September 9 - day 3

Dublin

I started the day with a hearty Irish breakfast. One egg, two sausages, one black pudding, half a tomato, a glass of orange juice, coffee, two slices of toast, two slices of bacon and about 1,200 calories later I headed for the Trim castle. It's the largest castle in Ireland, and the local businesses still display photos from when scenes from Braveheart were shot there.
As I mentioned, it's easy to get lost. I missed my bus back into Dublin because I couldn't find my way back to the B and B from the castle. They are less than 1/2 a mile apart. While the delay was entirely my fault, I think I should point out to anyone planning on going to Ireland that you should never ask directions from a local. I asked several times, and during my entire stay in Ireland I can't recall an instance when it led me to the right place. Most of that is the fact that it takes at least two rights and a left to go anywhere, but the rest of it is just the way they talk. It would have been kind of funny if I hadn't been trying to catch a bus.
Eventually I made it back to Dublin and stayed at a hostel that claimed to occupy the former studiios where U2, the Cranberries, Van Morrison and others recorded.
The highlight of my time in Dublin came that night at the Brazen Head Pub. While its claim to be the oldest pub in Dublin is touristy, the mid-week crowd was very Irish.
This is probably a good time to point out that the Guiness in Ireland really does taste different. There's a slight, bitter aftertast toward the bottom of a pint of Guiness in the United States. In Ireland, the whole glass tastes just as good as the first sip when the glass is still ripe with foam. It's creamy and smooth and fresh in ways I didn't think beer could be.
I ended up sitting next to a guy my age from Chicago and his Eastern European girlfriend who was studying urban planning in Scotland. We didn't have long to talk, though, before the music started. There wasn't a stage, but several musicians crowded in a circle around microphones in the corner of the pub.
The songs I can only compare to the best of the folk music I've heard in the US, except here the whole bar clapped and sang along when they started playing.
I told an older Irishman who chatted me up at the bar that I'd never seen anyone fiddle as well as the violinist. Every band has a fiddler, he said, and there are many better than him.
Every now and again they'd ring a cow bell to quiet down the crowd and a man would sing a ballad. During the other songs he would play the spoons, occasionally thwacking the drummer or his neighbor and alternately mimicing the sounds of castinettes and a rock drummer's snare drums in ways I didn't think possible.
He talked to us between sets and after the show with the chatty, mischevious friendliness I found all over the island.
When he isn't singing he works for a bank and flies all over Europe on business. At night, though, he's just another young Dubliner who'll tell a traveller it will take three days for him to get home. He only lives across the river, he says, but then again there are a lot of pubs between here and there.
We got to talking about the subtle differences in the English language. Until fairly recently, he said, most Irish outside the more British-influenced east of the country still spoke Gaelic/Irish most of the time. He said years ago a lot of people didn't understand the larger English words, so new meanings for them evolved over the decades in Ireland. A vicious crowd outside a wedding, for example, is not violent but large.
As opposed to English, he said, the Irish is a language rich in adjectives and flowery descriptions rather than straight forward nouns and verbs. For example, if I remember correctly, the Irish word for dawn means something close to the bridal ring of the morning. When he was a kid, this guy said his Irish speaking mom was just as likely to sing in response to a question from her children as she was to answer directly.
Then there's American English. When he visited the U.S. the singer recounted how surprised he was when one of his realtives told him if he did something again she'd spank his fanny.
"Fanny means c-nt," he said, proceeding to tell us how hillarious it was to hear her talk about her fanny pack.
A jovial half hour later the pub was shutting down and we went our separate ways. It was probably the cultural highlight of my time in Ireland.