Chapter 2, In which we conclude our flight and learn, quickly, about driving on the wrong...i mean, left side of the road.

We landed in Heathrow with about 80 minutes to get our connecting flight to Shannon, Ireland. We made our way to a bus that took us from terminal 4 to terminal 1 through some bizarre path that only an insane airport bus driver would know, and we arrived at terminal 1 in about 7 minutes. We had about 50-60 minutes to spare, I suppose.

It would be safe to say I had no idea how big Heathrow airport was. We walked. And walked. And walked. We left the main part of the terminal and walked through pre-fab type structures that looked like were build by some kid with a really big Lego set. And we Walked. And about 25 minutes later, in a near complete state of exhaustion, we arrived at our gate. By that point they could have tied me to the outside of the plane before takeoff, as long as I didn't have to walk anymore. We boarded the plane, we left London pretty much on schedule.

Despite sleeping some on the flight to London, I hadn't really slept well for a good 24 hours by this point. But as we descended down through the vast, lush fields of Ireland, that didn't matter at all. We could see castles in good repair and in ruins. We could see grass so green, a sight we had been robbed of thanks to the evil sun blaring down all summer on the Washington landscape. Even the air in the tiny, dank Shannon Airport seemed fresh and revitalizing.

Then I got into the rental car. Steering wheel on the right...okay, I was expecting that. Drive on the left...okay, I was expecting that too. We crawled our way out of the airport without much traffic at all. I was scared, but I started to believe that it may not be that difficult after all.

A sign..."Roundabout, 100m ahead". Okay...'m' stands for meters. Fine. 'Roundabout', hmmm, what could that be. An annoying Yes song...I automatically had a bad feeling.

I stopped completely, much to the aggravation of the person behind me. The deceptive road lead me to a complete circle. Now what the hell was I supposed to do? Instinctively, I began to make a right turn into the circle only to see a car scream by me...from my right side to my left. All of a sudden it made sense...everything here was backwards. I could almost hear Lisa Simpson reminding me to be careful because, with the comprehension that Everything was backwards in Ireland, "and hamburgers eat people here."

In about 15 minutes we rolled into the Limerick Inn Hotel. By this point, the place could have been a barn where I had to share a bed of straw with a pony and I would have still fallen asleep immediately. But the fact was, it was a beautiful hotel, and we quickly checked in, and by 2:30 pm, Ireland time, we were napping a well deserved nap.

Chapter 3, In which we enter our first Ireland city and drink our first Ireland beer.

I awoke at 5:30 and decided to take a shower. I had determined if we stayed awake for a couple hours in the evening, then got a full night of sleep, we would be over our jet lag by Thursday morning.

This was the first instance of a number of things that would just confused me to no end in Ireland. For all the preparations I had to made to acquaint myself to a foreign culture (albeit similar to America, there are still a multitude of differences), I was just not prepared for what was about to happen to me.

I couldn't make the shower work.

Water was pouring from the tub faucet as proudly as it pleased, but I couldn't make it come out of the shower head for anything. Now think about this...how difficult is it to use a shower? Think of your own...mine, it has a Hot water knob, a Cold water knob, and a knob that changes the water from pouring into the tub to pouring out the shower head. Pretty simple, and IMHO, fairly perfect. How much more is needed, really? (Okay, sometimes the hot and cold are merged into one knob instead of two...kinda silly, but still fairly manageable).

All i saw in front of me were two completely unlabeled handles, one i assumed was for choosing a comfortable point between hot and cold, and one i assumed would make water pour from the shower head. Nope. I just started turning and pulling everything imaginable in that shower to make the thing work. Finally, I managed to get the shower to perform the act it was created to do, and everything was fine. And even though I repeated that action the next morning, I'm pretty sure I would struggle just as much if you put me in that room today. The thought just makes me shudder, really...

Anyhow, that done, we drove into the city of Limerick, which was about 10 miles from our hotel. I was still a little shaky with the driving, basically having a difficult time judging just where i was on the road. It wasn't too long before we were entering the city limits, and the whole "judging where the car is on the road" thing became that much more important as parked cars started appearing, for lack of a better way of describing it, half on the sidewalk and half in the middle of the road. The sun was going down, Limerick was apparently on the later stages of an evening rush hour, and driving while determining where we were going as the sun was setting was becoming just a bit overwhelming.

Just as a side note, if you live in Limerick, and around this time in October some guy in a silver rental car clocked your right rear-view mirror with his left rear-view mirror, it wasn't me. Hope you find the jerk that did that, tho.

We parked...on the sidewalk...in the dark, dirty looking town of Limerick, close to 7pm i suppose. We walked around a bit to find just about every business in the town closed, including a number of the restaurants. We finally ate at a little dive called Enzo's, where we ordered one of those little pizza's that was very similar to the kind that I used to buy at the grocery at college for $.89. Overall, this wasn't shaping up as a very good thing.

After finding an ATM that would accept my bank card, we headed back to the hotel to have a drink in the bar there. We walked in to find a number of tourists and two guys sitting at a corner table, guitars in hand, trying to hammer out an Irish trad-sounding song. Both Nicole and I ordered a pint of Guinness...now, a whole ton of people were telling me that the stouts we would drinking in Ireland would be amazingly better than anything we had ever had in America, so this was a pretty big moment for both of us. Guaranteed, it took a good couple minutes longer to pour the Guinness than it does in a standard American bar, and they seemed to have the exact pouring method down to a science. Fill glass at just the correct angle, set glass down on a metal "overflow" catcher, wait until the beer has settled, then top off the glass. I was intrigued.

And then we drank. It was good. After all, I never had a bad glass of Guinness. But it wasn't the spectacular, life changing moment I had been led to believe it would be.

We drank up, decided we were pretty tired, and headed off to our hotel room for the night.