On Frozen Blog

I am on holiday from bad hockey. My cousin Bill and I are visiting the land of our ancestry this week, the Emerald Isle. We are here to throw back a few pints and to see if Erin will go braless.

Sport is gaining increasing importance in Irish culture. Games on the pitch, as elsewhere in western Europe, remain a staple of pub patrons’ enthusiasm. But coincidental to the scalding hot Irish economy has been the meteoric rise in the popularity of golf. Ireland today is home to some of Europe’s finest links, and Bill and I, in Ireland’s pre-dawn darkness Tuesday morning, were witness to its impact. We passed then an enormous travel case for the clubs belonging to Padraig Harrington, the reigning British Open champion. His Wilson Staff hard shell case was surrounded by perhaps a dozen other travel bags on an airport luggage dolly. It being Thanksgiving week back home, Bill and I thought it likely he was headed East across the ocean to some million dollar, “silly season” exhibition. But what was striking about this celebrity non-sighting was the Irish reaction to it. Scores of airport personnel gathered around Padraig’s bag and reached out to brush a hand against it. It is a small land here, and one sporting hero’s outsized accomplishments have an enormous impact on his countrymen.

Awaiting our train west cross country from Dublin to Galway this morning we enjoyed “a full Irish breakfast” as our first meal here. The breakfasts of some however are fuller than others’. A wool-capped gentleman of about 70 sat adjacent to us in the train station tavern and had polished off two pints with his.

His is not a lone act of rebellion. We passed a Guinness tanker or three on our bus ride from the airport to the train station. They are identical in appearance to oil tankers, except their cargo is mother’s milk. Ten million pints of Guinness are brewed every day. A fair number are consumed here.

Bill and I needed about six hours in Galway today to deem our arduous, sleepless journey worth all its trials. There is music in the mouths of our kinsmen. Briefly as a graduate student I entertained thoughts of studying linguistics, and I thought about this again as I listened to songs that are the common discourse when heard by North American ears. To ask a barmaiden here directions to a south county castle is to be woo-ed in comprehension-free meter of fast-paced, poetic refrains.

Did I mention bars? Today we also learned well of America’s shortcomings in her saloons. Back home we don’t much construct bars as comfort zones. We make sure the taps are working and the corners are crammed with high definition TV, but here there is in the typical tavern a home away from home. Lively live music of course, but the sheer structures are jewels. Here I need an architect’s vocabulary rather than a blogger’s.

We lodged ourselves in Galway’s “The Skeff” this afternoon and evening. A split-level saloon warmed with wood everywhere within you might think novel. How about five levels of such in the Skeff! Irish-American eyes this day were smiling indeed.