Chapter 17, In which we visit downtown Dublin and send cyber greetings to our friends.

The plan of attack was this: I determined a route to get from the hotel to Temple Bar, an area in Dublin we deemed to be the destination of our day. Nicole would sit in the passenger seat with the map and, basically, follow road by road with her finger where we were, with the final destination hopefully being a parking garage on Fleet Street.

To be brief, the drive went as simple as that. Monday morning traffic kept our pace at a bit of a crawl, which turned out to be a benefit as we could basically tell exactly where we were the entire drive. I pulled into the Fleet St. parking garage to meet an attendant who insisted I park in a spot marked "reserved." I decided this was a bad idea and began to drive past the spot, but he yelled quite loudly and again insisted I park there. Fine, with his help backing into the spot, I parked there, and nothing bad came of it. Let this be a lesson to you: whenever you see a spot marked "reserved", chances are it means the spot is reserved for you. Or me, but you can have the spot if I'm not around.

Temple Bar is a good bit like Georgetown, Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan all slopped into one area. A good deal of Temple Bar is pedestrian only, which we found to be a good thing because few sidewalks in Dublin, even on the major city streets, are wide enough for a large crowd of people to walk comfortably. And, not unlike Galway, there was a large crowd of people everywhere, and they all seemed to have to run to wherever they were going. This urgency to get from point A to point B was the last thing I expected out of Ireland, for some reason. I believe the pace was even faster than DC.

So, we hit a round of music and jewelry stores. I was more impressed by the CD shops I went into; although their prices were still outrageous, the selection was a lot better, even though I had never heard of most of the things I was looking at. Nicole and I both liked an Irish artist named Christy Moore; his new CD, Traveler was playing in Comet Records when we visited there, and we left with it being our first CD purchase in Ireland.

Next stop, a Cyber Cafe. Nicole had computer withdrawal pretty big by this point. We were able to check in on friends and send email off to our parents. Even though I wasn't exceptionally excited to be sitting at a computer only hours after arriving downtown Dublin, I started to get into the fact that we could see what was going on by our email and checking our message bases. Plus, by this point I had already dragged Nicole into about 5 different CD shops, so I figured I owed her as much time as she wanted here.

Lunch was eaten at the Bad Ass Cafe, a humorous little place to eat with a sad little donkey as their mascot. A sign hanging above the door indicates that Sinead O'Connor used to waitress at this restaurant, and it's really killing me that I can't think of any smartass comment to make about that. Anyhow, our waiter was interested in where we were from, and when we told him DC he proceeded to tell us a story about how a girl that used to work at the Bad Ass Cafe had just moved to DC and invited all her former Cafe-coworkers to her housewarming party. He said few made the trip across the ocean for the afternoon gathering.

Which brings up an interesting point. By this time I was becoming fairly used to the Irish accented English language that was spoken in Ireland, but it was surprisingly difficult for both myself and Nicole to entirely understand when people spoke to us. I probably asked 100 people to repeat themselves over the course of our time in Ireland. Although they were speaking English, I found many people to be talking really fast and dropping a fair number of syllables that I was used to hearing. On top of that, I also found a number of people speaking in a very low voice, which was difficult to hear long before I couldn't understand what they were saying. Just an interesting side note; not being to understand the language was not one of the cultural barriers I was expecting (though I'll still contend that everything went downhill after I was hit with the shower differences).

One of the few goals we went to Ireland with was to get Claddagh rings for each of us. We finally found a jewelry store which had a couple rings to our liking; Nicole got a really nice ring that is mixed with yellow and white gold, while mine is a solid yellow gold ring (don't read that wrong, we didn't break the bank on these, but we did gain two nice pieces of jewelry for a fairly small price). Although we were a little disappointed the rings didn't match (the yellow/white mix was too pretty to pass up, but they didn't have it in my size), Nicole does have a perfectly matching yellow gold ring to mine that her father had given her when she was a child. So, I suppose everything worked out.

We continued and concluded the day in Temple Bar, and then headed to our newly reserved B&B, The Four Seasons run by Maureen Flynn, in Raheny, a suburb of Dublin about 5km northeast of the city. Once again, the trip up north was navigated by Nicole following the map road by unmarked road. We actually arrived to the housing development where the B&B was located with a minimal of turnaround, but were still pretty frustrated just by the simple fact that we never really had a good idea where we were because of the unmarked roads. The housing development had the same awful characteristics of most American developments where there are just circles and circles of roads. Of course, few of these roads had street signs, adding to the challenge. But, eventually we checked into the B&B where we would spend the remaining 4 nights of our honeymoon.

Chapter 18, In which we meet some friendly Irish folk, and begin the feel the effects of homesickness.

