Dublin

I’ve felt drawn to Ireland for reasons that I can’t adequately explain.  In 1992, a friend took a trip that extended from downtown Dublin into what was, from his photos, stunningly lush green countryside, and with that and the discovery of The Pogues, my yearning began.  There is absolutely no logic behind it.  I know little of Irish culture or history; I have met few, if any, Irish people in my lifetime, and my heritage is far more infused with Welsh and Scottish-ness than anything else.  That said…after years of “what if,” this past January, my wife and I boarded a surprisingly affordable Ryanair flight to Ireland.

We had chosen to lay our heads at a guesthouse in the center of the city, just north of the Liffey river: a watery social dividing line, according to the several guidebooks I read.  All of which was best taken with grains of salt, and washed down with a Guinness.  Whatever differences the North-siders and South-siders may have traditionally held onto, none were visible or relevant during this long weekend excursion.

It felt good to be there.  Obvious linguistic familiarity aside, it felt like a form of home, albeit far different and with far less impact than New York.  The gray that held firm in the skies for much of the weekend was not as depressing as it might have been, elsewhere; if anything, it enabled the warmth of numerous old pubs to stand out that much more in contrast.

Pubs bear much elaboration.  Again according to the guidebooks we carried with us, what was once an inimical part of Irish culture had, over numerous commercially fraught decades, spread abroad, and somehow back again, to the extent that the “pub” experience was not, even in much of Dublin, what it originally was.  To a limited extent, I would concur.  Amusingly, my favorite bar and restaurant in New York, during the roughly five months that I was recently there, seemed most “Irish” of any purportedly Irish watering hole I had experienced in the States — a place where people came and went irrespective of schedule, or “happy hour.”