Things I Like About Ireland

I don’t know if I’ll be able to post regularly during my week in Ireland, or whether I’ll have to save ideas up and use them when I get back.  But for starters, there are a few things I really like about Ireland (other than the obvious: the beauty and the people).  Here’s what’s top o’ mind:

• You can order a cup of tea in a pub and not have them look at you as if you have two heads. Not that I’m only drinking tea in pubs. There’s G&T’s, Bailey’s, and an occasional glass – or even pint – of Guinness. (Guinness, after all, is good for you.) But I do occasionally just want a cup of tea. Not that it will be fancy, mind you. It will just be a string-less tea bag, served in a flimsy aluminum tea pot, with a chipped, heavy, white china mug to drink the tea from. Still, there is nothing like a nice cup of tea in an Irish pub – especially now that smoking in pubs is outlawed. (I started to type “drinking in pubs is outlawed” – now that would be something else entirely…)
• Irish brown bread. A cup of tea is even better when accompanied by a slab of brown bread slathered with butter.  Although there are some places in Boston where you can buy brown bread, they don’t tend to be supremely convenient to where I live. So, after I go through the loaf I will no doubt bring home with me, I’m out of luck. I have tried to bake it a couple of times, only to have my efforts end in failure. The recipe I got from the owner of O’Malley’s clothing shop in Galway was perhaps too complex, and the bread didn’t come out right. I had another recipe, which I got from a fellow who owned a B&B-cum-restaurant in Dingle. This man – what the Irish might call a cute hoor – sneered when I asked him for his recipe. “You won’t be able to make it,” he told me. He then produced a pre-printed version – so it’s not as if her were guarding his dear mither’s secret. His point was that an American couldn’t make it. And, even though I brought some special flour (brown mix) home with me, damned if he wasn’t right. No doubt he left something crucial out. Cute hoor, indeed. (My brown bread failure is despite that fact that I’m a good baker, and make a spectacular Irish soda bread with raisins. Hmmmmm.)
• The way they pronounce my name. It was only when I first began traveling to Ireland that I realized that, over the years, the pronunciation of my first name had changed from accent on the first syllable – as in MAUR-een – to accent on the second syllable – as in Maur-EEN. When I was growing up, most people pronounced my name MAUR-een, which makes sense. MAUR is the “real” part of the name (Maura is Irish for Mary), while een is the diminutive add-on. And then I moved out of Worcester and into a world where 75% of the people I knew were no longer of Irish descent. And those folks in the outside world mostly used the Americanized version of my name. Anyway, when I first heard me-self called MAUR-een, I realized that this was actually the correct (and sensible) way to say my name.

I may be able to sneak another Made-in-Ireland post or two in. Whether I do or not, I have queued up posts for each day this week, so you won’t go Pink Slip-less.

Slán for now.