irish fry-ups is a good way to remain single for life.

Galway was a breath of fresh country air for this city-dweller, and Cork was just the same way. Normally, bus trips can get on my nerves; they’re long and tedious, and every once in a while, if you tripped too many people on the way to class or broke a pretty girl’s heart or maybe killed someone recently, you’ll get stuck beside a chatty Norwegian with bad English and a life story longer than the Appalachian Trail. (That’s not a true story, but you know what I’m talking about.) When you’re in Ireland, though, every bus trip is an adventure. Who wouldn’t pay a few Euro to be flung through storybook pages for four hours? You can just at the window, looking and looking and looking, the green countryside rising and falling gently outside. I could have slept on the way down, but what was the point? Ireland was out there, miles and miles of it. I could take a bus trip like that every weekend for the rest of my life, and never be sick of it.

Cork is one cool town. I went to visit Rebecca, a buddy of mine from UNC. The walk from the bus station to her flat, which couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes, gave me a pretty representative impression of the city. Downtown is a compact grid of streets packed with shops and restaurants. Both of us always have an eye out for good bookstores, and Rebecca showed me her favorite, Connolly’s, which sits in the shadow of the biggest Tesco I’ve ever seen. Her flat is near the River Lee, which cuts through the middle of the city in a way that reminded me of the Liffey in Dublin.

But there’s no point in comparing the two. Aside from the rivers and the locals’ love for drink, Cork and Dublin couldn’t be more different. Dublin is huge, and full of multitudes. Although Cork isn’t exactly a hamlet, the city is spread up and down the sides of a large valley, and it gives it a more spacious feel. You don’t feel hemmed in or assaulted; the town is much quieter, and the old Gaelic spirit that Yeats and the crew were so intent on reviving seems closer to the surface here, and easier to brush shoulders with.

(Stout is generally cheaper in Cork, too. I’m just saying — we college kids are easy to impress.)

A brief summary of the highlights:

1. A trip to the gaol, or jail, which closed in 1923. They have art museum-style tape recorders with headphones, and you can walk all around the cold and dreary place, now populated only by echoes and lifelike mannequins of prisoners who were there once. They say the place is haunted, which is hardly a surprise. Nothing like a few chilling tales when it comes to inspiration for fiction.

2. A trip to the pub, a little spot called Southside, where it was me and my crew (all college students from America) and a bunch of Irish people, none of whom were under the age of fifty. I did meet one kid of about my age in the bathroom, and as he was fairly banjaxed, convinced him that I was President Bush’s son, or cousin. The man playing piano for our entertainment knew the words to a hundred American pop songs from the eighties, but when I requested my favorite Irish folk tune, “Dirty Old Town,” he had to play it on the tin whistle, being unfamiliar with the verses. The bartender was proud of me for taking my Jameson without ice.

3. A trip to the college — University College Cork, that is. Rebecca’s walk to class takes about 20 minutes, but I wouldn’t trade the sights for extra sleep: winding roads packed with houses painted a hundred pastel colors, the stately bulk of St. Finbar’s cathedral towering above us at one point. UCC is everything I expected in an Irish center of higher learning — stony and vine-encrusted, stories hissing out from every pore. We explored a few of the wings and tried the doors to the tower classrooms, but they were locked, which banished any Harry Potter-esque fantasies of secret rooms and old mirrors that tell the future from my head.

And speaking of the boy who lived, his mother’s coming, so I suppose I’ll wrap up. I’ve got to upload the pictures from Cork, but they’ll be coming soon. It’ll be good craic for all.

James and William. Just sayin.

Galway’s on the west coast of Ireland, a four-hour bus ride from here. I went with a group of international students I’ve been hanging out with in the last couple of weeks. Good craic, all of them.

The crew, from left to right: Megan, Shane, Andrea, Hannah. Regrettably I’m taking the picture — we weren’t smart about getting someone to get a shot of all of us. Oh well. These are great people.

We were hungry after a long ride on the bus, punctuated by the hilarity of trying to talk to an Irish kid about our age who decided it would be great craic to discretely bring along a flask of vodka to make the trip more bearable. (Maybe it did for him, but it made our journey seem a lot longer). Our Galway experience started at the Supermac.

