The following short tales are true stories from my time in Ireland.
Good Dinner!
I was walking down Saint James Place (some Irish streets make you feel like you are on a Monopoly board) with a big soup pot and a spoon that I was borrowing from next door, so I could make some soup. As I was walking, an Irishman saw me and kindly said, “Good Dinner!”, with a smile and a hearty accent. I responded, “I hope it will be a good dinner”, only later to realize that he said, “Good Day!” Fortunately, the butternut squash soup did turn out delicious, but it may have caused me gas, but that could be the Guinness too right?
Boston Beauty
One of three guys playing authentic Irish music in a pub one night, hmmm, that sounds like a joke. Well, the guy meets me, finds out that I am from Detroit, and tells me it’s close to Boston and that is where I am really from. It being midnight in an Irish Pub, I figured I shouldn’t argue with the guys relative view of geography. I returned to my seat with a slight identity crisis as he announced and dedicated his next song, “Boston Beauty” to me. Ironically, I saw him on the streets of Derry the next day, he recognized me and asked if I was coming to the Pub again. I think he just wanted another excuse to sing “Boston Beauty”.
The Not So French Girls
Justin informed me that he thought four French girls were laughing at him. In Ireland? No way! Okay, well girls of any nationality could laugh at Justin in any country so this did not sound all that ridiculous. About 20 minutes later I met four girls from Italy. I asked Justin if these were the French girls. He cowardly lowered his head and admitted that he thought their Italian sounded French. This was quickly forgiven as I realized we have been in both Italy and France in the last few weeks and Justin speaks neither language. Needless to say, we took the four Italian girls to the Pub that night. I drank my first Guinness and spoke in Italian with an ever increasing Irish accent. The Italian girls shouted “Bravissimo” and applauded, and although each of the Italian girls were beautiful, we never did hear “Bella Italiano” that evening.
V Eggs
One evening in Galway, I was in the kitchen of our hostel cooking eggs, when a guy from Spain approached me and introduced himself. This being a huge (200 something person) hostel, in which you could meet a new person from a new country every minute if that was your goal, I didn’t think much about meeting Carlos. Okay, not true, I must confess that when he introduced himself as Carlos, I nearly lost it. You see over the past month I have had a cough that comes and goes depending upon how much second hand smoke I have been exposed to. So, my cough became know as “Carlos”, with frequent references like, “oh Carlos, not again?”, cough, cough, cough.
Carlos (the actual man, not my cough) came back a few minutes later and admired my cooking, saying, “Incredible, incredible.” Then pausing to say, “It makes me curious”. Carlos wanted to know where I learned how to make the eggs I was cooking. I had cut a circle from the center of a piece of bread and I was frying an egg in the hole in the center of the bread. I told Carlos, feeling extra American at the time, that I saw it in a movie. He asked which film, and I replied “V for Vendetta”, in which he exclaimed, “Yes! I saw it too!” Carlos then wanted to know what we would call this type of egg in America. Sadly, I didn’t have a good answer, as I had just began calling them “V eggs” because of V for Vendetta. He laughed and decided he would call them “V huevos”. Hooray for enculturation of the Victory Egg in Spain!
