World, You Are Welcome!

Day 2: (April 17, 2013) - The Emerald Isle

You know, its kind of nice to sleep in a bit after a stressful day of travel.  Might as well, turn on the t.v. and watch that for a while in bed.  It was drizzling outside, so why not?  Besides, when you travel taking in a bit of t.v. is also part of understanding the culture.  Have you ever watched the Simpsons in french?  I have, and it was enlightening.  While channel surfing I discovered that we Americans owe the world an apology.  We have exported Jerry Springer.  Except, in the U.K./Ireland, Jerry Springer is named Jeremy Kyle.  Here he is:

Jerry Springer kind of comes off as a gentle soul who is empathetically trying to help people sort through their issues.  That is why after 40 minutes of cussing, throwing chairs and tossing about 1,000 pounds of red neck flesh on his stage, Jerry really grounds us (sarcasm intended) with some softly spoken moral advice.  Jeremy Kyle has all the same zoo animals present on his show, but he makes no pretense at providing direction.  Apparently, the British way is to tell your guest exactly what a total, worthless piece of sh*t he/she is.  So, as I lay in bed, Mr. Kyle is found following his guests about (they can't escape him) while berating them and waiving a slip of paper above his head which purports to contain either DNA or lie detector results.  Just look at his picture!  Don't you just want to smack that smug look right off of his face?  He is soooooo intense!

The good news is that the U.K.'s white trash look pretty much like our own, except (of course) the British have awful teeth, they aren't as fat and they dress slightly better.  Witness:

Thanks to Mr. Kyle's British guests and my own observation of the Irish, I've developed a radical new theory as to why the British have treated the Irish like a red-headed step child throughout history.  Was it racial prejudice, greed or religion?  No.  The British are simply envious of Irish teeth.  If you can't fix your own teeth, it wouldn't quite be fair to let those other chaps on the next island over keep their perfect teeth would it.  So, my theory is both orthodontic and democratic because everyone loses.

I realize I haven't gotten to the travel portion of today's blog, but this is important.  I do try to educate.  I want to recommend you catch Monday and Wednesday's episodes of The Jeremy Kyle Show on the internet as follows:

Monday: Which one of my children stole my bingo winnings?  (plug in that lie detector)

Wednesday: I only started sleeping with your sister when we broke up! (so we're cool then?)

You are probably wondering why I haven't described any travel yet.  Here's the answer:  What comes next has absolutely no interest to any of you.  We went to Knock.  What happened at Knock, you say?  Well, gather up your rosaries, sit down by the fire, and I'll tell ya.  In 1879, the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist and a sacrificial lamb (this represents Jesus for all you non-Christians reading) appeared all glowing white against the back wall of the church in the middle of the night.  The first person saw it and ran to get most everyone else in the town out there to see it, and they all stood there dumbfounded for about two hours as the image glowed.  I like to think of it as kind of like a really holy drive-in movie but without audio.  Here is a picture of the shrine located on the exact spot this occurred:

Now, I know what you non-Catholics are thinking.  You think we Catholics are always in an uproar about these things and hurry about worshipping images of Jesus or Mary which appear in cornflake shape or perhaps on a piece of toast.  Yet, it will please you to know that you aren't supposed to worship an image, even if were to appear on something you really want to eat.  Also, the Church has only approved a handful of such Marian Apparitions as genuine.  Knock is one of them.  And so we went to the site.  They had a pretty cool museum with stuff from the visits made by John Paul II and Mother Theresa.  Strangely enough, they don't let you handle these things.

After getting drizzled on a bit at Knock, we got in our super-cool rental Renault and headed to Castlebar to check into the Breaffy House.  Lovely place, but also somewhat "hamster-home like" (see Day 1 blog).  Here it is:

We didn't stay long because I really needed to swill more Guinness.  That means we had to take the 20 minute drive into Westport.  Why?  Because my second pilgrimage of the day had to occur at this specific location:



This little pub is owned by a fella named Matt Molloy.  Mr. Molloy is the flautist (relax, that means flute player even if it sounds naughty when you say it out loud) for the Irish music mainstay "The Chieftains".  Ah, the Chieftains have provided me hours of musical joy (especially at Christmas), and so I felt it only necessary to spend some money at Mr. Molloy's pub.  He wasn't there but his two Grammy's were just sitting there behind the bar.

Anyway, Stacy discovered that she doesn't like Guinness very much after years of telling me and lots of other people that she does.  I drank most of hers (I'm helpful) while we sat by a turf fire in the back.  Yep, they burn peat here.  Peat is just decayed organic matter and it looks like clay when you dig up.  Some chap back in the prehistoric times figured you could burn this stuff if you just dug it up and dried it out. I'm not sure how you dry anything out in Ireland, but they did it!  It basically smells like burning charcoal.  By the way, you don't call it a peat fire. It's a turf fire.  The Irish are very quick to sort you out on these things immediately after they come out of your mouth.

One delusion that I carried with me to Ireland is that everyone would think I was interesting.  After all, here's a chap with an American accent dragging his pretty wife into our tiny obscure pub in our rural village.  Shouldn't we get up and go talk to him, make inquiries, even buy him a drink?  No.  They pretty much just leave you alone.  Everyone over there has American relatives.  At least during spring and summer, Ireland is lousy with Americans even though we only saw a handful in our travels.  My only means of standing out was the terrible sunburn I acquired at my kid's baseball game just before we left.  The Irish have probably never even seen a sunburn, but I didn't get any attention for that either.  And that's probably a good thing.

So, no, I didn't get treated to free Guinness because I come from America.  That was a disappointment.  Don't get me wrong.  The Irish like Americans and they are mildly curious about you, but not in the order of magnitude I expected.  To illustrate, my only exposure to foreigners growing up were the Swedish foreign exchange students at our high school.  And I gave them as much attention as possible, but only because they were Swedish, pretty and female.  That kind of expectation just doesn't fly in Ireland.  Also, I'm not pretty or female.  Stacy is, but they didn't even bother her.  In this regard, those people are seriously messed up.

Anyway, Stacy and I vacated Matt Molloy's and returned to the Breaffy House.  We did drink a bit more at the hotel pub while watching soccer (excuse me, football).  Thus ends Day 2.