I’ll explain the Supermac culture in Galway briefly. It’s a national chain, but the one we visited has an especially colorful nightlife. Imagine a McDonalds that purveys the same breast of chicken presented in five or six different ways, equally unexciting. Now put it into a building with bad floor tiles and garish fluorescent lighting, populated with students aged 14 to 24 who come stumbling in much too late at night. Fights apparently broke out quite regularly at the entrance, and the security guard in the place advised us to hustle out when we were through, just in case. (Every store in Ireland has its own security guard, something I’m still getting used to).

Galway was a relief after the busy streets of Dublin. Aside from a small shopping district, the downtown isn’t much — a mandatory selection of Irish pubs on every corner, a couple of crisscrossing avenues with breakfast places and coffee shops. A small shopping mall. Our walk to the hostel took us near all of these, and also over the Shannon River, whose bridges offer some pretty spectacular views of downtown if you know where to look.

The hostel was tidy and just what we needed, full of other students on weekend holiday. At least there was carpet, which put it well above the hostel where my roommate and I stayed in Buenos Aires during our trip this summer.

We had a couple of good nights in the city, which I’ll come back to in a bit. But the real gem of the trip was seeing the countryside — that famous landscape that has become synonymous among every culture with rolling green hills, rugged cliffs, and herds of woolly sheep. In our room, we found someone had left a brochure for day trips into the country, and we decided to book one for Saturday. We had a choice between Connemara, the highland region to the north of Galway, or a trip that would take us south, where we’d be able to see some legendary Irish cliffs. We had heard the cliffs were a great stop, so we decided on the southern route.

Our six-hour bus tour Saturday took us through the Burren, a wild, rocky region of green plains peppered with rock outcroppings. Fields enclosed by stone walls whirled by; groups of sheep and cattle looked up to watch the bus roll past; every once in a while, a stray burst of sunlight would peep through the low-hanging clouds to give us a better view of what lay all around. It was the Ireland we had been searching for when we came here, an Ireland that takes some searching nowadays thanks to globalization and its rapidly homogenizing effects on much of Western culture.

Looking around us, we realized we had been thirsty for this for the past half month. Starving. Coming from the city, with its American retail outlets (and Soulja Boy blaring from every club and bar within earshot), Galway and the Burren were a wonder, a retreat, the fantasy of postcards and old poetry come alive right on the other side of the glass, streaming by full-tilt as our driver drove the bus much too fast down the narrow roads.

Our tour finished at the Cliffs of Moher, which I later found on Rick Steves’ list of must-sees for Galway, and with good reason. We don’t have many cliffs in Georgia. It’s the Piedmont; cliffs just aren’t something we do. So when I found myself on a high overlook, staring across the windy gap, it was a lot to take in. The wind tried to snatch us off the walkways at every moment, and rain pelted our faces until we couldn’t feel a thing. We took some pictures beside a watch tower left over from medieval times, perched at the top of one of the ridges.

They say the Cliffs of Moher are 800 feet at their highest point. I haven’t done physics or math diagrams since high school, and maybe it’s because of this that I didn’t really understand just what the guide meant until I got up to the overlook. The cliffs aren’t just big — they’re dazzling. You get up on the overlook and peer around you, and you become aware of the enormity of some things in the world, in nature. That kind of colossal scale has no words, and the picture I’ve included isn’t going to do it justice. You have to stand on the edge and feel the tug of the salt air on your clothes, feel the pit opened up in your stomach where security was a moment before. I’ve never felt so small. And so watched. You have crazy thoughts at the tops of those cliffs, battered by the bad weather and swallowed by the empty space above and below you. For all our barking and bluster, human beings are small, fragile creatures. The hands that shaped those cliffs, the tower-thick-fingers and volcanic thumbs, were strong beyond comprehension.

After such heavy meditations, food was obviously in order. Some pub grub on the way home — a good baguette with one of the best pints of Guinness I’ve had since I came here.

