Irish Hospitality

At the Blarney Castle, we are told the (possibly apocryphal) story of invaders who tried to take advantage of famous Irish hospitality to gain access to the castle they wanted to attack: "Knock, knock, may we come in?"

Well, we haven't tried to invade any strongholds, but we can testify to the warmth of Irish hospitality. We spend the first night living the vida local by staying at the Dublin home of my friend Brendan, whom I first met 21 years ago in a bar in Tokyo. And now look at us. All grown up, with spouses and kids and glasses of wine at the table.

photo from Brendan's iphone, taken by the waitress

After Dublin, when we head out to the country, it's his family farm where we bunker down for the week in county Galway. The rooms are freshly painted for our arrival; in fact he greets us in paint-spattered clothes with a brush in his hand, literally. At first we feel guilty for driving them to spend their weekend doing house chores, but in the end they convince us it's been on their to-do list for a long time just awaiting the proper motivation. Well, I guess we're happy to oblige. If anybody else needs guests to show up at their lovely homes in order to motivate them to get house-chores done, just let us know! We're for hire.

You know how sometimes friends you really like marry spouses you really don't, and it's just a huge bummer? Well, I am pleased to report that Anthony and Brendan, and Brendan's wife Ashley and I, all seem to like each other just fine. As you can see by the fact that the children are mixed up on each side of the table at our dinner out in the photo above, the girls also get along like a house on fire.

On this subject, we are happy to report that we do not actually set Brendan's house on fire, despite lighting fires in the peat-burning stove. It's a real farmhouse, and we (and by "we", I mean "Anthony") bring in peat blocks from the barn and test out our (and by "our", I mean "Anthony's") fire-starting skills.

 

Brendan's parents live on a farm just up the road and his lovely mother, Bridie, comes to visit every once in a while. She assigns the girls the farm chore of feeding the kittens which, as you can imagine, is not much of a hardship for them. If only they would clean their room and clear their dishes with this much enthusiasm! It's the best chore ever and, frankly, one of the things they will probably remember the most about our stay in Ireland. I think it makes them feel important, useful, and distinctly not like tourists. Also, we refuse to buy them any housepets. Perfection.

 

Bridie brings us a homemade apple pie one afternoon which is both delicious and so incredibly thoughtful. To be entirely honest, my own mother has never brought me a homemade apple pie. Probably because my mother has never actually made a pie. So this kind gesture makes me feel like I'm at home -- but at somebody else's home, not the one I grew up in!

Thanks to Irish hospitality, we only spend three nights of our vacation in B&Bs, but these are lovely, too.

Two nights at the Earls Court House in Killarney means two breakfasts at the Earls Court House, and I have to say we are thrilled by this. The B&B is the 2004 winner of the National Porridge Making Competition, an award which we mock for the first 14 hours of our stay...until breakfast. Just how good can porridge be? Oh...my....God. Very, very, very good. I just can't figure out who won the porridge competition for the last eight years. We all want to eat this every day of our lives.

We ask the secret, and while they won't give us the recipe, they do tell us to think lots and lots of cream.

In the harbor town of Kinsale, we eat what is the best meal of our trip at the restaurant with the goofy name of "Fishy Fishy". You will only make fun of this name till you eat there. The chef, Martin Shanahan, is a celebrity chef in Ireland and, as you can guess by the name and coastal location, his specialty is seafood. It is creative, fresh, perfectly prepared, colorful, and full of zingy flavors. It reminds us a lot of the kind of innovative food we miss from San Francisco. And sure enough, I find out Shanahan spent time cooking in San Francisco. Well, I think it shows, and for the better.

Our B&B in Kinsale, called the Rivermount House, is a true family operation, but very luxurious. Other than the family that owns the home, we have the place to ourselves, since we're so off-season. The breakfasts at an Irish B&B are enormous, and we find we never even need lunch. The bread baskets alone are so lovely I could weep. Here, the owners also serve us smoked salmon covered eggs, sausage, bacon, pancakes, and the list goes on.

