Sunday was the last day of Seattle’s annual Hempfest in Myrtle Edwards Park. We didn’t go but Belltown and lower Queen Anne were full of very stoned people, walking around on the hems of their blue jeans. We found a cigar shop on Pike and looked for German-language newspapers at the Pike Place Market news stand. The two Germans had no interest in a fish dinner so I ruled out Ray’s and took them instead to the 5 Spot. Annoyingly, the current theme of the restaurant is “Portland.” Portland is the Doobie Brothers of American cities.

Beer is important in Germany and I began to feel the pressure as several of Seattle’s artisanal brews were found wanting. I couldn’t disagree; the beers on offer at the 5 Spot tasted over-hopped. It was entertaining to listen to the German pronunciation of “Deschutes.” We moved to Fremont and a pitcher of Mac & Jack’s at the Red Door. This was cloudy and declared unfinished, with the suggestion that it was hurried out the door of the brewery for quick sale. We visited the Lenin statue. Rene appreciated the irony of the thing but, having grown up in East Germany, didn’t find it humorous.

We found offerings more to their liking at the George & Dragon Pub, which has Pilsner Urquell from the Czech Republic on tap. While seated at the bar a man sat down across from us, dressed in a white shirt with four-striped shoulder boards and a nautical officer’s cap. He had mutton-chop sideburns and his appearance caused murmuring in German as my guests tried to figure out if he was truly a master or dressed in drag. The universal antipathy of engine room hands toward deck crews was again on display. After the man left the English bartender told us that he drove for the Ducks, the amphibious landing craft that tour Seattle. 

We ended the evening at the 5 Point Cafe, in the shadow of the Space Needle. The Chief recalled the neon sign – “We Cheat Tourists -N- Drunks Since 1929” – from a previous visit. The place was jumping for a Sunday night, and it appeared that the organizers of Hempfest had retired there after that event ended. Rene was pleased with the eclectic Seattle-centric jukebox and found a “Les Canards” sticker over the restroom entrance. “Look! Prostitutes!” he blurted on the trip back to the Pier. I got them back to the ship before midnight.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_DIdOOXp1E

The Concorde Métro stop was built in 1903, on the 1, 8 and 12 lines. It was about 3 blocks from my hotel in central Paris. I hadn’t known that one of Ezra Pound’s most memorable poems was written after a 1912 visit to that particular underground station.

In a Station of The Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

According to Wikipedia, Pound described the inspiration for his Imagist poem this way: “I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde, and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me feel.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cca2u_aLIEw

I wanted a stopover at the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare and got one, but only for 40 minutes. On the way the bus passed through small towns and villages including Doolin which had been recommended to me and which looks interesting, but will have to wait for the next trip.

At the Cliffs I was able to check my bag at the tourist shop. The weather was terrific and I enjoyed my hurried visit but would have preferred to spend more time.

Travelling to the Cliffs by bus is a bit harrowing, as the roads are narrow and twisty. The driver is used to it and seems unfazed. After my 40 minute stopover I have a new driver named John for the rest of the way to Limerick. John lives in County Clare and I accidently wind him up by asking about a group of holiday homes in the area. This leads to a profane diatribe about the ridiculous prices paid for the houses in recent years, and resultant defaults, bank failures and  bailouts. John believes that Irish bankers are getting a free ride after plunging Ireland into economic crisis. He also thinks that America has been putting bankers in jail, while no Irish bankers are behind bars. I’m not sure he’s right about American bankers going to jail but I didn’t want to interrupt an entertaining rant. How much do you think that cottage is worth? he asks me. I don’t know, maybe 500,000 Euros? It sold for 800,000 Euros! Well, it is lovely I say, right there on the water. “It’s not that lovely!” John barks.

John’s anger at Irish bankers, politicians and developers is understandable. As Paul Krugman wrote last November:

The Irish story began with a genuine economic miracle. But eventually this gave way to a speculative frenzy driven by runaway banks and real estate developers, all in a cozy relationship with leading politicians. The frenzy was financed with huge borrowing on the part of Irish banks, largely from banks in other European nations.

Then the bubble burst, and those banks faced huge losses. You might have expected those who lent money to the banks to share in the losses. After all, they were consenting adults, and if they failed to understand the risks they were taking that was nobody’s fault but their own. But, no, the Irish government stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debt, turning private losses into public obligations.

Before the bank bust, Ireland had little public debt. But with taxpayers suddenly on the hook for gigantic bank losses, even as revenues plunged, the nation’s creditworthiness was put in doubt. So Ireland tried to reassure the markets with a harsh program of spending cuts.

Step back for a minute and think about that. These debts were incurred, not to pay for public programs, but by private wheeler-dealers seeking nothing but their own profit. Yet ordinary Irish citizens are now bearing the burden of those debts.

Remember Ireland is smaller than Denmark in terms of population, yet now bears the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world, with external debt per capita a staggering $535,529. Thankfully John is distracted by an acquaintance named Michael he picks up on the road to Limerick, and I am fascinated by the cadence of their conversation, although I can only understand a bit of it over the bus noise. They use each other’s first names in nearly every sentence during their back and forth.

On the walk from the bus station to my hotel Limerick looks especially hard hit by Ireland’s economic collapse, with many shops and restaurants shuttered. Despite deep spending cuts Ireland is being pressured to cut further, to reduce social welfare and benefits for the unemployed as a means of “incentivizing” them to return to work. As one commentator pointed out however, it makes no sense to talk about motivating the unemployed when there simply are no jobs.

