An American in Ireland

A while back, I wrote a blog post about What I’ve Learned since moving here to Ireland. Now, on the six-month anniversary of my move here, I’d like to present what I love about Ireland and about living here.

*High visibility jackets: I know you think I’m crazy right about now. OK, I don’t really love the high visibility jacket in and of itself, but I love what it represents. About a month into my relocation, my friend and I took a walk down a country road sometime in the early evening. It was still quite bright outside, but as we walked we were stopped by four separate people asking us why we were not wearing high visibility jackets. These people literally pulled their cars over, rolled down their windows and gave out to us (as they say here).

“You’ll get hit by a car!” said one. “The sun is going down and it’ll be dark soon, what are you thinking?” asked another. Even a week later my friend’s cousin, who was one of the people who’d stopped us, scolded me again saying, “I still can’t believe yous (<– slang for you girls, you guys, you people) were out on the road with no high vis jackets!”

I found all this fretting about high visibility jackets touching, really. Out in rural Ireland it gets really dark at night and therefore everyone who lives there owns one of these jackets. It’s as essential to the country wardrobe as Wellies and rain slickers. Whether you’re walking your dog or changing a flat tire, if it’s anywhere close to dusk you’ll be sporting one. In Los Angeles, the only people wearing high visibility jackets are road crew workers and night-time cyclists. I’ve never owned one (or even uttered the words “high visibility jacket”) my entire life. I remember that was the day I understood I was in a totally different place.

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When I was visiting my friends in Collon last September (this was the trip that basically got the wheels turning about moving to Ireland), I noticed red and black checkered flags all over the village. Pubs, houses, telephone poles – they were everywhere. I soon found out that these flags bore the colors of the Mattock Rangers, the local Gaelic football club, and that the team was close to securing a spot in the 2009 finals. The anticipation and anxiety of the village was evident in the bits and pieces of conversation I overheard during my visit. It was as if the entire population of Collon was holding its collective breath, careful not to jinx a victory by too much talk while at the same time silently agonizing over the thought of a loss.

I went back to America before the final match but heard from friends that the Mattock Rangers clinched the championship the following month. I saw video and photos of the three-day celebration around Collon village, and it looked absolutely mad. The guys were jumping on tables, the team paraded through the streets on the back of a huge flat-bed truck and it seemed the entire village was out partying for those three days and nights – kids, moms, dads, grandparents, the whole lot. I didn’t quite understand the passion and, most importantly, the significance of the team and what they meant to the community until I saw that evidence. For the village of Collon, the Mattock Rangers represent its hopes and dreams; it’s not just a football team, it’s a way of life for many in the community.

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Illustration credit: Suat Eman/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Whenever my friends and I go to the pub, something strange occurs. Though we all go there together, the second we arrive there is a separation of the sexes: the women sit at one table and the men at another. It’s kind of like the Red Sea, but instead of Moses it’s a peculiar, old-fashioned standard that parts us.

I suppose no matter the culture, women have their bond with other women and men with men but I still find this automatic, consistent division very hard to understand. While I’ve never been one to pay much attention to social expectations or opinions, I feel self conscious when I move over to the men’s table (and I find I’m almost always the first to make the crossover!). As the evening goes on people eventually mix but there’s always the core male table and female table enforcing the divide with talk of football on one side and babies, handbags and clothes on the other.

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The metropolis of Dublin, which deserves to be represented – along with the rest of Ireland – in the media.

I was spending time with a friend over the weekend when she expressed her dread for the upcoming work week. “But it’s a bank holiday on Monday!” I told her, thinking she’d be pleasantly surprised upon realizing she forgot about the three-day weekend. “Oh that’s not for us, that’s only for the UK,” she replied flatly.

The reason why I thought today was a bank holiday is because for the last week, it’s been mentioned in a lot of television advertisements. One cable channel was running a campaign for the Jennifer Lopez film, Maid in Manhattan, publicizing that it would be played twice “on bank holiday Monday!” A grocery store chain had an ad that promoted specials for “the upcoming bank holiday Monday!” Since these were ads playing in Ireland, I’d just assumed the holiday applied to us. Not so. Quite cruel, if you ask me.

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Nancy (right smack in the middle!) with her siblings at a recent birthday celebration for her brother.

Being from Los Angeles, I have a pretty specific definition of the Independent Woman. She’s single or dating someone (or a few people!), has a successful career, rents a nice apartment or perhaps even owns a condo or house and has a social calendar that involves lots of fabulous restaurants, bars and friends. She not only brings home the bacon (or maybe some organic chorizo), but she can fry it up in a pan, toss it on a bed of farmers’ market vegetables and have it all ready for an impromptu Friday-night dinner party for a few of her closest pals without breaking a sweat.

Suffice it to say, I was that Independent Woman living in Los Angeles. And though now I live in Ireland, I’ve worked hard to maintain that IW lifestyle – though it’s not always easy. I do rent a fabulous apartment and have maintained my writing career but there are not a lot of great restaurants or bars in the town of Drogheda, where I reside. However I still have my dinner parties and nights out and I’ve made some incredibly fabulous friends. But the more time I spend here in Ireland, the more I’m realizing that there is a whole other type of independent woman out there, and she is the polar opposite of me.

