Bacon and a Man Named Liddy: Dublin
Sunday, April 25, Dublin
Thank you Pat Liddy, for the wake-up call on Irish Breakfasts. Arlene and I have mastered walking with various blisters and sock issues (every pair I brought seems to want to migrate down into the toe of my boots so they've been dumped in the trash) but we are humbled by 70-something tour guide who is taking us through the hidden streets of Dublin at a speed we young folks apparently can't match. I blame my lag behind on the frequent stops I make to take pictures but the fact is Pat Liddy is in better shape than I am and as sobering as that may be I can't seem to turn down a scone or the bacon-laden breakfasts yet. Maybe tomorrow.
Irish breakfasts are both a curse and a necessary evil. I've been starting my morning with more food than I usually consume in an entire day and have had to gradually change my routine to prevent cholesterol overload. Since they are presented as a fait acompli, it's taken a few tries to overcome my feeling of obligation to eat everything - who knew how many bits of meat could fit on a plate already loaded down with a perfectly poached (and delightfully runny yolked) egg, toast, boiled tomato, buttered toast, beans, and fruit, placed next to juice and milky tea? Besides the ham, bacon, and sausages, our B&B in Dublin served a small patty of something that was identifiably meat but otherwise mysterious in it's cultural and four-legged origin. Both of us left that particular item alone after one experimental bite, and I've been feeling quite guilty lately about the amount of food I have started to abandon (sorry, pig!) despite my best efforts.
Blaming my overloaded stomach, I try to keep up with Pat Liddy as he briskly winds his way through tiny alleys and crowded 18th century marketplaces as we struggle to keep up. Lithe and energetic, silver-haired Liddy is the perfect specimen of a person who does not indulge in Irish breakfasts. Dressed in a long wool coat, trilby hat and carrying a leather satchel over one shoulder he is every bit the professorial image of what you expect a walking guide to be. Running his famous 2.5 hour walks through the storied and often hallowed ground of literary and historical Dublin is his retirement career. We know he's written several books and sent two children through Trinity College, Dublin's famous (and very old) university but we speculate on what he did before this job. He's educated and kindly (professor?), witty and urbane (advertising executive?) and in superlative condition (yoga teacher?).
Aside from the two tidbits on his personal life mentioned above he is not forthcoming on any subject save his beloved city, and we are learning about it from the ground up. Fishamble Street, once next to the sea, now obscured by acres of landfill and a very ugly military-style City Hall, the 20' stone wall surrounding the old Viking city, battlements and a river rushing below us under them, hidden from view but audible on quiet mornings. Bullet holes in statues and buildings from various civil uprisings, the loss of almost all the country's historical archives during an ill-conceived bombing of the public records office in 1922. In Dublin, as in many parts of Ireland, the English are reviled, but Pat Liddy keeps it light - he has British tourists after all, a new era of detante after the peace treaty in Northern Ireland.
Our tour takes longer than advertised - there is only one of these each day, after all, and we ask so many questions that the afternoon stretches on, the shadows lengthening over Dublin Castle, I search for echoes of aristocracy in every grand building whitewashed over if only to get closer to the ancestral connection I am weaving daily here. The modern city is barely visible, bits of glass thrust up between endless brick facades distinguished only by their colorful doors, Edwardian, Regency, Dutch, Scottish plain. Here there is an upstairs and downstairs, a place for every level of society once kept firmly in check. Kitchens that stretch out underneath the streets, dark places where so many once toiled, now tombs for storage, carriage entrances used for car parks, window boxes left empty. In old cities where a thousand years is only part of the story, change is not as swift as it might appear in billboards, memory is left intact in these places. The past and the future intermingle and we, the visitors, are left to speculate as to how they will continue to co-exist.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Thank you Pat Liddy, for the wake-up call on Irish Breakfasts. Arlene and I have mastered walking with various blisters and sock issues (every pair I brought seems to want to migrate down into the toe of my boots so they've been dumped in the trash) but we are humbled by 70-something tour guide who is taking us through the hidden streets of Dublin at a speed we young folks apparently can't match. I blame my lag behind on the frequent stops I make to take pictures but the fact is Pat Liddy is in better shape than I am and as sobering as that may be I can't seem to turn down a scone or the bacon-laden breakfasts yet. Maybe tomorrow.
Irish breakfasts are both a curse and a necessary evil. I've been starting my morning with more food than I usually consume in an entire day and have had to gradually change my routine to prevent cholesterol overload. Since they are presented as a fait acompli, it's taken a few tries to overcome my feeling of obligation to eat everything - who knew how many bits of meat could fit on a plate already loaded down with a perfectly poached (and delightfully runny yolked) egg, toast, boiled tomato, buttered toast, beans, and fruit, placed next to juice and milky tea? Besides the ham, bacon, and sausages, our B&B in Dublin served a small patty of something that was identifiably meat but otherwise mysterious in it's cultural and four-legged origin. Both of us left that particular item alone after one experimental bite, and I've been feeling quite guilty lately about the amount of food I have started to abandon (sorry, pig!) despite my best efforts.
Blaming my overloaded stomach, I try to keep up with Pat Liddy as he briskly winds his way through tiny alleys and crowded 18th century marketplaces as we struggle to keep up. Lithe and energetic, silver-haired Liddy is the perfect specimen of a person who does not indulge in Irish breakfasts. Dressed in a long wool coat, trilby hat and carrying a leather satchel over one shoulder he is every bit the professorial image of what you expect a walking guide to be. Running his famous 2.5 hour walks through the storied and often hallowed ground of literary and historical Dublin is his retirement career. We know he's written several books and sent two children through Trinity College, Dublin's famous (and very old) university but we speculate on what he did before this job. He's educated and kindly (professor?), witty and urbane (advertising executive?) and in superlative condition (yoga teacher?).
Aside from the two tidbits on his personal life mentioned above he is not forthcoming on any subject save his beloved city, and we are learning about it from the ground up. Fishamble Street, once next to the sea, now obscured by acres of landfill and a very ugly military-style City Hall, the 20' stone wall surrounding the old Viking city, battlements and a river rushing below us under them, hidden from view but audible on quiet mornings. Bullet holes in statues and buildings from various civil uprisings, the loss of almost all the country's historical archives during an ill-conceived bombing of the public records office in 1922. In Dublin, as in many parts of Ireland, the English are reviled, but Pat Liddy keeps it light - he has British tourists after all, a new era of detante after the peace treaty in Northern Ireland.
Our tour takes longer than advertised - there is only one of these each day, after all, and we ask so many questions that the afternoon stretches on, the shadows lengthening over Dublin Castle, I search for echoes of aristocracy in every grand building whitewashed over if only to get closer to the ancestral connection I am weaving daily here. The modern city is barely visible, bits of glass thrust up between endless brick facades distinguished only by their colorful doors, Edwardian, Regency, Dutch, Scottish plain. Here there is an upstairs and downstairs, a place for every level of society once kept firmly in check. Kitchens that stretch out underneath the streets, dark places where so many once toiled, now tombs for storage, carriage entrances used for car parks, window boxes left empty. In old cities where a thousand years is only part of the story, change is not as swift as it might appear in billboards, memory is left intact in these places. The past and the future intermingle and we, the visitors, are left to speculate as to how they will continue to co-exist.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
posted by vallie at 3:56 PM
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