The town itself is picturesque, and I enjoyed my evening walk along the “broad, majestic” River Shannon.

I took the Segway tour, led by Nora, a recent NUI Galway history graduate. It’s fun being on the thing but it takes up too much of the sidewalk and I kept having to apologize to the people I was crowding. Many people want to try it out but it’s not possible says Nora. One old sod says “Children are easily amused by their toys” and I tell him he’s jealous because he’s on Shanks’ mare. Another character wants to tell Nora how to do her job, asking if she’s told me about Christopher Columbus’ visit to Galway. (She had). I felt a bit foolish with the attention that the Segway drew, but it is fun. I left the battery for my camera in my hotel so got no pictures.

We went past a dock where, Nora told me, a Danish ship, the Thor Gitta, is under arrest after a dramatic lifting accident in which a sling broke and dropped one of two foot ferries it was loading into Galway Bay. Three men who were foolishly on the ferry at the time sustained minor injuries. The crew of the Thor Gitta are meanwhile killing time on the deck in the fine weather while the legal paperwork gets sorted. The ferries serviced the Aran Islands until bankruptcy forced their sale to a company planning to run them in Mauritius.

Saw the Spanish Arch. Saw Claddagh, memorable to me because of the Clancy Brothers parody of the traditional Galway Bay:

On her back she has tattooed a map of Ireland,
And when she takes her bath on Saturday,
She rubs the sunlight soap around by Claddagh,
Just to watch the suds flow down by Galway Bay.

Saw the Lynch Memorial Window, which Nora calls the oldest tourist trap in Galway. We briefly met the members of the Dublin band Fight Like Apes who were loading their van and talked about Seattle a bit. (They had played the Trinity Ball with Jessie J. Ireland is a very small country really. Nora was a bit star struck). I had the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York in my head all afternoon:

The boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay,
And the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.

Saw the Long Walk and the Salthill Prom, both mentioned in Steve Earle’s great Galway Girl. Saw the John F. Kennedy memorial in what is officially the John F. Kennedy Memorial Park but which everyone calls Eyre Square. JFK was made a Freeman of Galway Borough when he visited on June 29, 1963, three months before I saw him at a groundbreaking on the Hanford Nuclear Site, and five months before his assassination in Dallas.

The trip from Killarney to Galway requires train changes at Mallow and Limerick Junction. As we get closer to Galway I begin to see the dry-stone fences characteristic of West Ireland, some put up hundreds of years ago. Fiona, a second year science student at the NUI Galway, who is returning from a birthday party in Cork, leads tours of Galway. I am thinking of signing up for one after she says it includes a visit to the Nora Barnacle House. However the tours are conducted on Segways. Fiona has never seen Arrested Development.

On my first night in town I meet young rugby-playing raconteur named John in a pub. He is charismatic and knows everyone in town. We traded a couple of rounds and he recruited another Irish American named Patrick from Atlanta, along with several of John’s friends who work in the local bars and restaurants. We were then off on a tour of pubs and after-hours joints that continued into the small hours. I have been properly schooled in the “double pour” method of serving Guinness and now know what a lock-in is, but am otherwise unimproved.

To atone, I hiked the next day from my hotel to Ross Castle in the Killarney National Park. The park entrance is across the street from St. Mary’s Cathedral, which is strikingly beautiful. Nearby is St. Brendan’s College, a diocesan secondary school founded in 1860.

The Park is the largest in Ireland and is home to Ross Castle which has a rich history reflecting Ireland’s troubled past. It was one of the last holdouts against Cromwell’s Parliamentary Army in 1652. The location of the castle ruins is on Lough Leane which, on the day I visited, was whipped up by the wind and tea colored.

Tour groups are carried into the Park on horse-drawn wagons. The lakes and rivers in the park provide plenty of chances for photography. I ate at a lunch place run by young Eastern European women in uniforms with good sandwiches and excellent baked goods. Their no-nonsense efficiency extends to the name of the restaurant itself – Jam.

After an late afternoon nap I went for a walk to pick up my tickets from the train station. While walking past a pub I ran into John smoking outside, wearing the same clothes he had on the night before. His gregariousness was undiminished and he was entertaining a young management-side labor lawyer and his wife from Philadelphia. John quickly got onto a favorite topic: How was George Bush twice elected, since no Americans he has met will admit to having voted for him? I wasn’t up for another late night/early morning tour of Killarney and begged off, although we’re supposed to meet this morning for coffee. Hopefully his onerous duties as the unofficial mayor of Killarney will not have prevented his getting some sleep and a change of clothes.

I haven’t stayed at bed and breakfast places on this trip and decided to try one in Cork, since I was only going to be there one night. The one I picked more or less at random is on Lower Glanmire Road just down the street from the train station. It is an old townhouse run by a woman named Ellen. I lugged my overweight bag up the steep narrow stairs and kept banging my fool head in doorways while looking down to keep from tripping over the irregular sills. The room, which included a tiny bath, sloped radically from street window to door, dropping a good foot or more.

To get to a laundry required walking straight up a steep hill to a shop across from a military barracks. I was annoyed that the first laundry recommended to me was closed on Mondays and had to tramp around to find a second. Ireland doesn’t favor self-service launderettes and I have not had good results asking the locals for directions. You have to step carefully on the residential Cork sidewalks as they are used by residents for dog toilets.

I ate at Isaacs, and enjoyed a dish of three separate curries with rice and excellent homemade chutney. That and the dessert undid any physical benefit from my earlier mountaineering on the merde-encrusted sidewalks of Cork. I left the next morning for Killarney on the train, changing at Mallow.