The suburb our B&B was located in was not littered with many restaurants as we were used to, and heading back to the city for dinner seemed like a big ordeal. We were both pretty tired by this point. After some arm twisting, I convinced Nicole to ride up to Howth, a small peninsula about 5km north of the B&B. There we found, of all things, an Indian restaurant, Asian Tandorri, which turned out to have some magnificent food. I ordered a vegetable curry, and although the main vegetable in it was potatoes...lots of potatoes...it was some of the best Indian curry I've ever eaten, I think.

Have I mentioned that seemingly everyone in Ireland has a cell phone? And that they talk on these phones all the time, just about everywhere? Loudly? And, on top of all that, most of the phones don't just ring, they play a constant digital tune the way most old Nintendo games used to have. Yep, can't wait for that trend to catch on in America.

Anyhow, I bring that up because the couple at the table next to us (and, might I add, the only other patrons in the restaurant with us) were on the phone constantly, and being very loud at that. With that, a rather verbose argument, and a good deal of belching, we had just about had enough of the couple when they started talking to us. They began raving about the Irish Coffee they were drinking and insisted we order the same. Even if we were trying to be enthusiastic at that point, I suspect we would have been too tired to pull it off, so the gentleman of the couple comes over to our table and insists we try his Irish Coffee. We look at each other, probably thinking to ourselves it couldn't be any stupider than walking to the edge of the Cliffs of Moher, and each take a sip. And, to his credit, they were as good as he insisted they were. Probably even better, a yummy mix of coffee, chocolate and whisky. MMMmmmmmmm.

So we get to talking a little, and they ask us why we were in Ireland, exactly, so I told them it was our honeymoon. Before we knew it, they were crooning over us and even bought us each our own Irish Coffee. Which was great. It turns out they were at the rugby game on Sunday evening and were flying to Wales the next morning to follow the World Cup action there. Conversation continued about rugby being a friendly sport, as opposed to football (soccer to us yanks) which came attached with a very Catholic vs. Protestant rivalry to it. I never really thought about that, but I suppose it would explain, to a degree. the "soccer riots" I'm used to half hearing about. In any event, it was the first time we had heard mention of such troubles. Of course, we weren't about to bring up the subject with anyone, or even elaborate on it with this couple, for fear of offending someone, masking our ignorance of the subject with a nice wall of silence. Still, I thought I'd remark on it here as it was the only time we had heard mention of the friction the two religious groups have on the island.

But, most interesting in the conversation, was the talk of their home in Northern Ireland. Nicole and I were bouncing around the idea of taking a train trip to Belfast from Dublin for a day. To be honest, before the trip I had no desire to travel to Northern Ireland; although I believed nothing bad would happen to us, I figured it wasn't really worth the risk. However, EverYONE was telling us "don't go to Northern Ireland" so much that, like the true jerks that we are, we decided we Must go to Northern Ireland just to spite everyone.

As I was saying, the couple encouraged us to do the day trip when we mentioned it, and added that taking the train was a good idea because it would dump us in the middle of the city and take less time than driving. They told us that the city shouldn't be dangerous for us; although in years past the process of getting into the city was filled with checkpoints and searches, things were now very lax and we should have an issue. They also told us that we MUST go to the Crown Pub; I waited until we left the restaurant to tell Nicole how funny I thought it was that, when telling an Irish couple we were going to a particular city, the first thing they recommend we do is go to a pub. Unlike President Clinton, I hadn't made a drunken Irish joke for a while, and figured I was due a small bit of stereotyping (in case you missed it, Clinton, possibly in efforts to remove himself from the failure of the peace treaty in Northern Ireland, made some rather rude comments about two drunken Irish men not able to get out of the Pub, which was broadcasted in great quantity during our stay. Though in all fairness, there were quite a good deal of pubs in Ireland; even the smallest town would have a minimum of two. It did appear that drinking was a pretty integral part of the Irish community.).

Back to Raheny, where finding our B&B in that dreadful housing development was like getting through the hedge maze in the movie The Shining. Nicole and I began to open up a bit here; we were both becoming a bit homesick and, although we were having fun, the Ireland we had visions of falling in love with was just not what we were finding. The hassles and complications of finding where we were going were wearing us down and, quite simply, uncalled for. In my opinion, the lack of spending a couple million dollars to put up street signs to ease travel was a complete indication of pathetic bureaucratic joke of a government. Where was the 20% sales tax these poor people had to pay going? Did I mention I paid the equivalent of 15 American dollars to put barely 1/4 tank of gas in my car? What was going on here? Overall, having fun or not, I was pretty ready to go home at this point.

I think I can speak for Nicole here by saying we both fell asleep in a rather foul mood.