Gabi Goes! Adventures of a JMU Student Abroad, Vol. 9

The Long Awaited Dublin Post

We’ve waited 700 years. You can keep your seven minutes. – Easter 1916

Ah, Ireland. Land of leprechauns, green rolling hills, sheep, Temple Bar and traffic systems that sound like machine gun fire—the idyllic noise of horses and buggies touting about tourists, and the melodious strains of country western music wafting inexplicably from the bar across the street.

It was the day of London’s Comic-Con, which we had all astutely observed when our Tube train was boarded by storm-troopers, Mario and Luigi, a Japanese schoolgirl, and a single lone ninja. After an easy security run-through we waited by the first gate for our flight, the other girls playing cards, and me racing through a 5-pound copy of Les Miserables that I picked up at the London airport. We were so focused on what we were doing that we nearly missed the flight, as a dulcet recording reminded us that we were five minutes until boarding for flight 5114 closed. We ran madly through the airport and got on the plane an instant before the worst had happened.

We were on our way.

My first impression of Dublin was riding on the double-decker shuttle bus that was suspiciously like the night bus in Harry Potter as it precariously avoided crashing into cabs and Dubliners, and the enormous Spire (an odd choice for a city with such a pronounced heroin problem) rearing hundreds of feet into the sky.

In general, many of you are probably wondering what my overall impression is of Dublin.

It is like a very pointy London with a surfeit of brick. Music is everywhere, pouring out of the shops and the pubs and the bars, and in every possible combination, from sweet Celtic music on harps to odd garage metal. They also really love their 80’s rock in this town. I think I have heard about thirty renditions of Billy Idol hits in my three days there. Everywhere street performers dance and cavort, from improvisational drumming to a break-dancing man in a tiger suit. A man on a street corner played a particularly poignant rendition of Every Rose Has Its Thorn.

Dublin is certainly a different kettle of fish all together from the quiet climes of Bloomsbury London. Gone were the museums and the quaint bookstores, and replacing them are pubs, cobblestoned streets, and medieval churches. Gone is the famous London reserve that I had gotten so used to, a kind of hurried bustle that ignored all traffic, the kind of polite introspectiveness that lends one’s eyes a glassy look on the Tube in the early morning. People here actually are quite friendly as a whole.

Back in the far more solemn climes of Bloomsbury, I found myself actually missing the general extroverted good-naturedness of Dubliners. I missed the jumble of being at my first hostel, the fact that I heard every language from Portuguese to French to Italian to what I was sure was Korean, spoken at every turn. I missed the guy that manned the front desk, Lucas, even if he was covered in tattoos and played a horrific metal guitar. I missed the gentle lilt of an Irish accent that made even cursing sound delightfully off-kilter. I miss Dublin, but it was not, perhaps, exactly what I expected.

There were no rolling hills (this I should have gathered, as it was a city) few museums (apart from a few Viking themed ones) and even fewer leprechauns (excluding, of course, Seamus, at the National Leprechaun Museum). Dublin was, in some ways, a much younger city than London, and a particular favourite with the international jet set. The first night, I dutifully went on my first pub crawl with the rest of the girls, and while most of them were happily flirting with the other college boys our age, I hung out with our post-grad anthropology student tour guide Patty Cassidy and talked about Brittany with a bunch of Frenchmen dressed as pirates. Perhaps I just don’t do this party thing right, I considered. There must be more to Dublin than chatting with French pirates and listening to off-key renditions of Sweet Home Alabama.

I`m not really a partier, especially with people I don’t know. I don’t have enough of the traditional attributes to be successful in that endeavor, being rather shy, not very tall, and more intelligent than classically beautiful. It is difficult to stand out in a party when your main asset is words. So I mostly hang back, talk to a few people, but, as always, step directly back from the action and observe with a satiric eye until the sheer noise and amount of people overwhelm me and I duck out to write. But I did, in fact, manage to have a little fun and met people from all over the world, but most of my fun took place far from Dublin’s famous pubs.

I liked far more sitting in Christ Church’s churchyard near where Strongbow was buried, writing for hours, hanging out in Dublin Castle, and sitting next to the equivalency of Ireland’s CIA with only a hedge separating us.

I liked watching Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer where David Garrick first debuted his Hamlet and hearing the stories of how Dublin came to be, why there is a cat and a rat in a glass case in Christ Church, the fact that Lady Justice over Dublin Castle is not blind.

I liked strolling through Trinity College and seeing the city from the very top of the Guinness storehouse, and running through a ‘magic portal’ and a simulated forest in the National Leprechaun Museum.

So.
I will miss the Easter 1916 rebellion (Happy Days!) broken vending machines, the top bunk in Kinlay House and my epic roommate from Canada. I will miss Seamus the leprechaun and drawing kelpies to put on display in the gallery at the museum, and the charming Irish expressions and faint sarcasm but with no harm done.

I liked it there, but I was undeniably happy to see the London skyline again. On the Tube back, exhausted, I let slip how happy I was to be home, and thought how strange that I would be leaving the next Sunday.
One week to go. Let’s make it a good one.