Entries tagged with “collon ireland”.


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I spent this afternoon at my friend Sinead Roche’s house out in Broomfield, Collon with the people who are my first Irish family.

You see, Sinead is the reason why I’m here. Way back when I was a university student in San Francisco, I rented a room in a big kip of a house, and Sinead and her then-boyfriend Keith rented the room down the hall. We became fast friends. Sinead and I spent many Saturday nights drinking white zinfandel from a box and chain-smoking Marlborough Lights, watching cheesy TV shows and being carefree early 20-somethings.

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She taught me about good tea, Guinness and the beauty of the humble potato; I still laugh when I think about Sinead, sitting with her head over a plate of steaming spuds covered in butter and Bisto and eating them so fast she’d huff and puff just so she could avoid burning her mouth. “Nothing better than a good plate of spuds!” she’d say, with utter satisfaction, after eating the equivalent of probably 4-5 boiled potatoes.

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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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Downtown Drogheda

You can live in a big city like Los Angeles your whole life and never run into someone you know on the street. Occasionally it happens; you’ll see a friend or co-worker and there’s always this sense of surprise, like “Funny seeing you here!” You might even tell someone else, “I ran into [fill in the blank] today at the store!” It’s unusual enough to make it newsworthy.

I’m finding that life in a small town like Drogheda means that you pretty much can’t go anywhere without seeing someone you know. You’re probably wondering how many people I could possibly know here, and the answer is that I am friends with about seven people and am acquainted with about eight more, so 15 all together. On my first day here, as my friend and I drove through Drogheda, I spotted four people I know walking around town. Four!

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