Swans, Books, and Dutchmen

Something I realized in Galway, but forgot to mention, probably through some subconscious defense mechanism, is that swans are truly terrible, frightening animals. I think they got some sort of good rap through all the myths in which adorable children are turned into swans (evil queen Aoife), or born from swan eggs (Helen of Troy); or because of associations with graceful ballerinas. But in real life, swans are startlingly huge, dismayingly dirty, exceedingly unmelodious birds. The flocks in Galway bay, and there were hordes of them, were all paddling around with their enormous, slimy feet, eating some sort of muck off the bottom of the river. The sound they make is halfway between a honk and a groan, and I'm fairly sure that most of what they were honking/groaning about was a sort of plan to fall upon me and seize any food I might have in my bag. I left the docks area pretty quickly after that.

The other thing I've actually been noticing everywhere in Ireland, but especially in Galway, is that the Irish must really love literature. I'd been seeing bookshops on every corner in the bigger cities, and a lot of places that I thought must be old-timey bookshops, where they actually would bind books, and probably re-bind old books or something. These places were called 'bookmakers,' and I thought it was so cool that they were so prominent in Belfast and Galway. It took a week and a half to occur to me that 'bookmakers' is the full name of 'bookies,' and that the Irish don't love literature quite as much as they love betting on sports. I only remembered this after seeing that the inside of one of these bookbinding shops was plastered with lists of races, football schedules, and betting odds. It would have been nice if it had really been antique bookstores, though. Though then there would be a lot of idle greyhounds milling about the countryside, harassing sheep, and bored Irishmen with extra money to pour into Guinness, so I guess it all works out somehow.

I have run across a lot of Dutch people here, so I wasn't surprised to hear two people in my hostel in Doolin speaking Dutch. The man, who was probably about 50 and would look exactly like Van Eyck if you put a frilly collar on him, busted out an Irish drum and started explaining how it is played. He mentioned that he would be playing at O'Connor's Pub that night with a trad group, but didn't explain why he, an obviously Dutch man form Amsterdam, had become a part of the Irish traditional music scene. The next morning I asked him, in Dutch, where he would be playing that night, and he answered me in Dutch as he was leaving the room. A little bit later, he came back into the room as it occured to him that we hadn't been talking in English, and we talked a little more in Dutch about how I knew the language and who else was playing at that pub that night. I got to the pub in time to order food, and for about the fourth time in the past two weeks, was told that the 'soup of the day' was 'vegetable.' I had kept asking, hoping that there might be some good Irish potato chowder or at least cream of mushroom, or anything not made entirely of my old enemy, the vegetable, but apparently in Irish, 'soup' means 'vegetables.' I ordered it this time, because I wasn't hungry enough for the expensive pub dinners, and it would almost definitely come with some delicious brown bread. And so I learned, a bit late in my trip, that Irish 'vegetable soup' is really a delicious dinner, almost certainly made with cream and with vegetables cut into such tiny pieces that I could swallow them without admitting to myself that I was eating something healthy. At some point after my soup (the trad had started between my first and second slices of bread), the Dutch man came over to me and, to the surprise of the Americans I had been talking to about Boston and California, told me in Dutch something about a stool being free in the front, and I should come sit there to see better. So I moved up to the table in front of the musicians, and watched their banjo/guitar/flute/drum stylings, and everything was toe-tappingly lovely until an old, very drunk Irishman came to the front to sing, and tried to talk to me while he was waiting his turn. After being disproportionately excited that I came from Boston, he tried to strike up a very confusing conversation with me before singing an equally rambling (and even more off-tune) song without accompaniment. I snuck away, since it was near closing time anyway, and walked the 10yards down the road to my hostel, where three other occupants of my room were, of course, snoring away contentedly.