Ireland - Diary of a Craicfiend

Its 2pm on a Thursday in London and I'm curled up on a couch with a laptop, trying to think how I'm going to sum up the last 5 days on the Emerald Isle. I've come to terms with the fact that I'll never be able to fully explain how it feels to learn so much, so quickly, about a place I knew so little about. Ideally I would set up some grand question in my opening sentence, then answer it with a revelation in the closing paragraph, but I don't have the finesse for that so I'll just charge through from beginning to end and show a lot of pictures.



Being on an early flight out of Heathrow, Liz, Dan and I diligently set our alarms for 4am on Saturday morning. Unfortunately my mobile phone was still in sync with the trains in Frankfurt, so at 3am we were all up and stumbling about the house wondering why we felt so tired. Four hours and a full breakfast later, we were in Dublin.

I have to be honest about Dublin, it didnt amaze me. I've been to untidy cities, small cities and boring cities, but this was the first time I'd been to a city that encompassed all three. The people were nice, however, and the essentials (pizza and beer) were relatively cheap. As with France, I was keeping an eye out for something extremely Irish that would sum up the people I was dealing with. No sooner had we walked into McDonalds I found it in the form of a 16 year old girl wearing a name badge that said "Magda". This was repeated later in the trip when we were served at Pizza Hut by a young girl named "Deardrie". Theres something extremely Irish about kids with multi-coloured hair and designer sunglasses bearing the same names that their great-grandparents had.

After a quick bite, we dropped our bags off at the Hostel and wandered through town. Pretty soon we found ourselves at the Temple Bar district, which is basically the authentic Irish pub experience boiled down and mass produced for tourists. We literally saw 5 hens night parties in the same evening. We went to the largest and most inviting looking bar we could find, aptly named the "Temple Bar" and ordered a few pints of Guinness. I was confident that after my earlier successes with beer, I could put down a Guinness like it was a strawberry milkshake, but after my first sip I realised this would not be the case. I managed to take about an inch off the top before surrendering the drink to Dan, who chugged it down like a Man's Man while wrestling a bear and building a shed with his free hand.

We were starting to feel the effects of our early start, so we went back to the Hostel for a kip. We also discovered a new game that would see us through any of the dull moments ahead. Dan's happy meal from earlier in the day came with a deck of cards for some stupid McDonalds wild animal card game. After realising just how crap the game was, we starting frisbeeing the cards at one another. After 15 minutes we started getting dangerously good, so in the interest of safety we went out for dinner, then turned in for the night.

The next day we went to the Guinness Factory, which was brilliantly laid out, full of fascinating information and did absolutely nothing to improve my opinion of Guinness. Even after pouring my own pint and enjoying a 360 view of Dublin in the Gravity Bar, it still tasted like some bizarre combination of every flavour I don't enjoy.

Our batteries started to go a bit flat on the bus back to town, possibly because we were all realising that there was nothing more to see in Dublin, and possibly because we were up most of last night throwing cards and watching Clear and Present Danger. Liz and Dan were on their first holiday for a long time and it felt terrible that the wind was leaving the sails so early. Fortunately the burgers we had at the Hard Rock cafe were 90% sugar, so we all perked up and made a plan to do some retail therapy and watch the Simpsons Movie that night.

We hit every shoe store we could find on the main drag. Liz proved that a real marketing agent never clocks off and managed to talk me into a heavily reduced pair of Vans that I really don't need at all. The Simpsons Movie was excellent, even from the very very very front row. We had popcorn for dinner and hit the hay early, ready to catch the tour bus that would take us to northern Ireland the next morning.

The tour was what really made the trip excellent for me. Owing to the fact that we were heading north, the majority of the places we saw and stories we heard were focused on The Troubles, the overall description for the 30 odd years of violence surrounding Northern Irelands quest for independence. Our tour guide Paula (seen here in the middle with glasses) was absolutely excellent. Not only did she know pretty much all there was to know about the history of Ireland, but she managed to deliver it in a way that didnt immediately send me to sleep. We heard ancient celtic myths, simple summaries of years of social and political unrest, got the address of every bar worth going to, learnt Irish songs and were also taught exactly how to talk like someone from Cork. As I mentioned earlier, I learned more about Ireland in three days than I learned about Europe in general in 3 weeks. Liz said the place was starting to feel like a second home by the end of it and I agree.

Anyway, our first stop was a very pretty irish castle which, in true Hollywood style, was used for a scene in Braveheart. We were happy to be out of Dublin, so we danced a jig. A little further up the road we visited some ancient celtic tombs, which were at the top of a very large hill. If you ever want to feel stupid, go tramping around the Irish countryside in a pair of brand new Vans and snow white, shin high socks. You spend the whole time scanning the ground for sheep crap, mud and the kind of rocks that would shear your pretty new shoes in half. The tombs were rather cool, they were designed so that during the winter solstice the sunlight entering the door would be narrowed to a beam of light that illuminates a series of important looking symbols on the wall. I choose to believe this was an early form of disco ball.

Our first stop-over was the town of Derry. Had I entered Derry on a Busabout tour, my description would have been "cute town, bit heavy on the flags". However with the background on the Troubles we got while on the bus, it all felt very different. We dropped off our bags at the Hostel and half an hour later were standing on what used to be one of the most dangerous streets in the world, the site of Bloody Sunday. Huge murals had been painted on the buildings in the surrounding area, and as the town was pretty quiet at the busiest of times, it all felt very eerie. The was the same background feeling of tension that I felt in Berlin, only magnified a hundred thousand times due to how recent the Troubles were. Flags still fly over Republican and Loyalist neighbourhoods, and politically charged graffiti is more common than an advertising billboard. We arrived on the same day that the British troops were finally moving out, some 38 years (I think) after they first arrived.

