Liftoff!

 
The night before my departure, I finished packing around midnight. I was exhausted but I couldn’t sleep; I probably got about three hours altogether. Then it was up at 5:00 and off to the airport at a quarter to six. Got through security with no fuss and had some coffee and a bagel while I waited.

Near the end of my first flight, I started feeling nauseous. Since I’ve never had any trouble with motion- or air-sickness, I wrote it off as hunger. So I got some water and some ginger ale when the little cart came bumping down the aisle and started thinking about what I might find to eat at the airport in Philadelphia during my four-and-a-half-hour layover. But when we started our descent, it got worse. By the time we touched down, I was sure I was going to need the little bag poking out of the seat pocket in front of me. As we taxied to the gate, it was all I could do not to throw up. The woman to my right eyed me nervously when I clamped my hand over my mouth. I tried to distract myself with bland, boring thoughts in hopes that they would be like mental saltines and calm my stomach. It worked well enough that I managed to keep it all down, but the first thing I did after disembarking was buy some Dramamine.

Had a little lunch and went to sit at my gate for the next few hours. The Dramamine labeling warned of “marked drowsiness” as a side effect and I didn’t want to take it if it was going to cause me to fall asleep there in the terminal. I was already pretty markedly drowsy from too little sleep and feeling ill earlier, and kind of wanted to save up all that tired and just sleep on the plane to minimize my jetlag. So I checked my e-mail and hummed a little lullaby for Eyjafjallajokull, the Icelandic volcano that has been wreaking havoc on European air travel recently. If it would just rest a bit, I wouldn’t be stuck in Philly.

I like to think it worked. We boarded on time and shortly after liftoff were greeted from the cockpit with an announcement that the flight would be a little longer than scheduled due to the volcano’s ash cloud shifting, forcing us to fly a more southerly route than usual. As I had no connection to miss in Dublin, I was happy to have the extra time to sleep. I chewed up a couple of chalky, orange-flavored Dramamine tablets but managed to stay awake long enough to eat. About an hour into the flight, we were served a little dinner, some unsurprisingly mediocre chicken accompanied by half an ounce of lettuce (with two tablespoons of dressing on the side) and a small field stone masquerading as a multi-grain dinner roll. Got about six hours of sleep, arriving in Dublin shortly before 10am, more than an hour later than scheduled. The man at passport control was skeptical when I told him I’d be in the country for two and a half months but had no intention of earning any wages. When asked what I’d be doing all that time, I said, “Vacationing. Farming.” He looked at me. “Fairmin‘? What kind of fairmin‘?” “Vegetables, animals, whatever needs doing.” “And why would you do that, work for free on someone’s farm? What do you get out of it, besides the experience?” I told him it was in exchange for room and board and he asked if I knew anyone else who had done this. I assured him it was part of a large organization, Willing Workers on Organic Farms (alternately Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) and that I’m really only in Ireland as a stopover on my way to Nepal to volunteer in an orphanage. He shook his head a little as he stamped my passport with a 90-day entry stamp and said, “Ye’re wonderful people. Enjoy yer stay.”

Once in town, I left my larger bag in the luggage room at the hostel and took a brisk walk around the neighborhood in an attempt to wake up a bit and burn time until 2:00 check-in. I was trying so hard not to sleep at all, to just push through that first day and get on Dublin time, but once I’d settled into my room, I couldn’t resist allowing myself a one-hour nap, followed by another long walk, west along the quays in the late-afternoon sun and back down Dame St. to the hostel for supper.

The next day, I spent a long time wandering around Merrion Square and down through Georgian Dublin, with its tidy frontages, street after street of light brown brick with white trim and brightly colored doors. Many of them still have old-fashioned fixtures, centered brass doorknobs and decorative knockers. Most of these are lion’s heads or women’s faces, with a couple sleeker, simpler designs and one particularly phallic exception. Stopped in to the National Gallery, lingering over the prints on the mezzanine level and skimming over all the awkward religious allegories and painterly landscapes of Connemara that I had seen last time I was in town.

Continued my stroll east, across the canal to Beggar’s Bush, a neighborhood second only to Dolphin’s Barn as Dublin’s most amusingly-named. There I visited the National Print Museum, housed in the one large room of an old chapel, packed with old printing presses and boxes full of metal type. Inside, I could smell the ink still stuck in the crevices and serifs of the characters, the same warm, oily scent from room 210 in the Art Building at the University of Washington. I thought of Larry Sommers, the printmaking technician and my papermaking instructor in college, who passed away very suddenly last spring. I could almost hear him there, whistling to himself, shuffling slowly amongst the presses, happy to explain their history and operation to anyone curious enough to ask.

From there I found my way back to the canal and followed it north toward the river, pausing to watch stubbly men lower barges through the locks. When I stepped out of the shadows of the new Docklands high rises, the green-brown water of the Liffey brought to mind an oil painting I’d just seen at the National Gallery, of spectators watching people swimming in it. Maybe it’s because I grew up on the Duwamish, but I wouldn’t dip my big toe in that river, much less my whole self. Sure is nice for a walk, though, with its bridges and its boardwalks. Sometimes I wish our river was like that, central and social and attractively tree-lined, like the Thames or the Willamette, what I’ve seen of them. All we’ve got is Superfund status and a little park full of toxic mud, romantically named “T-107.”

While the other girls in my dorm (and the rest of the city, no doubt) were out on the town, I spent my Saturday night trying to figure out what to do with myself for the several days I have open after one of my farm-stays cancelled on me just days before my arrival in the country. I found another farm to take me for the first ten days or so, leaving me with 11 or 12 to sort out. Slept in this morning and took a leisurely stroll back to Merrion Square before visiting the Natural History Museum. Called the “dead zoo” by many, this museum was closed altogether last time I was in town due to a large staircase collapsing. My Lonely Planet book, which was printed only a couple of months ago, claims it’s closed until 2011, so I was a little irked to find it was up and running and I’d wasted the longer-opening-hours days not going because I thought I couldn’t. So I went today, Sunday, when it is open from 2-5pm and packed to the gills with small children.

Which was fine, really. If I’d been a child in Dublin, this would have been a favorite place to visit, and it was actually kind of fun to watch them squeal over the scale or strangeness of the Grizzly and the elephant, the mandrill and the pangolin. The density of taxidermied creatures and the skeletons of their brethren was quite a spectacle. Most were packed nose-to-tail in large cases, with larger specimens on stands on the creaky hardwood floor or hanging from the ceiling. From the second floor, you could see up to the third and fourth, which were closed due to the high volume of visitors and relative lack of emergency exits. The heads of various antlered animals hung around the railing above, glass-eyed and patchy-haired. Most of the collection was obviously quite old, their hides cracked from the combination of aging and antiquated preservation technology.

One more day in old familiar Dublin and it’s on to new territory, to Galway, to the rugged, wind-beaten Atlantic coast, to the true beginning of my new adventures in Ireland.

P.S. Happy Mum’s Day.