 

  

Though we have many, many quaint meals on the road, I would like to send a special shout-out to the Conyngham Arms Hotel in Slane near Newgrange, where we stumble across not only excellent food but also the most charming ambience imaginable. Small parlors in the old hotel have been transformed into dining areas, still with their soft couches and cozy armchairs. Even the library has dining tables, and this rooms wins as the room I will most fantasize about writing in -- with a basket of brown bread and a cup of tea by my side -- for the rest of my life.

 

 

We finish off our trip by staying a few days based in Dublin with another Irish friend, Anna, whom Anthony and I met 11 years ago when we were all backpacking around South America. We spent a memorable week together, first on a gut-churning ferry across the Gulf of Penas, then hiking around the incomparably beautiful Torres del Paine. One day, we all went ice climbing together and in a moment of youthful (but sober!) silliness, we all partially stripped for a wacky on-glacier photo. Evidently, Anna has had this picture of us in various stages of mooning/flashing/undress (which I have edited out, because the Internet never forgets....) on her dresser for the past 11 years. When her family asks her who's visiting, she tells them it's the American asses from the photo, and they all know instantly who we are. Or, at least, who our asses are.

 

 

Even though we haven't seen her in 11 years, she is exactly the warm, bubbly, funny person we remember, and the girls are completely enchanted.  Besides making our stay so comfortable, she also throws an impromptu Irish dance lesson for the girls, even roping in a former dance-champion neighbor. Gigi, in partucular, loves this, as she has started her own blog called Amikuku, introducing kids to dance from around the world. You can bet she will be writing about Irish dance soon.

 

 

In the end, having friends here has made the whole trip so special. Though trips to Morocco or India were more exotic, we feel like we have a connection here that we don't have in those places. We are so looking forward to reciprocating and hosting our Irish friends in Paris and maybe someday in San Francisco. But I'll have to prep for weeks ahead of time to compete with those Irish breakfasts.

 

Dingle

The thing to do from Killarney is to drive around the Ring of Kerry. But the truth is, the Kerry peninsula drive is scenic on a large scale, in every sense. You need clear skies to see far to get the most of the long drives whose main purpose is the view. So instead, we do the Dingle drive. First of all, I love the name. Any place named Dingle already has points in my book.

Also, the Dingle Peninsula is more compact so it's quicker, even though it's further from Killarney. The scenic aspects are close in, and there are more places to stop, see specific sites (and sights), and get out and stretch. Dingle does not disappoint. I don't know if Anthony or the kids feels it, but there is something magical about this place to me.

  

We get down from the cliffs to sea level so the girls can touch the Atlantic, their first time from this continent.

The peninsula is filled with antiquities, more even than the Ring of Kerry. One of the greatest things about this place is that it is a treasure trove of ancient sites. The ancients used what they had -- stones -- and some of the excellent and enduring stonework (corbelling, tilting down and out for rain runoff but stacked without mortar) reminds us a little of of the mastery you see in Peru. The first place we visit is Dunbeg (Dún Beag) Promontory Fort. Through carbon dating, the experts estimate use of this site as early as the 5th century, being regularly inhabited by the 10th century. It's hard even to put that in context for the kids, but all we can tell them is to go by our family benchmark: "It's about twice as old as Notre Dame Cathedral." Anthony is often our source of information; he likes to read all the placards, even as the rest of us are running for shelter.

 

 

  

 

Our second stop is one of the many famous beehive huts that dot the coastline. This one, specifically, is called Cathair na gConchúireach. And no, I can't tell you how to pronounce that. It was said to have been built and inhabited somewhere up to 1200 AD, so somewhere around 1000 years old, or more.

 

Taking a break from the on-and-off rain, on-and-more-on wind, car, and ancient buildings, we stop at Louis Mulcahey pottery shop and café, where we have delicious warm soup (the girls say -- correctly? -- that the various Irish soups we've eaten are, on the whole, the best they've ever tasted), hearty brown bread, hot chocolate with marshmallows, and a chance to relax. We buy some books, and the girls read up on their Irish tales. Also, before Anthony or I can exactly realize what's going on and stop them, they manage to yell out some dirty Irish limericks from across the room.

