On Frozen Blog

The Irish are unfairly maligned as a drinking culture. In point of fact, they are a chugging one. Tonight was a Wednesday in a non-holiday week of work for the Irish, with a “football” match between England and Croatia televised. Every pub in Galway was packed, every pub table larded (blessed!) by a preponderance of pint glasses. Ever filled.

Bless these big-time buzzed hearts.

There is something to be learned I think from the fact that per capita this land outdrinks all others combined and still manages to engineer the planet’s greatest, most impressively growing economy. Obviously, that lesson would be: behave more like they do.

This section of my report is directed exclusively at my family back home: we are never to see one another again, through no fault yours. Quite simply, I am home, and I need to carry off the remainder of my days in this lap of liquored luxury. But technology is fueling the dynamic economy of Ireland, so we will be able to exchange email.

I am aware as well that were I to return home I would be forbidden from ever witnessing the Washington Capitals winning another hockey game. What else is there but the life of a perpetually smiling ex-Pat?

Today actually was a day of relative fitness for cousin Bill and me, insomuch as we failed to see the inside of a pub before 4 p.m. We rented a car and journeyed south and east to take in the view from the Cliffs of Moher. Ireland’s roads are famous for instilling a fear so formidable in her drivers that, ever after, they seek refuge in the taverns. The roads here are narrow in the sense that the national highway system is named after Ashley Olsen. My cousin, whom I ordered to drive at all times (a Northern Virginian who daily commutes on Rt. 66), affirmed this nation’s treacherous reputation on the roads by clipping off the side mirror of a parked Saab some 60 seconds into our roadtrip today.

Otherwise, we arrived at the Cliffs drama-free. We were blessed by most un-Irish weather with which to view them: azure skies and soothing breezes of almost warm air. The freshness of the air here is a lasting quality in the scrapbook of my mind. These cliffs, about which I knew virtually nothing this time last week, are truly a physical wonder of the world. One stands hundreds of feet above the sterling clear Atlantic, virtually at the Earth’s edge; the experience is simultaneously spiritual and shrinking.

Later, in a pub of all places, Bill and I met a family of Americans from Boston, who informed us of the widespread unavailability of turkey here for our Thanksgiving.

Do you wish you were home, I asked them?

“Absolutely not,” they replied.