We leave Dublin for Cambridge today

     We leave for Cambridge this  Friday morning.  We have enjoyed our stay in Ireland very much – traveling around this part of the country was pretty easy with their very efficient public transit system – which was very fortunate given the scary driving conditions!  Narrow streets, street names that change in the middle of blocks, lots of aggressively driven buses, cars that drive right up along the sidewalk curbs, and driving in the opposite sides of the road would have been a recipe for disaster for us and the residents of Dublin if we were behind any wheel!  We found that Gaelic translations appeared almost everywhere and were offered for all public announcements of stops:  “Spencer Dock” was followed by “Duga Spencer” (this was an easy one, there were far more complicated old Irish names and pronunciations).  It was fun trying to figure out the language code as we traveled here and there – even the street signs and main public buildings offered the current and old names.  Mark observed that the young people we saw, whether Dubliners or their foreign visitors, looked just like UCD students – any of them could have been sitting in his lectures and you wouldn’t have noticed any difference in their clothes, hair and makeup.  Interestingly, the music buskers in the main shopping areas of Dublin seemed to play American music, especially blues, and there were two groups of Peruvians playing beautiful melodic Peruvian music while wearing American Indian full feather head-dresses!  We were quite surprised to see this but we did walk by one store named “American Apache” so maybe there is some sort of affection for American Indians over here.  We traveled to Howth yesterday, a pretty coastal town, and walked all over.  It was actually the warmest of the three days so far, maybe reaching 70 degrees, with the ever present clouds threatening rain that, thankfully, did not appear during our stay this week.  Dublin seems to be as much a metropolitan city as San Francisco with lots of people, bustling stores, history, old buildings (dating back to the 12th Century), and many tourist shops.  The countryside was as beautiful and green as we expected to see – very picturesque and tranquil.  Lots of cows, horses and sheep but not much in the way of crops – mostly a lot of green fields from our vantage points on the trains. 

As we say goodbye to Ireland, we also say Thank you:  Go raibh maith agaibh  (pronounced like guh rev mah ah-gwiv)