Today, on the app I use to learn German, I had to practice the phrase “Are you jogging right now?” which if you think about it, is a pretty cruel thing to say to someone. (If I were ever to jog again I’d hope it’d be sorta obvious.) Steve overheard me and said “Why practice German at this point? Are you that worried about the language barrier?” because we leave for Vienna tomorrow. But it’s our last night in Dublin and if I’m honest I’ve not understood a whole lot of what’s been said since we got to Ireland and it’s meant to be the language I speak. Today, for example, it was raining so fiercely that we ducked into a donut shop to wait it out and after we started chatting with a local I realized I might’ve told her I'm coming to her house.
She said her house is beside the Guinness factory, which i understood to be both fifteen minutes away and also thirty minutes away. Foolishly I made an attempt to chat more and asked why there were only buses and taxis in Dublin and no regular cars driving around and she answered by telling me that in the unknowably distanced town where she lives, they use horses and buggies. After we heard that Steve and I just started nodding a lot. She said you couldn’t swim on the beach there as a kid because the water was all Guinness flavoured, and Steve tried to engage with “Oh, so it smells like Guinness near the factory?” but she just said no.
I could tell she was pretty disappointed with these idiot Canadians. She held up her phone to show us an instagram video of the Guinness factory and I honestly thought it might’ve been a Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory type situation but with a beer river instead of chocolate but it was just a video of a beach. Any beach. There was no factory at all in the video.
At this point we were clearly just having two parallel and completely unrelated conversations in the same language. Maybe she asked me if I was jogging right now. Maybe she even asked it in German, and in hindsight, I might’ve been willing to take up jogging in that moment if it would’ve clarified what the hell we were talking about. It was still raining and there was nowhere else dry to stand so this was our life now.
When it finally cleared up a little and we said goodbye, I checked to make sure I still had my wallet but it was only partly because I thought she might’ve been distracting us with her high falutin horse-and-buggy-talk while her accomplice stole our stuff. But no one tried to steal anything of course, she was just a friendly person and as usual, I am an idiot.
As we strolled back through thick puddles to our hotel, Steve saw on google maps that Dublin has a leprechaun museum. “What would that museum have in it?” he said, and it hit me.
Maybe that woman was a leprechaun. Like, the worlds tallest leprechaun? And she was trying to get us to go visit the museum and there are horses and buggies and Guinness swimming pools and frosted lucky charms and even a beach in there?
And I wouldn’t be surprised because Dublin is magical. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people spontaneously break into song or laughed and clinked drinks in the last two days. It’s very easy to smile here. Next time I’ll stay longer for sure. And maybe practice learning Irish in my app before I come.
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