Ireland Part Deux

In Dublin, the whole world happens in a taxi. It is the thrashing point for the world: politics, city gossip, X Factor gossip, philosophies of love and sex and suicide bombers, stories about city birds and country punks and people who get drunk and lose their shoes at rock'n'roll concerts. In Dublin, if you are going with the right crowd (and I was), you spend your evening thus: you walk somewhere, you drink Guinness for dinner, you pay for your drink in a currency called jokes (someone else might pay in cash, but you are a guest, and you pay in jokes), and, in fact, that is the currency of the evening, and maybe the currency of the country, and then you dance a little, and drink another Guinness, and laugh a little more (someone told you a really good one), and then you spend a little time in a taxi, which is another world, where the money is peripheral and the important thing is how hard you can make your cabby laugh, and then you spend a little time in a taxi, which is another world, where the place you get to is peripheral and the important thing is how hard your cabby makes you laugh, and then you wake up, and you dream you hear birds and a car starting, and you are on the cusp of morning. You fall asleep.

For months I'd been worn out by conversations in which so much energy was spent just understanding the words. Now I was in Ireland, I could understand all the words (and the order!), but I was exhausted by the infinite number of things I could say. And I was also tired because while I could express anything I wanted, this didn't necessarily mean I would be understood. I could understand everything that was being said, and this didn't always make me happy. Being able to speak the same language as someone else doesn't mean you can communicate with them; I had been romanticizing English speakers. I found myself missing Gosha, and Ilir, with whom I couldn't speak, but for that reason, couldn't miscommunicate with. Ilir and I could say so little to each other: only that we wanted to take a walk, or a nap, or to eat, or that we were going to do the dishes tomorrow, or that we were tired, or that we felt good, and hoped the other person felt good too. We could only express simple things, and mostly, we expressed to each other our mutual good will. I think knowing Ilir made my heart bigger and my cheeks wider, just from smiling so much. And I didn't always smile because I wanted to, I smiled because there was nothing to say. "Tikanis, Maura?" (Big grin). "I'm freaking great, Ilir!" (Big grin). "Ti? Non capito."  "Puli kala, Ilir! Puli [big grin] Kala!"

Ilir is the kind of person who makes everybody at ease. He comes from a country full of bad luck (go Wikipedia the history of Albania). He's 23 and he looks 30. He walks for three hours and passes through a checkpoint just to go to work. But he smiles a lot. He pats everybody on the back. He laughs in spite of the fact that no one in Greece pronounces his name properly. (They insist on making it Greek, calling him Illias). We bonded over this because no one could say my name either, although I did get a few pretty great nicknames out of the deal (my favorite being Meow-ra). Ilir might not be perfect but he's got a big heart and that's all I'll ever know about him. Meanwhile, in Ireland, I could overhear rancid anti-Semitic jokes, and find myself in claustrophobic arguments about what women are and aren't capable of. In Ireland, as in Greece and Italy, culture is dominated by a sense of hospitality--in which countries is this not true?--but the emphasis is on alcohol instead of food, and this changes the course of everything.

There are people you meet when you travel that you will think of for the rest of your life. There's an exchange: in shared moments, you leave a little bit of yourself inside someone else, and vice versa. There are people who, if you lived in the same place, you would be friends with, and meet often, and some who you would even love and get the opportunity to fight with--but you will never know. I spent two days in Dublin, with some of these people, and one old and very good American friend. Then I took the bus north, to Belfast, where my journey began in early October.