As with Dublin though, it was the people that made the place shine, even if you did have to be slightly careful about what you said. Most of the tour wound up at the bar Paula recommended to us and we gingerly began our pursuit of the Craic. We got chatting to a group of irish guys who were very friendly and completely impossible to understand. I was reminded of the story Paula was telling us about her growing up in the south of Ireland and hearing about a "situation" in northern Ireland on the news. Everyone knew there was a situation, but noone knew what it was because "situation" was the only word they could pick out of the northern irish accent. The man on TV would apparently say "dei-de-dei-de-dei-de-situation-dei-de-dei-de" and that was all you knew. These guys were more like "dei-de-dei-de-dei-de-football dei-de-dei-de-guinness-dei-de".

Their accents became a lot clearer, however, when I accidently announced to the obviously Catholic bunch that I was having a great time here in Belfast. Suddenly it was "What?! Fookin Belfast mann? Fookin Derry man fookin not fookin Belfast is shite man Derry man". For the rest of the night my name was Belfast Man, but they all took it quite well. So well, in fact, that I even got away with correcting myself by saying I was actually having a great time in Londonderry, the Protestant name for Derry thats still contested to this day. I escaped with some boo's and a lighter sparked at me.

Towards the end of the evening someone produced a box of matches, so I issued the challenge I once heard from Dr Cook about taking a match out of the box and lighting it using only one hand. After wrestling with it for a beer and a half I finally figured it out and proceeded to set my pants on fire briefly. This became the cue to wrap up the evening and head back to the Hostel, but not before all the irish guys made it clear that they were only messing about with the Belfast jokes and wished me the best of luck in my travels.

The next day we were offered the chance to take a swim in the North Atlantic Ocean. While I dont consider myself a connoisseur of oceans in that I have to try every one, it did seem like exactly the kind of stupid activity that I would remember my trip for. Dan was up for it too, so along with a some other guys from the bus we stripped down in the middle of the carpark (using ninja towel techniques to preserve dignity) and charged in.

This is how swimming in the Atlantic works: The water is cold to the point of being searingly hot. You run in fine, but once it has seized up your calf and thigh muscles, you fall face forward into it and your heart stops. Then, guided by some primal survival instinct, you get to your feet yelling "MRUUHHURH" then lurch back to the beach. Suddenly the brisk Irish wind is like a big fur coat and you start feeling like you can go in again, so you do and you regret it. Somewhere out there, your character is being built.

From there it was on to the Giants Causeway, a massive area of hexagonal shaped columns formed by cooling magma. Actually, forget that description I just tried to give you, look at these: 1, 2, 3. The whole place is basically the same as a giant real-life game of Q-Bert, so after a lot of climbing, sitting and a nice little picnic we continued on to a rope bridge.

The bridge was sweet, but I was picturing something longer and more rickety, possibly flanked by angry pygmies like in that Indiana Jones movie. After we'd had our fill of natural wonder, the bus continued on and we arrived in Belfast.

Realising it was our last night of the tour we knew it was about time for a Big One, so we stocked up on Pizza Hut and headed to our recommended local. I have developed a love of Carslberg, because it tastes like nothing at all and I'm pretty sure I can get it back home. With a few of those under my belt I decided to try some Bushmills, which is brewed just north of Belfast (and mentioned in a NOFX song). It was, for want of a better word, delicious. Especially with coke. The craic was excellent, all the people on the tour knew each other by this point so we had a lot of fun.

In a continuation of my brand new trend of making an ass of myself in front of the irish, I managed to pull another collar tugging move at this pub too. One of the girls went to the bar to get a bunch of Jager bombs. What we got back was 10 glasses of Jager shots, without the accompanying Red Bull. I pulled up a bar chick and said that we had the Jager but we didnt have the bombs. She didnt hear me, so I found myself in a bar in Belfast yelling "WE NEED BOMBS" across the room. Fortunately by then most of the locals had cleared out.

The night finished up around 2am and we were all rather trashed. Any hangover we may have had, however, was blown away within seconds of starting the Black Cab tour at 9 the next morning. The tour is run by the cab drivers from the Trouble era (come to think of it, pretty much everyone in Belfast is from the Trouble era), some Catholic, some Protestant. They take you around their respective halves of the city, into areas that you either wouldnt know about or couldn't get to otherwise. The sense of tension here was even stronger than in Derry, especially in the area aroound Shankill Road, which saw the worst of the violence. There is still a wall running between the two neighbourhoods around the Shankill and Bombay street area, and the houses nearby are still protected by cages against petrol bombs and rocks.

Confronting as the geography was, it was nothing compared to the drivers themselves. They were all lucky to survive the Troubles at all, as taxi drivers were an easy target for snipers because their cars were identified by plates indicating what neighbourhood they were from. Their stories about life during the Troubles, and indeed the life many people were still leading today, pretty much silenced everyone in the group except the stupid american guy who kept asking ridiculous questions like why they never held a community basketball tournament to bring the two sides together.

We left Belfast a little later that morning and after a couple of stops at some more ruins and pubs we were back in Dublin. As a testament to life in the 21st century, all the good feelings and joy of 5 days in Ireland was wiped out in 33 minutes of waiting to collect our bags at Heathrow. We got back to Finchley Road at about midnight and slept like old people.

So that was Ireland - fascinating, inebriating and brief. As I said, I really cant sum it up, other than to say that you should go. By the way, not all the pictures I upload make it to this blog, so if you'd like to see some more, go here.

Its now 10am Friday and I'm going to the zoo.