An American in Ireland

If you’re lucky, you have a few people in your life that are just plain good. They’re unselfish, ethical and generally quite happy and their goodness inspires you to be better. If anyone were to say a bad word about them, you’d be ready to fight tooth and nail to defend their honour.

Bill and Sharon Gunter – known in foodie circles by their blog, Gunternation – are two such people. I first met them on an Irish Foodies outing I organised to the Brown Hound Bakery and Eastern Seaboard, and we immediately hit it off. They’re expats too, and we bonded on everything from adjusting to a new culture (they’ve been here a few years longer than me, so they were full of great advice) to our favourite foods from back home.

Though we’re all Americans, we hail from different regions; the Gunters are from the South and mid-west and I’m from Southern California. So when we talk about the American foods we grew up with, we talk about very different dishes. Sharon loves her Frito Pie and Bill, who went to college in New Orleans, is nuts about po’ boys and gumbo. Me, I’m all about the sushi and Cali burritos. I love hearing them talk about the foods they grew up with, because it’s so different from what I ate as a kid. From pimento cheese to chicken spaghetti, I now have a whole new list of down-home American dishes I want to try.

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The other day as I was chatting away with a fewvendors at the Honest 2 Goodness farmers market, I realised that somewhere between arriving in Ireland on March 4th, 2010 and last Saturday, I’d managed to create a life here.

When I first landed, I had a few friends I knew from years ago but as they all lived in a different area it was common for me to walk around town (Drogheda, which was my first home here) and not know a single face. I’d go grocery shopping, sit and read at a café for hours, stroll around the streets without seeing a single person I knew. I stumbled my way through getting to know the one-way streets and the opening hours of the post office and Tesco and which roads allowed free parking and which ones didn’t.

People say you either sink or swim, but for the first several months I was doggy paddling rather soppily – and doing a pretty good job at staying afloat. I couldn’t quite open my eyes underwater and sometimes I’d bump my head into a wall, but I kept kicking. After meeting Mountaineering Man and dating for several months, I made the move to Dublin and started that process again – the getting-to-know-you part – finding my way around the city, making new friends and creating a home. And I kept on paddling.

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“Did you put a clean tea towel in the kitchen?”

It’s a Saturday afternoon, and Mountaineering Man and I are doing a full house cleaning in preparation for his parents’ visit. While I’m in the bedroom primping the bedcovers, he’s finishing up the kitchen.

“Yep, all done!” he says.

“Is it the dark blue one with the stripes?” I ask.

“Yep!” says he.

“Noooo – not that one,” I said, before grabbing another tea towel from the hot press and running off to the kitchen.

MM looked confused, and understandably so. The blue striped tea towel was clean, and fresh from the press. But what he doesn’t know is that this particular tea towel is a mockery of a tea towel, or any towel for that matter. It has a large weave and a very rough surface and is cheaply made. When you wipe it across a wet surface, it doesn’t soak up any moisture; it merely spreads the water around, creating big streaks of wetness across the counter – the kind that dries into a pattern of unattractive water spots, ones you have to then wipe over again. To add insult to injury it lost its rectangular form after the first wash; it’s now just a sad, shapeless version of what it once was, when I first spied it in the kitchen aisle at TK Maxx and thought it would go nicely with some navy oven mitts I already had.

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Recently I was asked to give a talk about my experience of adjusting to life as an American in Ireland for “Enlightenment Night” at the Workman’s Club in Dublin. The monthly event features a half-dozen speakers/performers who each share something that may educate, or at the very least entertain, the attendees. Organised and hosted by the incredibly talented and charming Maeve Higgins, the evening offers a bit of enlightenment on a wide range of topics.

I chose to speak about how – despite all the bad news and negativity in the press about Ireland and its economy – this country has in many ways been my salvation. Don’t get me wrong; my life in Los Angeles was fine, but I felt personally unfulfilled. And I knew the only way to get out of that rut was to change my perspective, which I found impossible to do without throwing myself into a completely different environment.

My talk revolved around the idea of perspective, because Irish people’s reaction to my story of moving from LA to Drogheda (I now live in Dublin, but lived in Co Louth for the first year) is always that of shock and horror. From what I can tell, when Irish people think of Drogheda, they get visions of broken bottles in the street, antisocial toothless teens running amuck and dog poop on every footpath (someone once referred to it as “the armpit of the North East”). But when I first arrived, I didn’t see that stuff; I saw the rolling green hills, the cute cobblestone streets and the friendly people. Yes, the dog poop was there but there were so many other, positive aspects that I didn’t focus on the poop!

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