the (tiny) heart of ireland

So despite the fact that we were out till 5 the night before, Dave had to drive to his hometown of Longford (located right dab smack in the middle of Ireland, hence the heart of Ireland) for his parent’s wedding anniversary the next day at around noon and he was taking me with him. Armed with some strong coffee we headed out on the 1 ½ drive where I experienced great Ireland weather in all her fickle glory.

One minute:

The next:


And then back to sunny/rain/sunny/rain at the drop of a hat.

When we finally arrive in Longford I realized that Dave is actually a country bumpkin. His town is seriously small. Below is a picture of the road we took to get to his house as proof:

I was a little nervous about having a family lunch with a family not my own but it turned out to be quite lovely where I ate way too much, engaged in the great national pastime of chatting (behind drinking that is), and got to witness uncle Dave handle his 1 year old niece more gently than he would a pint of Guinness filled to the brim.

After lunch Dave and I decided to walk off our huge lunch through his small town which basically consists of a street. In the middle of the tour it started raining (of course) so we went a bar/grocery store/funeral home (I’m not kidding – had it also been a hospital you could spend your entire life in the building and never have to leave) in the town.

The bar was quaint and filled with old men who you could tell spent nearly every Sunday of their lives sitting in the same stool drinking the same beer and watching football. There was a random young black guy sitting at the bar like he owned the place that I kept looking at cause he was so out of place but karmatically it was ok because everyone was staring at me in the same manner. One guy even shook my hand, welcomed me to Ireland and then asked me if I was Dave’s wife which should have been fine but in the context made me feel like he thought I came from a catalog of the mail order bride variety.

Alas I was still so full from lunch I couldn’t manage a drink there so we left and headed back to Dublin where I met up with a couple more people I knew from JET for another pretty heavy session. So heavy in fact that Dave’s cousin Myles promised to cook me a grand dinner of monkfish later in the week. Dave countered with promise of a proper fry up the next morning with the Irish staple black pudding.

These two men are some of the biggest drinkers I knew in Japan to which the only culinary skill I’ve seen from them is the opening of beer cans. I couldn’t wait to see how they were going to pull off these drunken promises.