She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.
This is the fourth stanza from Dublin by Louis MacNeice. Its baleful tone is a good match for my memories of Dublin this year, especially the first day or two.
The Gaelic for Dublin is Baile Atha Cliath, pronounced Bal-yeh Awe-hah Clee-ah, which means something like ‘town of the hurdled ford,’ or ‘settlement of the ford of the reed hurdles.’ Study Abroad Ireland goes to the Town of the Hurdled Ford every summer for Bloom’s Day, June 16th, the day described in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
This summer’s trip to Dublin got off to a very bad start – one that left the faculty fearing ‘the crooked deal, the steel behind the laugh.’ We arrived at the Abbey Court Hostel to discover that our first night’s rooms had been cancelled. Somehow, the hostel had figured out it was an error before we arrived. Although they had already rebooked most of the rooms, they still had enough for about 40% of our group of 35. They had found additional rooms for the remaining 60% in a hostel quite a distance from the city center.
Mary and I divided up the group. We stood out on the busy sidewalk and told everyone what had happened and who was going where. We made arrangements to meet back at Abbey Court early the next morning. The hostel paid for taxis to take them there. We sent all the young men, some of the young women, and three of the faculty – both of the men and the most experienced traveler.
With the value of hindsight, I now wish I’d gone too, or instead of one of the other faculty. But, I didn’t; I stayed at the Abbey Court. Instead of sleeping in a room with a bunch of backpackers in their 20’s, I dragged the mattress from bed #5 – the one I’d been assigned – into Mary’s room and spent the night on the floor. That’s me hamming it up in the photo at the top of the post.
It was very stressful. We were upset that the arrangements were scrambled and we were confused as to how they got that way. We were worried about the students we had sent out to the other hostel. Later we learned that the alternate hostel was not the most secure and that made us feel even worse. The students handled it with great aplomb. Many of them stayed out very late which meant they weren’t even in those rooms for very long. The next day the whole group was installed in rooms at the Abbey Court.
As I said to myself and to Mary several times, “Nothing bad happened.” And that was true, but how did it happen that the rooms were cancelled? I was with Mary when she confirmed them earlier in the week. Did the hostel get a call from someone meaning to cancel other rooms and accidentally cancel ours instead? The manager told us that she had talked to an American, but that was about all she knew.
And even though nothing bad happened, and our students more than rose to the occasion, it really put a dent in my Dublin enthusiasm. It was as if my anticipation of a great Dublin weekend had been a bright red balloon floating above my head. Once it burst, I couldn’t let go of the string and drug it along, deflated, for the rest of the weekend.
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