I Do What I Want

I am interrupting Dominica with Ireland, which happened the year before. I am doing this because this I just found this entry and it is sort of super awesome. This is my blog, and it will be as disjointed as I want it to be.

I should be keeping up with this more, but I haven't. Truth be told, I have not really had enough time to write anything, anyway. I suppose that's a good thing, right? Run around until we've got nothing left to give to the waking hours and collapse into a fitless sleep until we start again the next day. There has been a lot of coffee since I got here.
So, we are on a train now. A day rail from Dublin to a place called Killarney, which Jeremy suggested. Ireland is beautiful in exactly the way you would expect it to be. All the cliches are true. Rolling green hills spotted with dairy cows and woolly sheep and occasional split rail fences.

It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

We got to Killarney, a gingerbread town, tidy and tiny and full of pubs. Our hostel is quaint and cozy, and they rent bikes. We biked out to the national park. Started with an old watch tower and then boarded a little whaler onto a glass lake with an old salty Irishman and held our stopped breath in awe of the scene. I wish that I had words for what we saw there. No one spoke much, as we were too distracted by everything we were inside. We docked at Innisfallen, a small island full of moss covered trees and earth and stones. There is an abbey there. A stone cross inside is from the 7th century and was found at the bottom of the loch in the 1970s. People left coins on the cross. I assume the coins were wishes; I assume everything is for wishing.
I dropped twenty cents and wished for my sister's happiness in life.


I felt like I was on a fairy watch the whole time, munching on wild blackberries, stepping over toadstool villages and keeping an eye out for glittering creatures trying to stay hidden. We were like kids running around that little place. Giggling and skipping rocks and painting our mouths purple with blackberries.
Ireland is magic.
We biked all over Killarney, stopping often to rest our legs and marvel with warranted awe. We ended up at a postcard waterfall. Rosy, windburned cheeks and dropped jaws. It seems like every time we start to feel like we might kill each other, we land ourselves in some stunning spot where we forget what we were annoyed with.
As a side note here, if you go into a restroom in an Irish national park, you might see a system of red strings that might lead to a unit on the ceiling that looks a lot like a smoke detector. Attached, curiously, might be an empty toilet paper tube. You might be tempted to pull on it, as there will be no indication of what could happen if you do. In that moment be strong. Resist. Because what happens in a quiet click followed by a not quiet, sustaining beep and a flashing red light.
I still don't know what happened there. I'll have to Google it when I get home. So, now we are on the train back to Dublin. We leave tomorrow. I will remember Ireland the most, I think. Not Dublin, really, as the streets are as gray as the building which are as gray as the sky and the people aren't that nice unless there is a pint glass in their hands. I feel like the rest of this country is what you remember.