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Roasted butternut squash on mixed greens with crispy shallots and sage leaves is pure vegan goodness

My hometown of Los Angeles can be a bit odd at times, to say the least. It’s not unusual to overhear someone at Starbucks place an order that would make even the most seasoned barista’s head spin: “Non-fat, half-caf, half-decaf, low-fat tall soy latte with one squirt of no-sugar vanilla syrup, extra hot and served in a grande-sized cup…to go.” It’s also quite common to see menu items that sound more like rabbit food than nourishment for humans, like macrobiotic sea cake with a side of millet or heirloom-varietal organic brown rice biscuits with honey and carob chips. In the health-conscious, model-and-actor Mecca of LA, people can be certifiably obsessed with what they put into their mouths, and restaurants and even Starbucks must cater to the oft-ridiculous requests of its customers if they want to stay in business.

In Drogheda, I get a double-take when I ask for low-fat salad dressing and I once got a cup of instant coffee when I asked for decaf at a local café (I sent it back). There aren’t a lot of choices around here, especially for people who want something healthy and/or beyond the average meat-and-potatoes fare. I imagine being a vegetarian in Ireland is about as unproblematic as being an alcoholic in Kuwait.

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Our menu for the evening, a la chef Imen!

It was bound to happen: Normalcy has set into my life here in Ireland. I know my way around town, I have favorite restaurants and pubs and I rarely go to the gym I joined a few months ago (if that’s not a sign of being settled I don’t know what is). Gone are the days of getting hopelessly lost on the way to the gas station and having to ask grocery store clerks to educate me on the difference between rashers and streaky bacon. I know that Come Dine with Me, my favorite show on television, reruns all five episodes on Sunday afternoons, and that if I don’t have a 1 Euro coin for the shopping cart I can use a 20-cent coin as it’s exactly the same size. In a nutshell, I’ve assimilated and life has become somewhat routine.

Richard, the Irish farmer himself, and Imen; Corey and Liam of Irish Fireside.

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I’ve always believed that food is an important reflection of the culture in any country, and as a food and travel journalist this is something I’ve been lucky enough to explore in a good few places. Since moving to Ireland I have learned that the potato is King, beef is a staple in most people’s diets and cabbage is almost always boiled and served with Irish bacon (which is more like ham for us Americans than what we know as bacon).

I’m also starting to get a better understanding of what flavors appeal to the Irish palate. When it comes to potato chips (or crisps, as they say here), the most common flavors are smoky bacon, cheese and onion and salt and vinegar. People especially seem fond of the bacon variety, at least that’s what I gather from my friends. And though a lot of Irish I know have an aversion to seafood, they adore the popular prawn cocktail-flavored crisps – something I’ve never seen in the U.S.

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In a place like Los Angeles, most Irish bars try especially hard to capture the essence of a real pub in Ireland. There are the dark wood accents, the Guinness on tap and the thick-accented Irish bartenders (or at least struggling actors pretending to be Irish). It’s a bit like the theme restaurants at Disneyland; while they’ve manage to capture the look and feel it lacks the  spirit of a true Irish watering hole.

There’s probably no Irish drinking establishment more authentic as the auld country pub in Ireland, and I’m lucky enough to have found one where I’m becoming a semi-regular [cue the theme song from “Cheers”]. The place is Mathews, which is bewilderingly pronounced “Mat-te-tis” and it’s an old pub in the middle of tiny Collon village, about a 15-minute drive from my place. On any given Friday or Saturday night, I know that my friends Bushman and Richella will be behind the bar, and that at least a few people I know will be wearing holes into the old barstools. On the weekends there will be some choice covers (think Garth Brooks and Air Supply) performed by a well-meaning and painfully earnest musician and by the end of a long night there might be a drunkard or two being thrown out on his ass by James, the barman you just don’t f*ck with.

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When I first meet people in Ireland and they find out I didn’t move over for a job, they ask the inevitable question, “Did ya move here for a fella?” Considering most American women I’ve met here did in fact follow their Irish husbands back to the homeland, I can understand why people would assume such a thing. When I tell them there is no fella and that I moved here to experience a new adventure, they usually ask if I A) want to meet a man and B) if I want to have children.

Of course it would be great to meet a fabulous, intelligent, handsome, funny, adventurous, foodie-type who loves to travel and is well-versed in current events/literature/etc. (or at least someone who possesses a few of these traits!). As for the kids question, my answer typically elicits a double-take of shock and disbelief, as if I was a three-headed alien or a talking dog. I don’t know if I want to have kids and to be honest I’m pretty sure that I probably don’t though I’d never say never. Most Irish people I encounter cannot seem to wrap their brains around the concept that a woman might not want to bear children, and I’m getting used to retorts like, “Oh you’ll change your mind – just you wait!” or “But of course you do, you just haven’t met the father!” Once, an acquaintance introduced me as, “Clare, and she says she probably doesn’t want children – can you believe that?”

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