As for me, I came here, as I tell anyone who will listen, ten years ago. Here being Dirty Auld Dublin town, as not only tourists sing drunkenly on their sway home over Grafton street (one of our favorite spots, The Duke, just there for a last one). There were things that I was fleeing, but mostly boredom. It was a dark world I used to live in because I never let the light in. Green stones hadn’t called me anywheres. But one day, my editor said to me, we want a foreign correspondent, and I said I’d go anywhere they spoke English and drank good beer. I hadn’t intended to stay long, or not to stay long. I certainly hadn’t intended to become (briefly) wildly popular, to leave that old paper and get syndicated, and STAY a foreign correspondent so long I had been, in more ways than one, domesticated.
They were dodgy days at first. You get an auld pass, when you get here, to stay in the country for a month that has a place where the Garda (as they call the police here, since their parents died to make gaelic a possible language and their children die having to learn it) can sign to make it a one month gig. You have to, however
1) Have 1500 Euros in a bank account which, when I got here, was several more than ‘twould have been in dollars. A task made complicated by
- The fact that I couldn’t find an ATM (Irish name) which would give me more than 500 euros a day and
- The refrigerator in my flat was broken with such gumption that the maintenance staff in my apartment complex just could not find their way to fix it for over a month, despite the daily siege I laid on their facilities to solicit such—resulting after a month of daily visitation, in a poorly hand-written sign posted on that ol’ fridge requesting that I remove my food from it, so’s it could be replaced. Food, I may point out, it had not got, insofar as, the damn thing being broken, it would have served as merely a very small pantry. Then another week of waiting. Which meant
- i. I had to actually eat at restaurants in Dublin, for however many meals a day I decided I could not do without, which meant that of that 500 I took out I was spending 30-40 a day, such food being the farthest thing from cheap, meaning that golden number of 1500 total kept slipping away like the well of Tantalus
- When I finally did make it to the ol’ Garda and waited in line for more hours than I’ve spent, in some time, on anything I enjoy, to learn only of the variety of other paperwork I should have had the whole time I was in line, meaning more days and more times.
I would say it was worth it, though. For starters, the line snaked around the building, starting at 6 am, right next door to the White Horse Pub, one of the few-enough all-night establishments in the City Center, which means we sober people who had woken ourselves before God had gotten up were subjected, nearly continuously, to the curious attention and helpful suggestions of people who had not yet gone home from the night before and wore it on their faces in a truly tragicomic way. One stumbleton, in fact, spent so long hitting on the lesbian in front of me (a lovely lass, there with her girlfriend), that he set what I believed to be then a world record for “not getting the hint”, though God knows I myself have been a strong contender in the years of my life.
Secondly, when you finally make it into the building there are rows of seats and rows of windows where the arbiters of destiny choose, depending, apparently, on how hungry they are or on some other factor I could not fathom, which of this very motley crew of grad students, immigrants, and Guinness-trotters would get to get signed in. There was, however, only one window for the immigrants from farthest away, as near as I could tell, in which, as the other voices over the intercom asked for Smiths and Petersons and Weisses, the morosest Irish voice would intone slowly, again, its best effort at names long of syllable, short on vowel, repeating each one over and over, forever and amen, in ways shifting continually to try to catch these delicious foreign fish. We presume he slept with his boss, or this was his first day, or his deity of choice simply held him in contempt.