Anywhere But Here

My Semester in Ireland, Part 2

After I finally found a permanent place to live in Ireland and got into the groove of school, I could relax and think about seeing the rest of Ireland.

The nice thing about studying abroad is that once you’ve crossed the “big pond”, you can travel fairly cheaply across Ireland, and Europe. I took several weekend trips across the country. 

Cork was the first big city I visited. And yes, I did the tourist-y thing and kissed the Blarney Stone. Everyone knows that the Blarney Stone is supposed to give you the gift of gab if you kiss it. But most people don’t know that it’s also supposed to be half of a larger stone, the other half of which is the Scottish Stone of Destiny. 

Most people also don’t know (at least I didn’t) that in order to kiss the Stone, you hang upside down from the uppermost ramparts of Blarney Castle, thirty feet in the air, and have to stretch out to kiss the rock. Sure, there are safety bars beneath you, and a castle custodian helps support you, but it still scared the crap out of me. 

Dublin was next. As part of a field trip for my Atlantic World class, Professor O’ Reilly took us to Dublin Castle and the Chester Beatty Library. Chester Beatty amassed the world’s largest collection of Eastern literature and artifacts during his lifetime and left his collection to the people of Ireland. 

The collection includes portions of the Bible written on papyrus, 200 years before the introduction of Christianity to Ireland, as well as copies of the Quran, Buddhist texts, and a full set of ancient Japanese samurai armor.

A stone in the wall of Blarney Castle in Ireland. According to an Irish legend, those who kiss the Blarney Stone receive a gift of eloquence that enables them to obtain, through persuasion, anything they want.

After the field trip, most of my classmates went back to Galway, but I stayed in Dublin for the rest of the weekend. Dublin is one incredible city. It simply oozes history and culture. The monuments to Daniel O’ Connell and other Irish freedom fighters, the Dublin Writers Museum, the National Gallery, the Guinness brewery, and many other tourist spots. I took a hop on, hop off bus tour my second day there, and spent hours poking around these places. 

I found out that student hostels are a great place to meet people. I struck up a conversation with several people in the TV room at Kinlay House Dublin because they were watching an episode of Star Trek. One of the people I met, Tim, or Stickman, as he is called on stage, is a professional street entertainer. He travels around the world, making a living from his fire juggling act. Tim took me on a walking tour of Dublin Saturday night, since he wasn’t working due to the cold. I saw Temple Bar and O ‘Connell street at 2 in the morning. It was a very interesting experience.

My mini-trips were fun, but I didn’t get to see nearly as much as I wanted to. Foot-and-mouth disease is not supposed to be harmful to humans, but it certainly managed to put a blight on my time in Ireland. There was an outbreak of it in February, and they still hadn’t managed to put it down by the time I left in late May. What this meant was that most of the national monuments were closed down, such as Newgrange and the Hill of Tara. 

Finally, I made it down to the Dingle Peninsula during the last couple weeks of my stay in Ireland. Riding through the countryside down there, you realize why Ireland is said to have forty shades of green. It was beautiful! 

The Dingle Peninsula is the part of Ireland that my ancestors immigrated from. So everywhere I went, I saw the name “Moriarty” on shop signs, newsstands, and even on a manhole cover. I took pictures every time I saw my name. 

I walked into an “off-licence”, or liquor store, named M.T. Moriarty. I chatted up the woman behind the counter, to see if she was a Moriarty, herself. Turns out not only that she was a Moriarty, but that we’re distant relatives. Several generations ago, an ancestor of hers immigrated to Minnesota, which is where my branch of the family lived before they gradually made their way down to St. Louis. 

I stayed at Ballintaggart Hostel, which is actually combination hostel/sheep farm. The receptionist told stories about helping the ewes give birth in the middle of the night. Apparently the hostel is haunted by the ghost of the wife of the Earl of Cork, but I didn’t see anything odd while I was there.

Ballintaggart Hostel and Campsite is a 300 year old manor house, situated on the main Dingle/Tralee road, on the Dingle Peninsula, overlooking Dingle Bay and the Ring of Kerry.

I took a boat tour to see Fungi the Dolphin my second day there. Fungi is a 21-year-old male dolphin who lives in Dingle Bay. He’s completely wild— that is, he catches his own food. And he supposedly loves hanging out with humans. 

