Europe 24 - From Ruoti to Dublin

There was not much sleep in Avigliano that night.

For one thing we got back rather late and had to get up very early the next morning to make the long drive to Naples to catch our flight, so even if everything had gone precisely to plan there wouldn’t have been much sleep. And things didn’t go to plan, so there was even less.

I’m not sure what virus infects the minds of some dog owners and makes them think that it is an acceptable practice to leave their animals barking madly outside all night long the way the B&B’s neighbors chose to do but it seems to be endemic to every part of the world where I’ve ever tried to get a night’s rest. Here in Wisconsin, for example, Our Little Town is full of such cases, none of whom, in my sad experience, have any comprehension of why every civilized place on the globe has ordinances against such behavior and all of whom will get exceedingly stroppy if any suggestion that this might be a problem is made to them. Perhaps science will someday find a cure or simply develop a screening test to make sure that only those not infected with this virus are allowed to own dogs, but today is not that day. Last month wasn’t either.

To make things even more intriguing, when we finally conceded the point and got out of bed there was no water. None at all – not on our room, not in the breakfast room, not one drop. This wasn’t the B&B’s fault either, it has to be said. It had been a problem in that area for weeks – I’d signed on to Ruoti’s Facebook page earlier in the year and they were making announcements about water shortages and shut-offs all summer before we left for Italy. They are still making these announcements as we head into autumn. I suppose it was just a good thing that we’d all decided to take our showers the night before.

So we packed our bags into the Jeep and by 6:30am we were on the road. The main street of Ruoti was still barricaded for the second day of the Festival of San Donato so we followed our way around the town like we’d done the day before and soon we were zipping merrily along toward Naples.

When we got to Naples we followed GoogleMaps to the rental car return lot, which was a madhouse. It took us two tries to get into it and then a fair amount of prowling to find a spot that we could squeeze the car into. There was a shuttle bus to get to the airport that left on a semi-regular schedule so Oliver and I found a place in the disorganized mob that surrounded the loading area while Kim did battle with the rental car company who did not believe that they had set us loose with less than a full tank of gas and eventually we just conceded the point because we had to get to the airport and a shuttle had finally appeared. We crammed our way on board – I ended up way in the back, surrounded by a vast British-Arab family happily chattering away in a mix of Arabic and working-class London English and who were kind enough to toss me a water bottle in the 37C/98F heat (“Cheers, mate! Got to look after one another!”) so I felt like an honorary member of the family and was rather pleased about that – and thus we made the short ride to the terminal, which was another madhouse.

We were supposed to check our bags for this flight so I got into a long immobile line and waited while Kim went to a gift shop and found an actual carry-on bag to replace the O’Hare shopping bag that I’d been using as my personal item and which had died a valiant death on the way in. Oliver went into a slightly different line which turned out to be the correct line and eventually we made our way to the front where we discovered that the reason things were such a madhouse was that the baggage system had broken down. The harried woman at the desk agreed that since our bags were carry-on sized anyway we could just take them with us, and since she was the one who ended up at the gate for our flight that worked out pretty well in the end.

We had some time before our flight and they don’t post gates in the Naples airport until right up on departure time, so we found some lunch and hung out a bit before being told to head to Gate B-14, where we waited until they decided that no, actually, this was a different airline’s flight to Dublin leaving at that exact same time so why not try B-9? We hurried down to that gate and onto the bus out to the plane waiting on the tarmac, and boarded.

It was so hot and humid in Naples that the plane’s air conditioning was condensing into fog as it came out of the vents.

Also, flight attendants don’t like it when you take pictures of that sort of thing and the one closest to me let me know that in no uncertain terms. I’m not sure why. Maybe he thought I was taking pictures of him.

But soon enough we were off to Dublin, leaving Naples and Vesuvius far below.

Dublin was thirty degrees Fahrenheit (seventeen degrees Celsius) cooler than Naples when we arrived and it stayed that way for the entire time we were there. This is why we planned Dublin for the end of the trip, actually – as a temperate reward for making it through the heat in Italy in August. Dublin was mostly cloudy, vaguely rainy at times, and utterly glorious. At one point the next day we went on a walking tour of historic Dublin and the guide made a weary sarcastic comment about “Irish weather” and was surprised when we told him how much we were genuinely enjoying it after a week or so where it was cooler inside of our bodies than outside of them.

We found a taxi at the airport and headed off to the B&B where we were staying. Our driver was happy to narrate most of the trip for us, so we got a pretty thorough tour of a good chunk of the city before he arrived at our building.

