Friday, December 23, 2005
Pub Pounds
[This short story is from Life as Festival by Jay Taber. Happy holidays from all of us at Skookum.]
Except for the Balkans, summer 1999 was relatively peaceful in Western Europe. Even our journey through Basque country was tranquil, punctuated by fine mountain/marine cuisine, petanque, and glace cones at the Biscay seashore. ETA graffiti could still be found, but we nevertheless felt safe wearing our “Pais Basque” berets.
There were, we were told by our residencial hotel host in Florence, unsavory elements—bandits, I think he called them—on the southeastern coast near Brindisi, but the worst we experienced in Italy were poorly-trained pickpockets near the train station.
By the time we reached the Republic of Ireland four months later, we’d only been asked for passports once (entering Switzerland by train from Milan), and had our bags searched once (boarding the Irish ferry in Wales). To my knowledge, there were no hijackings or bombings in Europe that summer, either.
Yet, we were somewhat reluctant to travel to Ulster, despite my desire to see the land where my ancestors once lived, and with forecasts of weeks of rain, we opted for the sunny south and west of Counties Cork, Kerry, and Clare. Ferrying and strolling around the archipelago between Cape Clear and the Mizen Head Peninsula, we were reassured we’d made the right choice. The hostels, pubs, weather and sea were absolutely glorious. The rocky isles of our friends, clan Keohane (kyo-hahn), near Schull (skull), even boasted some villages where Gaelic was still the first language.
With a fine harbor, lovely parks and view, and easy walk-on ferry rides, we adopted Schull as a base of operations for exploring, pubbing, and catching up on correspondence. Within a short walk along the coastal bluff from our hostel to town, we found a very nice place for tea and scones, a used bookstore, an astronomy center, two fine markets, several pub/cafes, and cheap internet-by-the-hour in the back room of the small one-pump petrol garage.
The Euro currency—promoted from traveling walk-in vans with music and free prizes—wasn’t yet in circulation, but everyone was talking about it, and the way the EU eventually got around local identity issues was to print different pictures on currency for each country. But while we were there, we had to exchange currency at each border, which—other than making calculations--was actually kind of fun. The tough part was making sure we stocked up with adequate cash to get us through bank holidays and unusable credit cards, as well as figuring if something was a good deal or not. Mostly we did all right. In France, you could also get money at the Post Office.
The beautiful stone bank in Schull is on the bend of the main street next to a very popular pub where we ate regularly, and across from our favorite tea house bakery. The woodwork inside is exquisite. I was, in fact, admiring the fine carpentry (being a former finish carpenter myself) one morning while Marianne ordered our breakfast across the street.
As I waited for my card to be authenticated over the painstakingly slow phone line, I also observed some nice glass work behind the polished wood counter leading to the vault. Then, two security guards joking with the tellers emerged from the vault with bags and calmly walked out the front entrance. My transfer was shortly approved, and our pub pounds for the weekend were counted out in front of me.
Exiting the bank, though, I was startled to find camouflage-uniformed army commandoes with machine guns and radios guarding both sides of the intersection with their jeeps parked in a way as to block both side streets leading out of town into the countryside. As I carefully walked across to the bakery, I could see Marianne looking anxiously out the window from our table, obviously wondering what was going on.
When the waitress brought our Irish side bacon, tea and scones, we asked, “Is this normal?”
“Oh,” she replied, “there were some bank robberies by the IRA in the past, but now it’s mostly gangsters from Limerick. The army started providing escorts in remote areas to cut down on trouble. It’s nothing to worry about.”
We were, of course, relieved to hear it, but for a few minutes that morning, all Marianne could think of was that I’d been taken hostage by bank robbers while soldiers surrounded the building ready for a shootout. It certainly livened up our day.
Except for the Balkans, summer 1999 was relatively peaceful in Western Europe. Even our journey through Basque country was tranquil, punctuated by fine mountain/marine cuisine, petanque, and glace cones at the Biscay seashore. ETA graffiti could still be found, but we nevertheless felt safe wearing our “Pais Basque” berets.
There were, we were told by our residencial hotel host in Florence, unsavory elements—bandits, I think he called them—on the southeastern coast near Brindisi, but the worst we experienced in Italy were poorly-trained pickpockets near the train station.
By the time we reached the Republic of Ireland four months later, we’d only been asked for passports once (entering Switzerland by train from Milan), and had our bags searched once (boarding the Irish ferry in Wales). To my knowledge, there were no hijackings or bombings in Europe that summer, either.
Yet, we were somewhat reluctant to travel to Ulster, despite my desire to see the land where my ancestors once lived, and with forecasts of weeks of rain, we opted for the sunny south and west of Counties Cork, Kerry, and Clare. Ferrying and strolling around the archipelago between Cape Clear and the Mizen Head Peninsula, we were reassured we’d made the right choice. The hostels, pubs, weather and sea were absolutely glorious. The rocky isles of our friends, clan Keohane (kyo-hahn), near Schull (skull), even boasted some villages where Gaelic was still the first language.
With a fine harbor, lovely parks and view, and easy walk-on ferry rides, we adopted Schull as a base of operations for exploring, pubbing, and catching up on correspondence. Within a short walk along the coastal bluff from our hostel to town, we found a very nice place for tea and scones, a used bookstore, an astronomy center, two fine markets, several pub/cafes, and cheap internet-by-the-hour in the back room of the small one-pump petrol garage.
The Euro currency—promoted from traveling walk-in vans with music and free prizes—wasn’t yet in circulation, but everyone was talking about it, and the way the EU eventually got around local identity issues was to print different pictures on currency for each country. But while we were there, we had to exchange currency at each border, which—other than making calculations--was actually kind of fun. The tough part was making sure we stocked up with adequate cash to get us through bank holidays and unusable credit cards, as well as figuring if something was a good deal or not. Mostly we did all right. In France, you could also get money at the Post Office.
The beautiful stone bank in Schull is on the bend of the main street next to a very popular pub where we ate regularly, and across from our favorite tea house bakery. The woodwork inside is exquisite. I was, in fact, admiring the fine carpentry (being a former finish carpenter myself) one morning while Marianne ordered our breakfast across the street.
As I waited for my card to be authenticated over the painstakingly slow phone line, I also observed some nice glass work behind the polished wood counter leading to the vault. Then, two security guards joking with the tellers emerged from the vault with bags and calmly walked out the front entrance. My transfer was shortly approved, and our pub pounds for the weekend were counted out in front of me.
Exiting the bank, though, I was startled to find camouflage-uniformed army commandoes with machine guns and radios guarding both sides of the intersection with their jeeps parked in a way as to block both side streets leading out of town into the countryside. As I carefully walked across to the bakery, I could see Marianne looking anxiously out the window from our table, obviously wondering what was going on.
When the waitress brought our Irish side bacon, tea and scones, we asked, “Is this normal?”
“Oh,” she replied, “there were some bank robberies by the IRA in the past, but now it’s mostly gangsters from Limerick. The army started providing escorts in remote areas to cut down on trouble. It’s nothing to worry about.”
We were, of course, relieved to hear it, but for a few minutes that morning, all Marianne could think of was that I’d been taken hostage by bank robbers while soldiers surrounded the building ready for a shootout. It certainly livened up our day.
