Ireland Travelogue: Introduction

An index of sorts at the end of this post.

"Goin' Wild on the Emerald Isle" (cue surf music)

No, seriously, that's what I have written on the front page of the Moleskin sketchbook I used as a diary.

Anyhow, I'm back in New York. Taking the E from the Airtran transfer I was given a welcome back hug by the hot mugginess of the train, the dirty sticky floor that made the whole car smell like coffee someone obviously split earlier in the day and sat across from a homeless couple with the guy glaring at me and muttering about something or other. I put my "Don't talk to me" New York face back on after spending days of walking around with a "Oh wow, oh wow, won't you look at that" face.

Getting to 42nd Street Port Authority was a struggle and I realized that I was heading home with a suitcase during rush hour. As people crammed in to get home as soon as possible, we were stuck on the Fifth Ave. stop. The conductor droned "Please step away from the closing doors," over and over again until finally another voice on the radio crackled, "We have a slight altercation up front," over the background noise of two women arguing. Ah, I was home.

I celebrated by having two plain slices made crispy in an oven loaded with garlic powder, oregano, red pepper flakes and romano cheese. "I missed you guys," I mumbled to myself, mouth full with salty, cheesey goodness...but I miss chips too. I don't think I had any bad chips whatsoever. I love Pomme Frites on Second Ave., but honestly they do not hold up a candle to the deep fried potato love I had over there.

I also developed a taste for black and white pudding, then again I'm fan of any sort of piggy by-product. I found myself reintroducing my tongue to the mouth feel of American bacon after being so used to the bacon over there. But it's bacon so it's all good. Why yes, I do plan on suffering from high blood pressure and eventually having a heart attack. Why do you ask?

Proust had his madeleines, I have pork.

So for those of you who don't know or just didn't pay attention, I spent 11 days in Ireland. The first seven days were spent in Cork where I helped out with the Cork Film Festival while I spent the last four running around Dublin.

I'm terrible at planning ahead for things so I'm actually surprised at how much I got accomplished, though I see lots of gaps and wasted time too where I missed out on other things that I could've done. Oh well, at least I have a kind of flimsy reason to go back ("Yea...I'm uh...going back because I um, I didn't realize the James Joyce Cultural Center closed on Mondays. Yea, that's the ticket.").

The next couple of days I'm going to be putting up updates based on journal entries I made and with photos. My journal entries weren't really all that coherent. They were more like notes, so I guess it'd be more correct to say that I'll be elaborating on journal entries I made.

At first I thought I'd try to indicate where I was making changes, deletions or additions in the spirit of full disclosure as well as to make it interesting, but then as I tried to figure out a system of noting changes I realized my actual notes sound like Ezra Pound with severe ADD and all the italics, bolds and footnotes would make the whole thing way too "House of Leaves."

Anyhow, I know people hate other people's vacation photos and slides, but I hope you find something interesting about these.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7