Our boat was noisy and disturbing, even to me. We kept following a group of kayakers, because Fungi kept following them. Those kayakers had to be so annoyed with us. Every time we passed them and kicked up a big wake, they had to stop so they could ride out the waves. We did get to see Fungi a couple times, but I still felt bad that we’d harassed those people.

And when my time abroad was almost over, on a day when I should have been studying for my last final, I took a day tour of the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren. 

Talk about your awe-inspiring views. The Cliffs of Moher are green hills that become sheer drops into the Atlantic Ocean, with waves constantly crashing against them. Usually I’m scared of heights, but I was too busy admiring the view to be frightened. 

Deep blue ocean met bright blue sky and mingled with it on the horizon, and white puffy clouds matched the white foam waves on the water. I’m a lousy poet, but never have I coveted those skills more as when I stood on top of those cliffs. I lamented my lack of words to adequately express what I was feeling. 

The Burren is a series of rock formations carved from limestone, not by human hands, but by the water that once covered it. More than one source compares the Burren to the face of the moon. It looks incredibly desolate, until you get up close. Then you can see the grass and heather sprouting in the cracks in the rock face. It’s comforting to see that no matter how barren a place is, nature finds a way to survive. So if humans screw up and wreck the planet (more), at least something will endure, even if it’s just heather and cockroaches. 

After spending the day out in the artistic expressions of Mother Nature, I found it hard to go back to studying for my finals. I just wanted to absorb and appreciate all I’d seen. But then, I also wanted to pass my exams. So I made myself hit the books.

The Burren up close. Lots of limestone rocks and scrub. The limestone of the Burren has been weathered over the years to have lots of cracks and strange shapes.

Four months was not long enough for me to fully explore Ireland. There’s a lot of stuff I missed— the Waterford Crystal factory, the Ring of Kerry, County Wicklow, and all of Northern Ireland. I hope to go back, and soon.

Study abroad is definitely an exciting, enriching, life-altering experience. If you have the opportunity, go. If you don’t have the opportunity, make an opportunity. You’ll never regret it, even if you spend the next several months paying off your debts (like me).

So that’s all for this month! Tune in next time for…oh, wait. You guys wanted to hear about my fling with my Irish boy, didn’t you. 

For my three week spring break, I backpacked across Europe. I actually met Devon while I was waiting for my flight to London in Dublin Airport. The flight kept being delayed. I was bored, and I noticed a cute red-haired guy with a black trench coat and a tartan cloth draped across his shoulders. I made up some lame excuse and started talking to him. 

It turned out that in addition to being cute and Irish, he was also a computer programmer from Donegal. I’m something of a computer geek myself, so we had lots to talk about. Devon was taking the same flight as me, but he was trying to make a connection in London to Tokyo. He wasn’t sure if he’d make his connecting flight if our flight kept getting delayed.

Devon and I talked until we got on our flight, talked while we were waiting to pick up our baggage after the flight, and talked as we ate dinner at a Burger King in Heathrow Airport. Devon had indeed missed his connecting flight, so I hung out with him for three hours in Heathrow. I had to leave around 11 pm so I could get to my hostel before the underground shut down.

Devon and I exchanged contact information and arranged to meet up a few weeks later, when we were both back in Ireland. He came down to Galway to see me. I was really, really nervous about hanging out with him, because I don’t have the best of luck with guys. But I made a move on him and he said yes! Over the next few weeks, we did all the silly “couple” stuff: long walks on the beach, dinners at tiny cafes, making out at the movie theater. 

I remember one time, we walked into a bookshop in Dublin and Devon picked up a book of poetry and started reading it for me. Not to me, for me. Notice the distinction. I know I did. It was and still is the most romantic thing a guy has ever done for me. To most people, I come off as very sarcastic and cynical, but all I really want is for a guy to buy me flowers and do some good old-fashioned wooing.

“Know that you are beautiful,” Devon would tell me frequently, in his sexy Irish accent. It never failed to make me melt inside. I swear he was a bard in a former life. 

We broke things off when I left Ireland, rather than trying to have a long distance relationship. But we still keep in touch. 

Okay, now this really is all for this issue. Next time I’ll be writing about my second trip to Greece, complete with photos I actually took myself!

Caitlin Moriarity is a freelance editor and writer who has been hooked on travel since a semester studying abroad in college. You can read her other travel writing at www.tropeofirony.com.