hull in my head

We arrived in Irish airspace mid-afternoon on Friday and as the plan began to make it’s slow decent were met with the possibility of snow. From our vantage point (of the plane’s window) we could see a light dusting of white over the 40 shades of greens seen in the boxed-off gardens, farms, and fields of Ireland. I was very excited. I’ve wanted snow now for a while. The previous day we were told it was to snow in London but were met with disappointment when it didn’t happen so now here was Nature’s way of redeeming her reputation.

She did not. In fact the filthy liar, just to spite me, had it snow in Hull instead, recognizing the ironic sense of disappointment that it’d instill in me. But when we did get off the plane, Dublin, despite being bare of snow, did seem different. You see, the last time I was there I wasn’t too impressed with the city. I don’t know if that shined through in my words or not. I mean it’s not like it was terrible, I had a good time, but it didn’t seem like somewhere I’d want to live. Maybe my expectations were just too high, but whatever the case I tried to warn Tony not to be expecting too much.

When we arrived in the city center though those feelings of animosity already faded away. Good weather had an amazing effect on the city. Since the sun was shinning through it brightened up the grey place and filled her streets more. The city just seemed to be more alive, cleaner, and hopeful. However it was not because of this that the time spent in Dublin was Tony and my favorite part of our adventure. Nor was it because of this that Dublin has been the best time I’ve had since leaving the USA. Nope, it wasn’t the city at all, but a few of the people who inherit it.

I’ll introduce you.

Top of the list is the brother and sister duo Andy and Elizabeth. They were our contacts in Dublin and are directly responsible for us having had such a good time. Andy and Liz are from the Davies clan in Hull, a clan that is leading the race to win the “Best Family of the 2008” award. I’m already good friends with their brothers Matthew and Chris (White Bear or Chunk) but Andy had moved to Dublin almost the minute I arrived in Hull saying something about “the town not being big enough for both of us…” and Liz had already been living there for almost 2 years (I think) so I didn’t know either of them too well. However we bonded a bit during time spent together around Christmas when they came home to visit their family. It’s amazing how close you become towards a person after playing twister with them. Not to mention the “Extreme Spoons” incidents* (see footnote)

Like their brethren in Hull, Andy and Liz are almost impossible not to like. Liz is the elder of the two and is definitely added onto my list of favorite girls in the world. One reason to like her is for her sense of adventure and independence. Besides England, she has lived in Paris and currently Dublin, moving both times on her own and making it work. She speaks French and Chinese and I’d imagine little bits of various other languages as well. But this hasn’t made her pious, quite to opposite really. She seems to have the aura of knowledge beyond her age but emits it with grace and compassion. Andy seems to be following suit in her artistic and adventures footsteps but again is humble about it. He is a fantastic photographer but never mentioned a word of it while we were in Dublin taking loads of pictures. That’s just the kind of guy he is. Together they made excellent hosts and ambassadors of their city.

They met up with us at the Dublin Spire bringing along with them Debbie. Debbie is Irish born and bred from the little town of Tralee but you’d never guess it when she does her fake American accent. It’s spot on, so good even that when she speaks in it she almost becomes a completely different person. She has devoted much time to developing this accent because she admittedly “loves the American accent.” Bless her heart, the only girl in all of the UK! But besides her obvious fondness for Americans Tony and I loved Debbie for her exuberance. Debbie is full of life in every sense of the term and this excitement is contagious. I know that if she and I lived near she’d be one of my best friends. Later that evening we saw some bits from a travel video she and Liz made when they visited America. It made you want to travel around with them, both being those people you can imagine having these great adventures with.

Equally cool was Sam: Liz and Andy’s friend, Debbie’s honorary brother, and my new role model. I’m exaggerating a bit but the guy is just one of the coolest you’ll ever meet. For starters he is an Irish artist living in Dublin. How cool is that? He’s not a painter who makes most of his money by waiting tables; he is just an artist. That’s his job. And he is darn good at it. While we were in Dublin a documentary was showing featuring some drawings he had done. Besides being good at painting he is also an excellent Dylan-esk musician with a great voice. We recorded some songs on my computer and I’m mixing them and added some more instrumentation now. He just embodied a lot of qualities that I’d whish to be: creative, opinionated, independent, and artistic. Plus he is only a month older than me but seems to have lived so much longer. I envy that in him and wonder if it is just growing up in Ireland that caused that.

