It's been a rough couple of days. First Peyton got sick, then Tim, and at last I'm sick too. But it's hard to take much time off when there's so much to do and see. On the advice of Tim and Joyce, the amazing woman who runs the show at NCI, I wandered over to the chemist (pharmacy) after I finished teaching yesterday. So, a few differences between the U.S. and Ireland re: drugs.
- You cannot get any drugs in the grocery store outside of paracetamol, which is like Tylenol.
- If you want drugs you'll have to go to a chemist.
- You are not allowed to get the drugs yourself, you'll need to get a consultation from the pharmacist.
At first, this seemed like overkill for what most Americans consider over-the-counter medicine. Upon further reflection, I'm not an expert in medicine, I often struggle to read the literal fine print on the bottles and boxes, I have no idea how any drug interacts with any other drug, especially when I'm sick and addled. So, I had a very pleasant chat with a chemist who kindly asked me about my symptoms and then made several recommendations. I gotta be honest, this felt very humane and kind of special. If I want to talk to a pharmacist in the U.S. I often have to wait for a while and then it's very rushed because they're also fulfilling prescriptions. As far as I could tell, this guy's whole job was to just talk to people. It was incredible. As I was packing up my drugs (Sudafed with some ibuprofen), I mentioned that my friends and I had been calling our cold the Irish Flu. Without missing a beat he says, "That's what my friends and I call the morning after a night of drinking." I never get tired of Irish banter.
Day 8
My cousin Clara has come for a visit! It's her first trip overseas and it's been wonderful showing her around. She got the redeye flight in and couldn't check into her place until 2:00, so she slept at our place for a while. After I got home from teaching (first day of Angela's Ashes!) and Clara got up we headed over to Mellon's, our neighborhood bodega, to get her a bite to eat and to get Peyton a 99 flake.
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| Clara--jet lagged, but ready to go! |
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| Peyton with his beloved. |
After fueling up, we went to one of my favorite museums in Dublin, the
Natural History Museum. People sometimes refer to this museum as the dead zoo--it has the most unbelievable collection of taxidermy I've ever seen. If you watched the show
Penny Dreadful a few years back, there's some fabulous scenes that were filmed here. Unfortunately, the upstairs in currently under renovation and is likely to be closed for the next few years, but the downstairs is still open and I had a chance to say hello to some old friends. I'm weirdly obsessed with a gull and an otter--my friend, Lindsay, visited over spring break and sent me the same picture of this otter's face. It's priceless.
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| Immature Little Gull--also Peyton's nickname. |
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Best otter face ever.
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Once we finished looking at
all the things in the museum, we decided it was time for Clara to have her first pint. So, we walked to
The Stag's Head where she had a
Bulmers and declared it delicious. The Stag's Head was my favorite pub near where we taught the last time we were in Dublin and it was great to see that the old girl hasn't changed. At this point, the Irish Flu was catching up with me, so we took the bus back to our place and put Clara in a cab to go to her home for the next week.
Oh, I forgot to mention that to save time we took a cab to the museum. We've had some honest-to-God real characters for cab drivers, especially the Irish ones. On our way home from the rural pub tour I thought I was in the car with Baby Driver (the guy never stopped at a light). Today, we were in a cab with a guy who happily told us about how much his wife likes to drinks--"She's got two hollow legs!" "It's two a.m. and she's hollering, 'drink, more drink!'" He was relieved that she was in vacation in Spain for the week. I had the image of a woman version of Father Jack from Father Ted.
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| "Drink, girls, arse, feck!" |
Day 9
The Irish Flu persists--I had a terrible night's sleep, but somehow summoned the energy to get up and walk the mile to and from class. After a visit with the chemist, things began to look up. The power of Sudafed is not to be underestimated. We wrapped up the second half of Angela's Ashes and I let the students leave a bit early. There was much rejoicing and an immediate stampede to the coffee and sandwich shops for fortification before Tim's class. Once I got home, we met up with Clara and took a walk to the museum in our neighborhood, The National Print Museum. This was our first time visiting and I have to say that it FAR exceeded our expectations. In fact, I was wondering this morning why my life didn't land me in a job where I could talk about the history of print all day. The museum is rather small, but all of the presses still work. The fella who gave us a brief tour was everything I could have wanted in a tour guide in this sort of museum: thin, loud and raspy laugh (on the inhale), a thick accent, a nervous but enthusiastic way about him, and eyes swimming behind the thickest glasses I've ever seen. He looked like a character out of Joyce. I was overjoyed. In addition to being a visual and auditory feast, he was also a joy to listen to as he described the minutiae of print making. We also learned the history of several cliches that have their origin in printing
- Mind your Ps and Qs. When looking at a tray of lowercase letters, it's very difficult to tell the difference between ps and qs because all the text is in reverse. The bs and ds are difficult too. As someone who has mild dyslexia, the whole thing had me in a sweat. Apparently, to graduate from an apprentice to a printer, apprentices had to be able to create lines of text with blindfolds on. So, essentially, they had to memorize the location of all the tiles and then know them by touch. Remarkable.
- Coining a Phrase. Our guide told us that the phrase comes from the process of quoining (wedging) phrases (or lines of text) in a printing press.
- Leaving an impression. This one seems obvious (but I had no idea)--to leave a good impression is to ink your tiles sufficiently so that when you roll your paper over the top you get a "good impression" from the tiles.
For anyone who knows us, you can imagine how utterly thrilled we were by this whole nerdy experience.
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| Peyton inking his tiles. |
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| Our tour guide giving us a lecture on how to "leave a good impression." If you look closely you can see what I mean about his glasses. |
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| Peyton running the press. |
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| Running the press with supervision. |
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| All of the printing presses are still in good working order and used by experts for special runs of a variety of texts. |
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| An example of one of the posters in the print shop. |
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| Upstairs there was a great exhibit on labels! |
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| Vintage Aer Lingus labels. |
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| Wind pills. |
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| A view of the display from the second floor. |
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Having tea in the cafe attached to the rear of the museum.
After the museum, we met up with Tim for a whiskey tasting at Pearse Lyons. For those of you who know us, you know that we're no novices to a whiskey tour and love doing tastings. The tour was brief, but we got a great overview about the history of company (which has its origins in KY and not far from where we used to live in Lexington) and how it ended up in this particular church in the Liberties. Before we tasted their range of whiskeys, our guide gave us a primer on the distillation process, including defining the "devil's cut" and the "angel's share." The way he described these terms seemed really different from the way I'd heard them described in the past, so I asked a question for clarification, which really flustered our guide. This is not the first time I've accidentally asked a question that has created unhappiness on a tour. I swear I'm not a know-it-all--I just like to know about dumb stuff like char levels and I like to make sure that I'm using the correct terms and concepts. Well, the debate over "devil's cut" and "angel's share" devolved into me saying that I didn't need to be right and I was happy just to drink whiskey, but the tour guide wouldn't let it go. After a bit more chatting, I think we just misunderstood each other and even though Pearse Lyons is using used bourbon barrels (from Town Branch Bourbon), I don't think our guide knew much about bourbon production. In any case, I felt like an asshole, which is nothing new. |
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Interior of the guest center at the distillery.
Tonight's goal is to get a decent night's sleep so I can fight off this cold and be ready for tomorrow's adventures! |
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