 

 

This is where I buy my new cheese tray, a platter-sized version of the bread plate above. Luckily, it survives the trip better than the stone cheese platter I bought in Morocco. Here's a sneak peak (flash forward to Paris) at how amazing my Louis Mulcahey pottery looks hosting a bunch of French cheeses:

And back to ancient Ireland. Now warm and well fed, with a few fun souvenirs in the car, we head out to visit the virtually perfectly preserved Gallarus Oratory; that's preservation, not renovation. It has looked like that, if you believe the official information, for the past 1300 years. As a sudden, brief downpour hits while we're there, I can tell you form experience that it is, in fact, still completely water-tight. There are two stone loops to tie up a curtain of some sort over the door, and while the wind and rain rage outside, we imagine how cozy it would have been with a fur or wool curtain, and perhaps a small fire inside (would they have had fires inside? Or would that be too smoky? In my clearly romanticized view of the ancients, there's a fire to keep us warm, but it ventilates well. Oh, and we have modern clothing, shoes, food, shampoo, and medicine).

One small detour to see Kilmalkeader, a 12th century church.

 

Woman of letters that I am, I absolutely love the two ancient language stones here. On the stone pictured below, called an Ogham pillar, the notches are actually an ancient form of phonetic writing, used to write Archaic Irish, Old Welsh and Latin between the 4th and 7th century AD. This one says "ANM MAILE-INBIR MACI BROCANN" ("the name Mael Inbir, son of Brocan"). Do you notice the "Maci" in there that means "son of"? As in MacDonald, McNeill, etc. The system itself looks like chicken scratches, and is way too complicated for me to absorb and explain. If you're really curious, check out this explanation.

  

 

The American part of me that's used to everything of historical value being roped and sealed off feels a little bad that Pippa is leaning against the pillar. On the other hand, it's been sitting in a still-used cemetery in the open, under the Irish rain, for nearly two thousand years, so perhaps this is really the least of it.

Another pillar in the churchyard contains the Roman alphabet, and is said to be from the 6th century or earlier. The assumption is that it was used as a teaching tablet. It stands vertically, but I've put it on the horizontal and enhanced the contrast it to try to make the letters more visible.

 

Anthony, man of science that he is, prefers the following stone, which is an ancient sundial. Yes, we see the irony in this, too, given we are in Ireland and on a very typically overcast, rainy day. More than that, the hole in the rock is not carved all the way through, as you can see from the backside. So it does beg the question, how could it have worked? We can't interpret the carvings, but find them lovely nonetheless.

 

 

It's too cloudy, and we will be too carsick, to go over the famous Conor pass, so instead we retrace our steps along the officially less scenic (but still spectacular) and drastically more efficient road back to Killarney, where we're staying for a couple nights. Along the way, we stop at a little aquarium in the town of Dingle for what will be our last hoorah for the day. With very low expectations, we are, frankly, pleasantly surprised. It's a great way to give the girls something that's a little more kid-friendly. It's actually quite an impressive aquarium, out here in a tiny town, on a tiny peninsula, in a tiny country. 

 

 

  

 

There are a couple signs that tickle my fancy here. One, on the piranha tank:

 

But my favorite is the sign on the petting tank. Check out rule #4: "Avoid the Thornback Ray's Spine. It has THORNS on it's back." Woman of letters that I am, my pet peeve is not that they unwisely stuck a thornback spine into a children's petting tank, but rather that they incorrectly stuck an apostrophe into the "it's".

 

 

The one thing we don't stop for on our tour is "world-famous" home-made Dingle ice cream. Mostly because we are too cold, and partly because living on Ile St. Louis, near "world-famous" Berthillon, we get a whole lot of ice cream in our lives already. When I wonder aloud what the local specialty flavor might be, Anthony answers, "Of course...it's Dingleberry!" Really, I just walked right into that one.