In Waterford
The last time I was in Ireland, in 2001, it seemed to me that Parliament had passed a law requiring that every single pub and restaurant in the nation should be playing “It’s Raining Men” on constant repeat. It got to the point where I just laughed every time I heard it. In Westport, in this little tiny pub at the foot of Mount Patrick, there was this pub full of huge Irish working men, muscles widing than the horses they drove, beards out to everywhere. You didn’t want to mess with these men. They could break you in half just by looking at you. And yep, the music playing when we went into this pub was “It’s Raining Men”.
This time, the theme is apparently American classic rock. I’ve heard more Bob Dylan since coming over here than I ever did in America. In Kilkenny the other night, we went to a pub called Kyteler’s Inn, named after a woman who was accused of witchcraft (she escaped burning at the stake by fleeing, I think, to Wales; her serving maid was therefore burned in her place). I had seen that there was going to be live music playing, and I asked the waitress about it. She said, “Acoustic stuff. Definitely Irish.” So I was expecting, you know, a traditional pick up jam session. I was not expecting a couple of guys who did covers of Cat Stevens, the Beatles, and other such artists and tunes. It was kind of disappointing, in a way, even though they were very good musicians. Jennifer and I shared a table with a woman and her son, both from Surrey, and complained about the music and compared travel horror stories and griped (just a little bit) about politics.
We left Kilkenny yesterday, having felt like we’d tapped the city dry for entertainment purposes (for our relatively low-key brand of entertainment, at least). There was a bit of excitement when it came time to pay for our stay at the Celtic House B&B; they wanted cash, so Jennifer told me to put the suitcases into the car while she took care of the payment. What I didn’t know was that she didn’t have enough cash so she went to an ATM to get more. So when I got back into the B&B, I couldn’t find her anywhere, and neither the innkeeper nor his wife had seen Jennifer leave. We spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out where she was; and when she came in, cash in hand, there were hugs and exclamations of joys all around. It was very friendly.
We drove down to Waterford after that, stopping through New Ross to see the Famine Ship (a fascinating reconstruction of one of the famine ships that carried fleeing Irish to North America, complete with actresses portraying historical women whose names were drawn from the passenger records of the original ship). Then we got lost in Wexford looking for the Irish National Heritage Center, which featured recreations of structures dating back to the Stone Age and through the Norman Conquest. Nomadic tents to round towers, in other words. It was fascinating to see the ways in which technology has advanced in the past few millennia.
We also drove to the Hook Head Lighthouse, a lighthouse which has been in continuous use for at least 800 years (and the head served as a signal point with monks tending huge fires for about five hundred years prior to that). The drive there was probably the most boosting I’ve had since we’ve gotten here; I only nearly fatally crashed twice. We were delayed at one point because of a small flock of sheep that were wandering into the road, followed by a pair of very annoyed-looking young men. Damn sheep. The lighthouse itself was built by a bunch of monks, who lived there and carried sacks of coal weighing over 100 pounds up and down the stairs to keep the signal fire burning. We’ve come to learn that medieval monks lived for this kind of thing. Sometimes, they came down with severe respiratory infections, the guide said. I can only imagine the ecstasy that the monks must have felt: “Not only do I get to carry all these loads of coal up and down these stairs in sub-zero winter temperatures while a storm rages outside, I’ve got pneumonia to boot! Am I the luckiest monk in the world or what?”
Hard life, those monks had. On the other hand, it was the 14th century, when the harsh life of a monastary was better than life outside by several orders of magnitude. The vow of poverty wasn’t a hardship since no one owned anything anyway; and the vow of celibacy was easy as well, since the Black Death had killed off anyone you’d want to break that vow with anyway.
We made it safe and sound to Waterford, which is a different experience yet from either Trim or Kilkenny. The woman who owns the B&B where we are staying is friendly and a good cook, but the room we’re in is miniscule. Jennifer slept on the floor, closer to the door because she figured she’d have to get up more often during the night than I would. I slept on the bed, because I’m that nice a guy.
Waterford is swimming in history, from when the Vikings established it as an encampment back in 800 something (probably earlier, I can’t remember) through its adventurous years as a pawn between the monarchy of England and the various pretenders to the world-class glass manufacturing center that it is today. We visited Christ Church Cathedral (our B&B is right next to it), saw the old French Church, and toured an undercroft underneath the street. That part fascinated me; it was like a D&D setting. What intrigued me the most about it, though, was the way in which the undercroft had been discovered after centuries of disinterest. An historian was visiting some friends; the dialogue was essentially something like this:
HISTORIAN: Hey, what’s this six hundred year old staircase in the corner go to?
HOMEOWNERS: Dunno, never really thought about it. We just throw our trash in there.
It exemplifies perfectly, to me, the way in which the Irish take so casually to the thousands of years of history that they see around them every day.
And that pretty much brings things up to date.
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