I’ve had trouble knowing where to begin talking about the two Irish cities we’ve visited. The last time I was in Ireland was in the early 80’s, and it’s good to see that their economy now isn’t what it was then, when a passing Irishman noted me looking at a long line outside of a building and said, “That’s the dole queue [the line to the welfare office]. Darlin’, that’s where you’ll find half of Ireland.”

Dublin
I don’t know what the statistics are now, but Dublin had all the hustle-bustle you’d expect to find in any big city. And for Anglophiles like Greg and I, just being there makes you feel like you’ve come home somehow. I don’t know how it is for others, but when I see cobblestone streets and highly-ornamented old brick and stone buildings, I’m already thinking that this is the way life should always be. I eventually stopped taking pictures of all the beautiful architecture, because it was everywhere. And the tour guides throw dates of origin around so much — 17th century, 18th, 13th, 16th — that those eventually become meaningless as well.

On this day, we had only one errand to attend to. Since it was Greg’s 40th birthday, we had told him that he could take any direction he wanted to in Dublin. But when it came right down to it, we steered him into one of the lovely overgrown parks in town for a picnic lunch. We were standing idly around when bagpipe music started to play from one of the copse of trees. There isn’t anything Greg likes better than bagpipe music, and so he stayed rooted when the piper in full regalia appeared out of the trees and slowly made his way across the lawn to us, taking little steps that seemed to have some meaning. He stopped right in front of Greg, stopped playing and said,”Happy birthday.” Yep, we had hired him for the occasion, and the expression on Greg’s face was, as Visa says, priceless. But the piper’s next remark probably meant almost as much: “I’ve got a message from your people — Come home!” Greg is adopted and so doesn’t know his heritage, but he does look quite British, and certainly right then, I don’t think he or I could’ve thought of anything nicer to be.

Belfast
In many ways, Belfast looks like Dublin, as you’d expect. When I visited the last time, we didn’t attempt to go to the north of Ireland, because “the troubles” — as the Irish quaintly refer to the long and bloody battles over Irish independence — were in full swing. I don’t know quite what I expected to see when we came here, but at first blush the city gave no indications of those terrible days of daily bombings and terrorism. On closer examination, you realize it’s everywhere.

To be sure, there are still many beautiful cathedrals and buildings, but the tour-guide on our open-air bus told us often that this or that building had just finished being repaired, or that funds had just been collected to rebuild a neighborhood, or pointed out an incongrous billboard and mentioned that it was there to hide the space created by the building that had been blown up. And going down one street, he told us that the Protestant neighborhood was on one side and the Catholic neighborhood was on the other. Eventually, we came to a place where there’s a wide stone wall that separates one side from the other. They’re called “walls of peace”, and the door that leads between them is locked at 6pm each night. Barbed wire is everywhere, and our guide pointed out that the top two floors of an innocuous-looking apartment building are completely taken up with surveillance and security equipment. (”Ye might’s well tek a picture of them, because they’re takin’ pictures o’ us.”)

What else can you expect from an area where the mural on one building depicts guerrillas with machine guns as heroes, and the mural one block later is a loving tribute to the Queen Mother of England. It’s amazing a truce was ever reached, though it has a bit of the feel of a truce borne not out of a solution as just the fatigue felt by everyone for a fight that never seemed to end. So I don’t know if they solved anything in their truce, but at least life is allowed to go on, and that alone seems to delight them. Or at least I assume so, from the great friendliness that was shown to us as tourists.

Ours was the first cruise ship of the season, and I expected a little bit of the disdain that all natives reserve for tourists. But it was just the opposite — the people were so unfailingly friendly that it became a little embarrassing. When we’d ask directions, people were so eager to help that they almost took us where we were going, when we were fiddling with the money in confusion, a businessman stopped and gave us the complete rundown. And when we stopped into Kelly’s, a 300-year-old pub, we became the special friends of Paddy, who looked like he might’ve been sitting by that same stool by the fireplace for all 300 years. He had such a wonderful brogue (”Me nem’s Puddy”) and gift of blarney (”Jist so ye’s know, I’m a talkaholic, not an alcoholic.”) that he might’ve been cast for the part.

It never occurred to me that anyone would look on tourists as halcyons of better days returning, but then I’ve never visited a town where mere survival was a great joy.