I met Mary in the park

 So today I met Mary at the park. She was probably 80. Dubliner all her life.  I was sitting in Iveagh gardens park and so was she. I had come there for the fountains. They weren’t on. 

I went over to ask her were they ever on? She told me they were on until noon. That started the conversation. I learned a lot from Mary (like you always do from older people). 

She told me this park (which is sort of a secret park popular with Dubliners) was the front yard of the Guinness family of beer fame. St Patrick’s Greene park down the way was the back part. Their old house is the Irish Ministery of foreign affairs. 

She said that when the place was too “common”, they moved to the coast and donated all of it to the city. We’re talking a huge swathe of land here.

She asked me what part of the US I was from. When told her where, she said her brother lived in Milwaukee and she had visited him in the 1960s. She loved the city. 

She had two brother who went to the US. One lived in Massachusetts and been “Irishman of the year”. Quite successful, that one. She had been to the US a few times.

I told her I had been to Belfast and she was disgusted with what has gone on there.  “It’s not about religion, it’s about politics”. London keeping control in other words.

Older people love to talk. I found that out as a nurse. You can learn so much about them in a short time. What you learn is usually really interesting.

That’s the fountain in Iveagh park.

Are you lace curtain or shanty Irish?

There seem to be a lot of lace curtains in Ireland these days. I’m not kidding. Walk through a neighborhood and you’ll see them. 

Lotsa high fallutin’ people round here as my mom would say. You don’t even have to ask because these are the lace curtain Irish. 

Me, I grew up shanty Irish back in the U.S. My mom would say sometimes we were showin’ we were shanty Irish. 

Everyone who came to America started out shanty Irish. They were poor and lived in shanties. Shanty defined: “a small crudely built shack”. The shanties took the form of tenements in New York.

Hopefully you would move up in life, make more money and become a lace curtain Irish. You would find yerself among the high mukkety muks of the world. Example of lace curtain Irish: the Kennedy. Definitely lace curtain. Even though patriarch Joe had a bit of a shady background.

So if you were Irish you were probably Catholic. Irish Catholics had big families. Sometimes twelve kids. Everybody was baptized. The girls dressed up what is essentially a child wedding dress for communion. The boys in a white suit. Then there was the confirmation. Nobody really understood that.

Confession. You go in a wooden booth where you can’t see the priest. You are a 6 year old kids thinking up sins to tell the priest. Then you would get a penance of three Hail Marys and four Our Fathers. What a strange deal it all was. 

Any self respecting Catholic parent would send their kids to Catholic school if they could. I went one year. 5th grade. St Lawrence school. Sister Rose Angela. The nuns still wore habits. We wore uniforms. 

The boys and girls played on one playground, the girls on another. What I mostly remembers is the fact that we were heathens(ha). We didn’t go to church every Sunday. What if the nuns at school found out? They never did. After the year, I went back to the unholy public school.

Where are the damn leprechauns?

 Ever since I came to the land of Eire one week ago, I have been looking for them. Where are they? 

Sometimes I think I see them but it turns it’s some kid with red hair and a green t shirt. They look at me funny when I go from a big smile to a frown in two seconds flat.. They usually start crying. It’s a mess. 

When I was in Belfast I asked a woman on the bus what time do the leprechauns appear? She got really angry and shouted “They’re not real you foolish American!” Wow, calm down lady. You don’t have to believe in them if you don’t want to. Cripes.

The world could use some leprechauns right now, mischief makers that they are. We’re all too serious. We could use a few practical jokes. Hey wait a minute…have they been around all along? Is that what the years 2016-20 were in the United States? A big practical joke? It would explain a lot…

Oh but I digress. So I had almost given up on my pilgrimage to the nooks and crannies of Ireland looking for the little green men …when a brilliant light appeared. And there it was, The National Leprechaun museum of Ireland.

At last! Apparently this is where they hang out, live, party, get into mischief. I have to go. Now I’m not much of a museum goer especially if it lightens my wallet. I will make an exception in this case. I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

Beware the glittery vases in west Belfast

  One of the things I like to do in every place we are is walk around the neighborhoods. You see the houses, the stores, parks, people going about their everyday life. 

The houses here are terraced just any other UK city. Here they have tiny front yards where the put flowers or sometimes just gravel.

The other day on our way back from the peace wall, we walked through a Catholic neighborhood.  It was on a busy street with the usual terraced houses, neatly kept.

Then we came to a section where there were small artificial turf lawns in front. Then I noticed that the houses had these glittery silver vases in the front windows with different designs. 

I wondered what’s this about? Is this some kind of tradition? A religious thing? I looked it up online. It’s just a thing they do on some west Belfast streets.

There were a lot of people from Belfast who made sarcastic remarks about the phenomenom saying they were tacky, some kind of competitions with neighbors.