(How can he tell the difference? you ask. I’ll tell you a story my Irish roommate passed along to me about the Guinness culture. Every Guinness pint glass you’ll find in Ireland has a box with the number 1759 on the side. Tradition holds that Arthur Guinness, during his earliest days as a brewer, was pouring a pint of Guinness at this time — in American time, 5:59 p.m. — and he was interrupted by the bells on a nearby church, which rang at noon, midnight and 6 p.m. to call all good Irish Catholics to a brief prayer. He stopped pouring the pint halfway through, said his Hail Maries, and finished the pint. Now, all these years later, if you get a pint of Guinness in any respectable Irish pub, the bartender will pull you half a glass, let it sit a moment for the head to rise, and finish it off. Older Irishmen, who drink Guinness like it’s their job, which it probably is, will return a pint of Guinness if they don’t get this special “long pull,” and the bartender has to pass them another, with much chagrin.)

Our night in Galway was a great one. We wound up in an enormous pub downtown called The King’s Head, home of a million stag and hen parties, and the cheapest pints we’ve had since we came (3.80 Euro — let’s just take a minute to think about how sick that is). The highlight of the night by far was the cover band that played, Tightrope. All the musicians were grossly overqualified to be in cover bands — the lead guitarist ranks among the best I’ve seen live. I’ve never heard a version of My Sharona that dropped my jaw, but these Irish musicians changed my mind on that score.

(I wanted to put some footage of ‘Hey Ya’ at the end of this, but I think the band would get after me because they already have some stock footage on YouTube, so check out this one instead.)

That’s about it as far as the Galway trip. It was well worth it, and the travel bug has bitten hard. I’ve got Cork planned for this weekend — the TRAD (traditional music) festival is starting, so it sounds like this is the best time to go. I’ll try to get updates up a little more frequently from here on in, as I’m sure you folks at home are interested in Irish goings-on of late. Slainte.

(That being the Gaelic word for ‘cheers,’ pronounced SLAWN-chuh.)

Knights of Cydonia, by Muse. Note the intense guitar jam toward the end. Other Tightrope hits from our Galway concert included When You Were Young by The Killers, Highway to Hell, and a Metallica medly ending with Enter Sandman, which brought the house down.

After a bit of online searching, a bit of standing in line, and a bit of talking to the right people, I’ve finally got my schedule ironed out. Here it is, full-color and gorgeous, with accompanying links for course descriptions if anybody’s interested.

Irish Literature (Tues. 11:00)

Imagining Ireland: The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (Fri., 12:00)

The Narrative Art (Tues., 12:00, Thurs., 11:00)

20th-Century Ireland: North and South (Mon./Wed., 9:00)

Apocalypse Then: The Disastrous 14th Century (Tues., 13:00/Thurs., 14:00)

Some of these have seminars and such — we’re not just meeting once a week for Irish Lit, for example — but I’ve still got to work those out. This will do for now though.

I think I’ve worked out the last few kinks in my schedule. Classes work differently here than at home — for one thing, I’ll probably be taking six (that’s apparently what’s classified as a full load here, the equivalent of about 15 hours back in the States). I managed to get a pretty good schedule, one class on Mondays and Fridays, three Tuesday and Thursday, and two on Wednesday. I tried my hardest to come out of it with no Friday classes, but scheduling classes here is harder than it sounds, so I’m lucky to escape this last week with anything at all on my schedule.

The North and South class, where I just was, looks like it’s going to tell me a lot about the history of what’s been going on. We started all the way back at the beginning of the 1900s, talking about a bunch of political parties in Ireland and England and how those forces wound up sparking the movement for independence. I feel like growing up here would make this a lot easier; for a long time, I thought the professor was talking about an Irish guy named Bob Dylan who was part of the liberal alliance in southern Ireland (I got really excited), but it turns out his name was John Dylan, which means he wasn’t some kind of wonderful cross-breed of bohemian guitar-strumming vagabond and vigorous Irish revolutionary war hero. Ah, well. C’est la vie.

Nap time, and then a batch of errands to do: buying a notebook, getting my cell phone in order, and obtaining a working debit card (one of the Allied Irish Bank ATMs downtown ate my last one). The sun’s coming out, I hope the weather holds for a while. That’s one thing about being in a rainy country: no matter how good things get, the sky’s still gray and low-hanging most of the time. On the other hand, that means it only takes a few minutes of sunshine to make a terrible day a lot better.

Oh, Ireland. You’re such a tease.

http://flickr.com/photos/eirepilgrim/sets/72157603757080920/