|
| |
Ireland - Part 1
Written by: Donald Miserandino
The wild geese will always return to mother.
I anticipated this trip to be a trip “home,” and I was not disappointed. Ireland is about the people. Pick a location, visit it, but stay long enough to really be with the people. That’s where the wealth is. That’s what you will take back as a souvenir. Growing up, I wondered why my grandparents did certain things, ate certain foods, or even exhibited a great faith when various life troubles hit. The answers were in me all the time, but I just couldn’t see them until the book of life opened a new chapter on this trip.
Let me start at the beginning. The flight over was pretty typical. A friend of mine, Mr. Mac, who had been to Ireland several times, told me to get on the plane and “Let mother take you home. Don’t worry about anything.” And she did, and I didn’t. I was just starting to doze off when the passenger across the aisle started to speak very loudly. The steward went over to him to quiet him down. The passenger said that he was very nervous and getting panicky since this was his first flight since 9/11. The steward then left to get him a drink. The nervous passenger then turned toward me and started to talk about his whole life, his job, and the fact that he just moved out of New York City… talk, talk, talk…on and on. I thought I was going to need a drink if I had to put up with this guy the whole trip. When he mentioned that his brother was a firefighter, I asked if he knew of Father Judge, the fire chaplain who died in the September 11 tragedy. He said yes, so I reached into my wallet and gave him my memorial card of Father Judge. I suggested that he read the card and said it might calm him down. He did, and it did! The rest of the trip he spoke calmly, and didn’t bother anybody. So, between the card and the drinks the travel hours passed peacefully.
I read my notes on all the areas I would be visiting. Tourism Ireland (www.tourismireland.com), had set up the itinerary for this trip. I used the internet as my main guide and started out at www.shamrock.org/activity, just to see what they offered. I prefer to know generally where I’m going and what there is to see when I get there. About a week before leaving, I got on the net and did my research. I hate to take notes, so I just copied and printed whatever I wanted to save. Then, I read it on the plane and threw pages away after I visited each location. The local hosts seemed to respond much better to questions that showed I cared enough to do some homework.
I arrived in the afternoon and was greeted at the airport by a representative from Discover Sligo. They had arranged this tour, “Fáilte Ireland.” That was my first introduction to the Irish language. As well as a national tourism agency, it means “Welcome to Ireland.”
The first stop was the Celtic Seaweed Baths. It is located at the end of a road, next to a wide open beach, with the typical sand, rocks, surfers and even small village store. The bath building is composed of a waiting/reception area and a hallway, off of which are separate rooms for each client. The bathing rooms are about the size of an average home bath and had tiled walls and floor. They contain an old fashioned deep tub, a bench and an enclosed shower. Each room is fully cleaned, sanitized and reset before being used by a new client. Yes, as the name says, one bathes right in the seaweed and ocean water, so if you have a concern about grass stains, wear a bathing suit. After relaxing about 45 minutes, I was awakened by a knock at the door to remind me I was in someone else’s house and my time was up. Showered and dressed, I was now ready to meet the world. It was a great idea to do this after a long plane flight.
For the next two nights, I would stay in the town of Sligo, which was one of the main ports of departure during the Great Famine. The town retains many of the buildings of that period and walking down the street is a bit of a time warp. Our hotel was the Clarion, a “retrofit” of a nineteenth century insane asylum into a modern first class hotel. While I could make up mystery stories about the late at night screams in far away spaces, it would be a lie, because this modern hotel has almost more comforts than home. The only noises heard here are from the bar and restaurant, and those are of people at a party.
Today’s breakfast was typical, if you call my sudden introduction to “blood pudding” typical. I noticed on the buffet line that there were what looked to be little hot meat patties about the size of silver dollars being offered in addition to the various cereals, eggs and meat. The bacon looked like ham, while the “meat” patties looked like scrapple. They were, in fact, not meat. After I enjoyed three of those babies, another visitor decided to have fun with me and explain that the blood pudding is not a pudding. Blood yes, pudding no. It is grain, not meat, which was soaked in blood and then cooked. It seems these little torpedoes are put out in a casual enticing fashion to allow the locals to nudge strangers into having extra coffee to wash out their mouths.
The day’s theme was “Yeats Country.” The folks at Discover Sligo had put together a little taste of their tour of the homeland of the Nobel Prize winner and local poet W. B. Yeats. Even though in elementary school I studied some of Yeats’s poems, I stopped at a bookstore in Sligo and bought a sampler book. The tour would take a different tack and actually showed some of the locations Yeats mentioned in his poems. It was a way of showing the elements that creatively influenced the poet. If experience is the best education, then this tour is equal to a thesis. From a boat trip on Lough Gillaround, the Lake Isle of Innisfree, to his grave at Drumcliffe, to a Lissadell House, Yeats was here, there and all over Sligo. Lissadell House, recently open to the public, was the childhood home of the Gore-Booth sisters, whose family hosted Yeats. The new owners have shown a loving hand at restoration of the property and make it available for occasional tours. The Gore-Booth sisters participated in social activism-- with Eva a social reformer and Constance being a muse to both the poet Yeats and to Irish society in general. Better known under her marriage name of Constance Markievicz, she was a leader in the 1916 Uprising.
| |
Celtic Seaweed Baths with Real Seaweed |
|
Part 1
Part 2
|
|
|
|
|
|