Here’s my favorite remark: 

“It’s for the ashes of your enemies, sometimes pets. But mainly enemies. Be very afraid”.

Here’s another good one:

“It’s an anti burglary measure. It says this house and everything in it is tacky. There is nothing worth stealing”.

I was thinking you could turn the the from artificial turf patch into a putting green. 

At Christmas you could put one of those 1960’s color wheel lamp for silver trees and shine it on the tree. Voila! Instant Christmas decoration!

Is there liquor in that tote bag?

 It doesn’t seem to matter where you are in the world, weather is a universal topic of conversation. Our ability to cope with the local weather we wear with a sense of pride.

Standing at the bus stop and I was talking to someone. I mentioned it was a nice day and it seemed that forecasts here (and all over the UK really) are useless  Her response:”They always lie You can have all four seasons in one day here.”

 I always look at the coming weeks weather and 90% of the time it’s rain everyday.  Most days there are a few hours of sun or it’s cloudy with no rain. 

Weather in the UK changes through the day. There is never a day when it’s clear all day. Clouds always come. We really have had little rain in our time in the UK. Some light rain at times. A couple downpours that were short. I haven’t even bought an umbrella. 

Because you never know the weather sometimes hard to know what to wear. I learned what everybody in the UK already knows, especially those in the northern countries. 

I was sitting on a bench next to two older ladies talking about their upcoming trip to Italy. (Yes I’m an ease-dropper). 0ne was talking about having a water bottle to fill at the hotel because “I’m not paying 2 pounds for a bottle of water”.  Also she wasn’t paying 3 pounds for a cup of coffee either. 

We sit there and it clouds up. Gets a little cooler. One of the ladies takes out a zip up sweatshirt and puts it on. A little while later it starts very lightly raining. Out of the tote bag comes a raincoat she puts on. She seems to be ready for any weather change. 

So you buy yerself a tote bag, put in a sweater in, a raincoat, perhaps some galoshes, a pair of gloves. There’s room for a water bottle, perhaps a light snack. You are set for the day in Belfast. Wonder what else she’s got in there? A first aid kit? A sewing kit? Perhaps a flask for a wee nip?

Entering through gates and walking the peace wall in Belfast

 A bit of a bazaar day today. We decided to walk down to the peace wall from central Belfast.  It’s about a 1.2 mile walk. It takes you up falls road, a notorious road in Catholic West Belfast. We were following google maps an did not realize we were on falls road until I saw a sign.  

So we came to an area that had all these political murals about oppression of Catholics and uniting Ireland. There were murals about political struggles across the world including Black Lives Matter. 

Went further where turned down a short street that looked industrial. Galway down we’re iron gates that were open but could be closed across the road. We just thought some company didn’t want people past this area after a certain time. Later we would learn this was one of the gates that closed off the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods from each other at night.

So at the end of the road we turned left and started down the road where there was a continuous wall with graffiti on it. I eventually looked up and realized this was the peace wall. It was one long wall with fencing on top that was 25 feet high. 

So on one side of the street was this tall wall. On the other side there was a maybe 10 foot regular fence with houses behind it. The area looked poor.  This was the Protestant side. 

So we walked to the end of road - about half a mile and came to a place where you could turn back into the Catholic side. A little ways down are steel doors that stretch across the road that were open. They could be closed and are every night.

So when the troubles started Falls road was where a lot of clashes took place. Houses were burned down. People were killed. It was out of control. That’s when British troops were called in to “protect the Catholics”. There were clashes bff were tween Catholics and police. The neighborhoods were also fighting each other. Barricades were put up between the neighborhoods by police. Eventually all of this led to the building of this peace wall which has stood for more than 50 years.

So the first gates we went through on the short road closed at 6:30 pm.  The second gate on a busier street going back into the Catholic area close at 10 pm.

And that’s life in Belfast…

Belfast: city of surprises

I never really gave Belfast much thought. It was home of the troubles. I knew there had been a peace agreement signed.  I knew more about the politics back in the 70’s but hadn’t thought much about it since.  

I didn’t even want to come but M has a friend here so we came. It has turned out to be a lot of surprises. 

As for the peace agreement, I didn’t know there were 20 foot high walls between Catholics and Protestants. There are still skirmishes. The city is divided along religious lines. I probably thought it was kumbaya  by now. 

I didn’t know the titanic was built here. It was the biggest ship ever built at the time. 100,000 people saw it off. It sank 4 days into the voyage. The main architect of the ship went down with it.

I didn’t know game of thrones was filmed here. 

From 1968 to 1998 Belfast was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. There were 45,000 bombings. 45,000! There is such a sad history here.

C.S. Lewis was born here.

The defibillator was invented here.

Belfast has one of the best hockey teams in Europe. They have huge arena in the titanic quarter.

The end.