After our time together in one room in Avigliano it was a bit of a shift to be in a place where we each had our own little room. During the academic year the building is student housing for a nearby university but during the summer they rent it out for guests. You go into the suite and there’s a hallway with four dorm-sized bedrooms on each side (each with its own little bathroom) and at the end there’s a good-sized kitchen area to the left (with a chore rota fastened to the wall) and a living room area to the right. The kitchen overlooks a courtyard which we didn’t explore but was nice to look at over breakfast. It was a slow time in Dublin, apparently, and we had the suite to ourselves.

Our first order of business was to find something to eat, and in the end Oliver and I walked over to the Spar market next to St. Paul’s Cathedral and picked up meats, cheeses, snacks, and beverages to bring back (including Club Lemon Soda “with real bits!” which became my new favorite thing while I was there), while Kim went to the (rather closer) Fogg Café for coffee and pastry. The Fogg Café was festooned with Pride flags, and we were pleased to discover that these were very common in Dublin. It was a nice neighborhood to walk around.

When you walk around in Dublin you notice a few things.

One of them is that the Irish are making a concerted effort to bring back their native language. For centuries the English tried to eradicate Gaelic (Gaeilge in the language itself) and they very nearly succeeded. It’s only spoken as a true native language in parts of far western or southern Ireland these days, where about 2% of the population lives. But it’s making a comeback fueled by national pride. Pretty much everything you see that has a label on it, from food to buildings to street signs – has that label in both languages.

We managed to learn one word of “tourist Gaelic” while we were there – “slànte,” which means “health” and is generally used as a toast. It more or less sounds like “slawn-che” because Gaelic does not transliterate well into English and nothing sounds like an English-speaker such as myself would guess it would on a first try looking at it.

I took an Irish history class when I was in college way back when and discovered that a) transliterating from Gaelic to English is a highly inexact science and b) if you get much further back than about 1500CE the dates get fairly conjectural. When you combined those things what that meant was that the joints between the several small textbooks we were using could be very loose indeed (“Is this the same guy or event the last book was talking about? They sound similar, but the authors have different spellings and slightly different years so maybe?”). My favorite Irish king that we covered in that class was named Rhuadhri Ua Conchobair, though I have since seen his first name spelled all sorts of ways (Ruaidrì being the most common if you look it up today). If you’re wondering, he was the last High King of Ireland, from 1166-1198CE, and he pronounced his name more or less as Rory O’Connor.

Another thing you notice walking around in Dublin is that the pedestrian lights at the intersections make a very Star Wars sort of “pew!” sound when the light turns green and then they start clicking. The green is very short and the yellow is very long and pedestrians in Dublin do NOT jaywalk which says something about how they view the drivers there, I suppose. This might also be why they have railings on a lot of the corners. As with the UK, with whom they share the British Isles, people in Ireland drive on the left and I suppose the Irish police have gotten tired of cleaning up the tourists so you will often find, painted on the roads at intersections, reminders that you need to look to the right for oncoming traffic, not the left.

Once we’d had our lunch my mission was to find bus passes. Dublin has what they call LEAP Cards for its public transportation system and you can get a 3-day guest version at some newsstands in the city. We figured out that the closest one was at the Heuston Train Station a short tram ride away so I walked down to the tram station – a pleasant walk through a quiet neighborhood – and took the Red Line tram to the train station. It took me a while to figure out how to get from the tram stop to the newsstand – it turned out that I just had to go in the main entrance and it was right there, but this wasn’t obvious on GoogleMaps – but eventually I had passes for everyone as well as another bottle of Club Lemon Soda with actual bits as my reward for my efforts. I tried my new LEAP card on the tram ride back to our rooms and it worked fine.

I have now been on public transportation in nine different world capital cities. Ten if you count New York City, which considers itself to be the capital of the universe. I don’t know why this fact makes me as happy as it does, but there you have it.

For dinner that night we walked over to a Korean barbecue place with the unlikely name of Space Jaru. It was a pleasant walk through a neighborhood that looked nothing at all like the Italian or Hungarian neighborhoods we’d been walking through earlier – it’s really quite astonishing how different places are, even when their basic function is the same – and eventually we found it.

It was really good. And really, really a lot of food. Kim and Oliver got bowls but I chose something called an Appa Burger which turned out to be a very large fried chicken breast sandwiched between enough bulgogi beef on top and bottom to have constituted its own separate meal. It was marvelous.

We shared a large table with some college students who were happy to tell us all about their food – they’d ordered small plates of pretty much everything and were passing them around among themselves – and talk with us a bit about the little things of the day.

Oliver went back to the apartment after that – we all had our own keys, since we had our own rooms – but Kim and I walked around the neighborhood for a while, stopping at a grocery for fruit and a giant KitKat bar. The Olympics were on when we got back so we hung out in the living room for a bit basking in the glow of international sports before finally calling it a night and retiring to our individual rooms.