back-dated posts 6/3

I'm now sitting in the Kirkwall county library, on the main island of the Orkneys. This place is great. It's free, and they totally allow me to plug my drive in to upload pictures. I'm not up to date yet, but check out my yahoo acct for the new additions (photos.yahoo.com/gd1303).

6/3/2004
Early morning. Overcast, with a light drizzle. Back in Dublin if only for 30 minutes. The train from Cork to Dublin arrives at Heuston Station. I needed to transfer by bus from one side of town to the other in order to take the Belfast-bound train from Connolly Station. Kind of a pain, but it allowed me to relive some familiar sights: the Guinness storehouse, a wide-body truck painted black pulling a trailer full of kegs of Guinness, the River Liffey. . . Along the way, a tall wiry old man with deep liver-spots asked me if how to get to Connolly Station. As he descended from the upper deck of the two-story bus, I noticed how large his hands were compared to how thin his arms were. Was he on his way to Belfast as well? For the last time? On the platform at Connolly, a different sort of spectacle; I would have pegged her for a Russian prostitute. Sharp facial features (if somewhat attractive), white jacket with fur trim, and tall black boots fitted with spike heels and an absurd assortment of buckes and clasps. And me. All on the ‘Enterprise’ Dublin-Belfast express train.
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Last night in Cork I finally made it down to the Shelbourne Pub. The hostel made a visit practically obligatory; they had a special price for hostelers there (3 euros for a pint) and even had an advertisement printed on the keycards they distributed to guests. There I met a young American by the name of R. J. whose father is currently serving in Iraq, and a bald Irishman (who reminds of some T.V. policeman whose name I can’t recall) with a Ph.D. in history. I guess we did the pub thing; over 3 rounds of beer, we discussed WWII, immigration, Iraq, Northern Ireland, and Israel. The old chap was a sharp one. He gave me the lowdown on the referendum on the Irish constitution. A vote ‘yes’ to amend it would stop the ‘abuse’ of the citizenship law in Ireland where parents of children born there are also granted citizenship. Under the proposed amendment, only children born in Ireland would gain citizenship, but not their parents. Supposedly, this will remove the incentive for visitors to bear children there, and drag down Ireland’s social welfare system. The old chap’s main point is that in America they don’t have the same degree of social welfare, so the debates are not comparable. Of course, I can’t totally agree with that, but then again I find it strangely hard to fault the Irish. Most countries in Europe are extremely stingy about granting citizenship. Germany for example has solved its labor-shortage problem with the gästarbeiter (guest-worker) program: workers are allowed in, but are not given citizenship rights. A lot of other countries are producing similar dual-structures in their populations.
Anyway, predictably the Labour party as well as marxists and socialists oppose the constitutional referendum, and equate ‘common-sense citizenship’ with thinly veiled racism.
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Early bar closings, ‘The Brog’, Chinese chefs, and absinthe.
The rest of the evening must remain purposefully vague. But a few observations: bars tend to close early in Ireland, where they stop serving at 11:00PM, like Great Britain and Champaign-Urbana. However, some mysteriously are allowed to stay open, and these get ridiculously packed with people afterhours. Bartenders will direct you there in fact after they close up. “Go to the Brog, make a right, a right, a right, and look for the crowds.” Nowhere else to go, I guess. The music: The White Stripes, Stone Roses, Nirvana. The Beer: Murphy’s. The change encounter: a group of Cantonese and Malay-Chinese working in Cork’s Chinese restaurant (I think there’s only one?). Back at the hostel, joining a group of Canadians and Iowans for cards. Did I want a drink, they asked. Did you know that in Eastern Europe they still sell absinthe with the wormwood in it?
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Back to the narrative present. Damn Belfast, and damn the Let’s Go™ guidebook. They say that you can take a ferry from Belfast to Scotland (a wee little port called Stranraer, pronounced Str-Ahn-nAR). Well, the LG map of Belfast doesn’t show the central trainstation. It’s simply indicated by a disembodied arrow pointing off the right edge. Neither is the ferry port on the map. When I asked the chipper but retrospectively quite insolent officer on duty at the trainstation, she replied that it was “awkward” to get to the ferry port. “Catch a taxi” she told me. Well, I walked. I carried my two backpacks along busy citystreets and highways, following the signs directing vehicular traffic toward the docks. I couldn’t a single taxi to stop for me. It took close to an hour, and I was soaked in sweat by the time I got there, dodging streams of cars and trucks the whole time. And according to the LG map, I went from terra incognita (where there be dragons) to the known world, and then back again.
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5:10PM on the Stena Line ferry from Belfast to Stranraer. For one, it’s far less gaudy than the Irish Ferries ship I took to Dublin. It was decorated in more subdued greens and blues, though there still were gambling facilities on board (‘bandits’ they were labeled, for ‘one-arm bandits’ I suppose). I had a steak and guinness pie, which cost me the exorbitant sum six pounds. That’s close to $12.00! Now who’re the bandits? Tonight, I’m looking forward to staying in a real hotel in downtown Glasgow. I need to get a good night’s rest, and I don’t want to worry about waking other people from my coughing. Though I’m already feeling better. If I hadn’t thought that I had turned the corner, I would never have gone drinking the night before.
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7:20PM Ah, but now Scotland. Rolling hills, cows, and blue skies. The sun doesn’t go down until 10:00PM here so there are a few more hours of light as I ride ScotRail to Glasgow Central.
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Listening to Curve and watching the clouds and pastures roll by. I get chills the scenery is so beautiful.Black-faced sheep scampering in unison, rock strewn streams, the setting sun, a tan speckled falcon perched on a fence post.
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Whoops! A drunk just got dragged back into the conductor’s cabin for starting a fight. I don’t quite get what the problem is, but they’re arguing quite animatedly about it still (in an accent so think it defies comprehension).
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We’re stopped now at a tiny station in the fields, and he’s off the train. He storms back on and tries to batter down the conductor door. Now he’s stalking along the length of the train carrying a large rock. Moments later, he’s sitting down on the other side of the tracks. I don’t know exactly how that was resolved, but a few minutes later we’re on our way again. “I apologize for the delay” the conductor informs us.
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10:30PM Glasgow Central station, and walking through the closed down shopping districts of downtown Glasgow. I’m staying at the Corus Hotel, which is amazingly luxurious compared to where I’ve been staying. The last place didn’t have consistently hot water in its showers. At the Corus, I took two showers and a long hot bath.