Luck of the Irish

Guinness Workers Housing



“Will you marry me?” I asked.

I was at the Dublin airport and trying to find the bus to the hotel. There to assist me was an Irish angel. Flame red hair, striking green eyes, alabaster skin, and rosy cheeks. A perfect model of Irish beauty topped off by a lilting Irish accent that just melted my heart.

The girl giggled, even her giggle had a lilt to it.

I shook my head, “No, no, I’m serious. I do this all the time.”

For some reason she laughed even harder.

Ireland, the home country, where one third of Americans originated. Jeez, I lived in England, you’d think I could have taken a weekend trip or something. But somehow I never got around to it. I regret it now, not because Dublin is great and I’ve missed something special all these years, it’s not, I think ‘Dublin’ is the ancient Celtic word for ‘boring’. It’s just that it is obvious the place has transformed like a, well, transformer. All the buildings here are either 100+ years old or 10- years old, without a never-you-mind in between to link them together. I missed seeing history before modernity altered it permanently.

New buildings and old warehouses. Bank building stopped mid construction.


Don’t get me wrong, the new buildings are sharp and sleek, but they sit all around these older buildings. I’m not sure Frank Lloyd Wright could make it all fit together, but it certainly doesn’t work here. And not to mention that due to the Great Recession, many of these buildings, like the one across from my hotel, lie empty, begging for occupants like forgotten ghosts of better days gone past.

I took the city tour bus and ended up at one of my lifelong goals, the Guinness Storehouse. This was their factory for over 200 years and now they’ve revamped it for tours. As it turns out making beer is very boring, when you have to throw in ‘water’ as one of your four ingredients you hype it shows you’re grasping. Yes, yes, yes, I know, it’s special water from some local hills they call mountains.




Still, they managed to make a nice presentation. My favorite part was the advertising. I also found out that John Gilroy (I used to live in Gilroy, CA) was the guy who did all their advertising drawings years ago. You gotta hand it I to them, they learned from their American cousins, the gift shop you have to pass by twice, once on your way in, and once on your way out. I mean, how can anyone turn down Guinness spiked chocolate truffles?



Of course there’s the free pint at the end of the tour, but to top it off it’s served on the seventh floor in a round glass room with a 360 degree view of Dublin. The view is amazing and absolutly beauti…no, strike that, I mean the view is boring and absolutely dreary. Dublin was an industrial city until Ireland’s tax laws turned it into a tax mecca and businesses started rolling in. But it still has that industrial feel. If Dublin has a sister city it’s probably Hamburg or Cleveland. I’m told they asked Rio de Janeiro for sister city status and were informed they should try Lima.



Aaaak! They serve Budweiser at the Guinness plant!

There’s no skyline to speak of. A few nameless boring churches dot the horizon, but who cares really, it’s not like anything interesting ever happened here except for the continuous failed bloody uprisings. Why were the Irish so desperate for the English to leave? If they were smart they would have proposed a trade.

“Listen, you take Ireland, and we’ll go to one of those lovely Caribbean islands you have. Sure, we’ll still be English slaves, but we promise not to revolt. Why? Because at least it’ll be sunny and warm.”

The major attraction is the Dublin literary pub crawl where you can go to the same pubs that famous depressed Irish writers frequented. It dawned on me that I’ve never read any of these guys, I guess it’s because they remind me of the Russian writers, long winded and miserable.

Many years ago the IRA blew up a column to Nelson on their Main St. because it was put up by the British. During the boom Dublin decided to substitute a new monument, something to recognize the city by, something they could be proud of, something that would put them on the map, like the Eiffel Tower, or Corcovado. They had over two hundred entries. They chose ‘The Spire’ a non-descript 394 foot needle of steel. You don’t even notice it, and when you do you wonder, ‘WTF?’ At first I thought the thing was peeling at the base until I looked closely and realized it was done on purpose as ‘art’. Makes you wonder how bad the other entries were.

I saw a sign that showed a guy with a cell phone in his raised hand, head thrown back in victory. The caption read, “Finally, mobile betting”. Yes, Ireland finally has a use for all that technology Steve Jobs invented.

Last remnants of the old city wall


There are so many white people here it’s beginning to creep me out. And they all look the same to me. Even the cleaning ladies in the hotel are white and don’t speak a word of Spanish, I can’t communicate with them, maybe they’re Russian. Actually Dublin does have a large immigrant population, including Chinese and Africans. You gotta be really desperate to leave your country for Ireland, I guess nobody told them the Irish were Emmigrants, not Immigrants.

I have zero problem understanding people here, unlike England, where the English murder the language. It must be because so many Irish came to America. Or perhaps it was all those old movies with the Irish cops so I got used to the accent.

Actually I do have a problem understanding some people, there are a lot of people from other countries working here. I always pride myself on understanding people’s accents. If someone comes up to me and asks, “Zaaa Dwaaa”, I know to point them in the direction of Safeway. But it turns out that accents are three dimensional. I understand German, Russian, and Spanish accents, but now I have to understand German-Irish, Russian-Irish, and Spanish-Irish accents. And just think about Chinese-Irish!

It looks like they’re trying to revive the Celtic language. All signs seem to be in both English and Celtic. Good luck with that one, millions of Chinese are trying to learn English and you want to get everyone off English and back to your native language? If you want to spite the English why don’t you start driving on the right side of the road?

Cheers!