I think I liked Sam so much because he embodied the fantasy I have of being a starving artist myself. I think artists live a bit differently than the normal person and I’ve always wanted to experience this and I finally got to first hand by staying with Sam. Sam is one of those guys who will always be out of toilet paper, who has 9 bottles of shampoo in his shower but all are empty, and who will be the only one to know the order of his disorganization. He rents a tiny but quaint studio flat and because his futon wouldn’t fit where he wanted it, keeps it piled up in the corner and sleeps on the floor instead. As it was, with Tony and I sleeping there, we completely took up all the room in his place. You couldn’t even open his door all the way. The day before we arrived he decided to get rid of his armchairs (don’t even know how he fit them in the first place) so he hacked them into tiny pieces and filled 5 bins with them. Are you getting a sense of how cool this was for me? Seriously.

Well there is more. We ended up spending most of our time with Sam, especially since he convinced us not to go on our hasty (and overly brief) road trip to Kerry and to stay in Dublin instead. Throughout this time spent with Sam we were given further insights to what is world is like. For example he took us to some of his favorite Dublin places to see pretty things. We went to art galleries and being an artist himself he could make confidence-filled comments like: “this just doesn’t work, or, he is trying to hard” on world famous pieces from Picasso, Van Gogh, or the like.

He also took us to see other pretty things showing us where to see the finest girls in Dublin. One place was the fancy girly store Brown and Thomas that we passed through as casual observers. Sam says he goes there to feel better when he is poor or the weather is gloomy and terrible and I felt a kindred spirit in him.

Not that we had to go anywhere to see pretty things… the first night that we were there Andy and Liz organized dinner at this really cool Japanese restaurant. In addition to the persons described previous, the table was filled with just awesome people. In top of being
a very welcoming and comfortable group, it was also a very attractive group of people. There was the sisters from Spain: Melissa whose deep brown eyes could get even wise men to do silly things, and Monaca her likewise beautiful sister who in 10 minutes taught me more about my camera then in the entire time of owning it. Also Victor, with his innocent face and infectious laugh, and Joe, (Sam’s more pensive older brother) with a head full of deep thoughts and a mouth that begged to sip a fine scotch. There was only one person there whose name I couldn’t remember, a pretty girl with curly hair, but to be fair she left early.

Anyway as I said in the outset it was these people who really made Dublin for us. Instantly we were just a part of the group like that had always been the case and contented talk and laughter followed. In some ways we didn’t do much in Dublin, or at least didn’t do what the average tourist of the city would do, but I wouldn’t change our memories for anything. Whether it was just hanging out in the always-comfortable atmosphere of Liz and Andy’s, or walking around the city with Sam, or splitting expensive dessert 3 ways, or making zany and random music videos set to Chinese music, Dublin was just the best. It felt the closest to the friends I miss back home. I can’t wait to go again, maybe I’ll even move there someday….

Post Script: At some point Sam casually dropped that his great great grandmother was Maud Gonne the woman that most of W.B. Yeats’ poetry is for/about. And his grandmother, (Maud Gonne’s granddaughter) is still a practicing sculptor in Dublin. He remembered to tell us this after we were looking at a book on her life in a shop. It would seem that art and just all around coolness is in his blood.

*Extreme spoons was an experiment in pain. It is a combination of the normal card game spoons but instead of having the spoons on the table in front of you as is normally the case, our game progressed to the point where the spoons were hidden in other rooms or outside the house and the players who had been previously eliminated would become “defenders of the spoons” and would prevent you from trying to get to them by blocking doorways and hitting you with little objects, At one point it was down to just Becky and I so all the “defenders” ganged up on me. Scott cornered me and prodded me with a cane, Nathan jammed some kind of rag into my mouth, and Chris and Andy just whipped me with wooden cooking spoons. When I finally broke free and made it up the stairs Scott grabbed my ankles and drug me back down, my body making one of those great thud, thud, thud, sounds as it hit each individual stair. As sadistic as the games sounds it was a lot of fun and I very nearly won.