From A Couch In Dublin

It is grey outside, rain falls intermittently and the cars have their lights on. Dublin in Autumn. But the pubs are open, warm and cheery. Of course they are, that is Dublin at any time of the year.

I met a friend yesterday afternoon and we decided to go do something.
"We could go and look at a museum"
"Hmmm, they will be closed in half an hours time."
"Any sites of interest we could check out?"
"They are all grey."
"We could go to the pub?"
"I know a good one in the Temple Bar."
....
"I'll have a Guinness."
"Make mine a Heineken."

Reality Bights

I arrived in Dublin from Madrid, via a hit-and-run visit to my old friends Annamarieke and Marlene in Holland. I was woefully unprepared - though I had organised a couch to sleep on via the couchsurfing website. With a couple of hundred euros in my back pocket I had to organise work and accommodation.

It didn't take long to find work - bartender and waiter in a restaurant and bar in the Temple Bar. Accommodation has proven to be harder to come by. There are more people than beds in Dublin, and competition is fierce for every free room. Prices reflect this - one pays silly money to be crammed into a shoebox.

But, on a positive note, there is a lot of money in Dublin. Stacks and stacks of the stuff, and I plan to get me some of it. I am bartending for the meantime, but I intend to find some more lucrative employment that gives me free nights.

The Post That Wouldn't

I have tried to write a post in this blog over the last couple of months since the last post. Each one has been half-finished and discarded for various reasons. Now the adventures are far too many and funny stories to numerous for me to tell all - if I tried I would not finish and this would become another discarded post. So, here is a collection of stories and ancedotes that by no means cover all of my comings and goings over the last couple of months.

Fresh Off The Boat

My first night working in my new job was a steep learning curve. I started on the floor at six for the Sunday evening dinner crowd. Simple table service, and I was comfortable with most of my assigned tasks after half an hour. The bar was serving drinks to the people sat along it, and the floor staff took food and drink orders from the people on tables around the bar. There was a folksy guitar player bashing out tunes in the corner - easy stuff.

At nine food service stopped, the dinner crowd left and we started preparing for the night ahead. The two floors above the ground floor where the main bar is are devoted to a tacky 90s night-club setup, which are opened up at eleven. Sunday night is gay night, so around ten stacks of men and a trickle of women descended on the bar. The folksy music was replaced by nasty 80s and 90s pop that gay men apparently like (I don't think that we give them enough credit for taste in music). My job got a lot harder - try taking drinks orders for drinks you haven't heard of from men who speak with an effeminate Irish accent over the sound of very loud pop music. At least the tips were good! Whenever I made a mistake I would just wink and say "sorry, I am fresh off the boat".

The Little Things

On the whole I didn't enjoy Morocco - I would go so far as to say that it is a bit of a shithole. Of course plenty of people will say that I didn't find the real Morocco or the real Moroccans, - "because you know man, it is a state of mind and you need to get off the beaten path". Well, we were robbed, with Jamie losing his passport and me my camera. One gets harassed all the time, it was too hot, and I just didn't have much fun.

You can tell a lot about a people from the little things - such as how they stamp your passport. Look at each page in your passport, it is divided into 4 equally-sized spaces that are perfectly sized to fit one exit/entry stamp. When I was leaving Holland the woman who stamped my passport started on the first page and carefully flicked through it until she found a free space and neatly placed the stamp inside the allocated space. In Morroco they went to the back page and placed entry stamp right in the middle of the page at a funny angle, wasting a whole page. On exiting the same was done for the second to back page of my passport.

It might seem that I am making a mountain out of a mole-hill, but these little things reflect the attitude of many Moroccans in general. And this sort of thoughtlessness gets on my tits, big time. I will not mention Morocco again.

Private Village

Word got around that heavy rain was on its way to the beach for the weekend. People were moving their campsites to more sheltered locations in the forest, or making alternative plans. Gory, a crazy little Andalucian guy, who I could hardly understand despite my best attempts at learning Spanish, was heading to an abandoned village. I took up an invitation to check it out with him.

The village was at the end of a dirt track through the forest, next to a small hydroelectric powerplant. Originally the village had been for workers in the plant, which generated electricity from a waterfall. But now the powerplant was automated, and it had not been occupied for the last fifteen years.

Three days prior to our arrival it had been used as a set for a film, so everything had been cleaned and repaired. There was running water in the houses, plentiful firewood chopped and stacked up and fruit trees (figs, grapes and oranges) loaded with ripe fruit. The surrounding forest was full of old cork oaks and rhododendrons. We wandered around muttering "no falta nada", which means "not missing nothing" (in Spanish one uses double negatives all the time, which gives many English speakers guilty pleasure).

On our first night we sat at our fire, cooking food, trying to comprehend what the other was saying, and looking at the stars when we heard a car approaching. This was a problem, because the only road to the village was protected by a gate that needed a key, so we assumed that this must have been some sort of security patrol. We extinguished the fire, and spent the next half an hour sneaking around in the dark, avoiding the two guards who were inspecting each of the houses with lashlights.

We eventually decided that we should go and have a talk with the guards when it became apparent that they were going to be staying for a long time to keep an eye on the place. We approached them, and what followed was an amicable conversation between the guards and Gori in thick Andalucian Spanish that I couldn't understand a single word of.

One guard kept looking at me as though I was suspicious, due to my quietness and the silly "me-no-understand" smile that I had painted on my face. Then he asked Gori if I had a football team, and Gori replied that I supported Liverpool. All of a sudden he was pumping my hand and singing the praises of said football team. Obviously I wasn't such a bad chap after all.

We were given unofficial permission to camp in the village, and got regular visits from the guard over the next couple of days to chat and check up on us.

Till Next Time

Now I have to run and look for accomodation with a friend. More stuff will follow... sometime... I promise...