Claire's been back home for five days after her visit here, already hard at work at Borone's Cafe. For Claire our seven days together was her first trip to Ireland, her first time to meet relatives neither of us knew before now, her first visit to Ballinderry, her first Irish chips, her first Guinness (ordered at the pub by her--drinking age is 18 in Ireland). For me it was my vacation from sitting in frigid rooms (even in June) reading bad nineteenth-century handwriting. It was my first trip out of the Midlands since I've been here, my first really good meal, my first time to visit Cork without Nora (so remembering the great time we had there together a few years ago). Mostly it was a chance to spend time with one of my children, all of whom I have been missing so much, to catch up with what Claire has been doing since I left, to hear about her thoughts about the future, and to show her where I have been for the past three intense months.
Cork, which is about three hours from the place I have been living, is a vibrant city on the southern coast. Nora went to school at the University for a semester during her junior year. This time Claire and I stayed in a B&B just across the street from Nora's old campus. We spent the days in the countryside and the nights in the city, the perfect arrangement. The best meal I've had since I've been here was in the resort town of Kinsale. While the town itself is a bit too similar to the crowded tourist towns on the Maine or Massachusetts coasts, the steady influx of tourists does help to support the local restaurants, including one of the best-known ones, Fishy Fishy. Irish foodies tend to worship at its fins; having eaten a superb lunch of mackerel on the sun-drenched patio I now understand why.
Both nights Claire and I were in Cork we went to the theatre. The first night we sat around the perimeter of an open space on the 17th floor of a government building at the edge of the city where we saw a highly updated version of the Medea story. This one began with some backstory coming through a cleverly hidden tape recorder on the elevator ride up. This medEia, fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, had three actors manipulating Barbie and Ken dolls in ancient Greek get-ups through the traditional story, complete with numerous inexplicable references to pop lyrics, mostly from Beatles songs. The very best part of the production was the use of a 40- or 50-gallon fish tank, complete with goldfish, to represent the Argonaut, Barbie Medea and Ken Jason riding in glory on top. The actors pushed the tank across the performance space while the fish sloshed around inside.
The second night we saw the kind of play that most kids would be horribly embarrassed to see with a parent. In fact, while we waited for the opening of Slick in a 50-seat black box theatre behind the Cork Opera House, the person behind us remarked that this was the kind of play an actor wouldn't want his parents to see. Uh-oh. The play was billed as adult, even though the main character was a nine-year-old boy who loved to skateboard and whose only wish was that his horribly abusive parents would buy him a helmet. The characters were all presented as puppets, although according to Claire, not at all like those used in Avenue Q. Comparing notes afterwards, Claire and I agreed that the script was simply gross in a way that managed to nearly completely undermine the allegorical comic-book tale of greed, the sort of meta-greed that big oil companies suffer from. Still, the staging was nothing short of brilliant, and Claire is far too sophisticated to be concerned about sitting next to me while something potentially offensive is going on onstage.
To me the sightseeing highlight of our trip to Cork was our tour of Bantry House, a much-added-to eighteenth century mansion an hour or so west of Cork. The house overlooks Bantry Bay, and comes with the usual extensive gardens, this one including 100 steps reaching up to the hills behind the house. Claire held out her camera and took a photo of us at the top of the steps. We also visited an enormous ruined castle, where Claire found a door designed for her height (and we had had another great lunch at a German cafe), and we drove along the gentle west Cork coast.
On the way home we decided to stop in Tulamore to go to the movies, something I hadn't done since I'd been here in this country in which very few towns have cinemas. Our choices were severely limited, but we finally decided on I Love You, Man, a fluffy romantic comedy that Claire had actually seen (she went to the premiere in Westwood and ended up having her photo taken with the star, Paul Rudd). We were a bit late for the start of the movie. As we groped our way to seats in the very dark theatre it dawned on us that we were the only two people in the room. And, as we walked through the lobby afterwards, we realized that even though it was Friday night at the multi-plex the place was like a ghost town, another casualty of the recession here (or maybe they needed to choose better movies).
We went to Dublin twice, once for Bloomsday (June 16th, the first full day of Claire's visit) and once to have dinner with my first cousin Deirdre, her husband Eric and some of their family. But first we went to the World Street Performance Championship in Merrion Square, the heart of Georgian Dublin. Two of the three acts we saw were Americans, as it turned out. One, who billed himself as a piano juggler, told us after his act that had just moved to South Carolina from Santa Cruz where he had been based for 50 years. He said he didn't perform so much these days but that the Dublin championship was so lucrative he couldn't pass it up. It's astonishing that a country so mired in economic woes still opens its pockets when the hat is passed.
In between all the touristing we visited Ballinderry (where Claire met the horses up close), Ballindoolin, Grange Castle, and the wonderful Nodlaig, who welcomed us with tea into her cozy bungalow. For me Claire's visit was one of the very best parts of my time here. It was great to have a travel companion, especially one who did all of the map reading. So much of my anxiety about driving here has been tied to not knowing where I am going; Claire read our atlas so brilliantly that we almost never got lost, and I could relax and just steer the car. Claire's very bad allergies nearly wrecked the trip for her, but she refused to allow them to slow us down. When she left I started the last phase of my stay here, the recent memory of our little vacation always fresh in my mind.
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