...Are Potatoes Roots?

I'm a dispossessed Irish princess. But of course, you already knew I was royalty. It's pretty obvious.

This is just one of the many, many incredible things I had confirmed when I finally, after nearly 21 years of waiting, made it back to the land of my mother's fathers. Ireland. And Jaysus, was it an eventful three weeks.

I left Rome with a pit in my stomach, which then evaporated when I got to Florence, but then returned when I went back to Rome and realized that it was the last time I'd be back there until February. It's odd how attached you get. Anywho, after taking a header when rushing to get the Terravision shuttle to Ciampino and subsequently making friends with some Belgians and speaking French and English the entire VERY STRESSFUL bus ride when I didn't think I would make it to the plane on time, only to get there and find out that everything was being delayed because the Europeans are pansies and won't fly in little snow flurries. So, I didn't get to Dublin until about 2 in the morning. If you're ever in an Italian airport and they're threatening not to let you fly out until the next morning if you don't get off the ground by midnight and it's quarter 'til, make sure you're on a plane full of Irishmen. They're not shy about yelling if it gets the doors closed faster. What an adventure.

Got to Dublin, saw this guy walking along beside the taxi as it pulled up to the gates of Trinity College... pretty standard-looking Irish guy with a tam on, hands in his pockets... it was Ryan. The first thing that I noticed when I got to Ireland (besides the obvious point that people were once again speaking a language I understand, with much better accents than you generally find in Michigan or Montana, however) was that I looked like everyone else. This was an incredibly disorienting thing, after four months among the swarthy, slender Italians... I don't look like them, as much as I tried to pose. But I got to Dublin, and there are pasty, blue-eyed, dark-haired, big-boned people all over the place. It's no wonder I thought Ryan was just a random Irish creeper as he walked along next to the cab... we do look incredibly Irish.

It was so awesome to see Corbin and Ryan. It honestly didn't seem weird at all that we should be hanging out in Dublin. I know I've said it before, but that's been one of the strangest things about this whole Euro-adventure: I really do feel like it's not that big a deal that I'm here. Well, I oscilate between being abnormally, hyper-aware of where I am and the implications thereof, and living life with the nonchalance of one who really wants the whole world to be her oyster. The point is: it felt very natural to be there with them.

Maribeth, Scott and Kealey arrived the next day, and we all set out to explore Dublin. I cannot stress enough how beneficial it is to see a city for the first time with someone who really knows it. It may sound weird to say, but sometimes I think it's better not to do it the first time with a local/native, but someone who has recently moved there. Corbin knew all the cool local spots (MacTurcal's Pub, for instance, and a magical substance called Purple Rain...), but he was also aware of the fact that, with only a few days in a place, you kinda do need to do the tourist stuff. That's why it's tourist stuff, right? Because you're only there for a little while. My point is: Corbin was still excited enough about showing us around this city he's been discovering that he was full of information, but he knew enough about it to weed out the unnecessary, too. I feel like I was effective at doing this when people visited me in Rome, and seeing Corb in action makes me think it must be a study-abroad thing.

Dublin is so different from other cities in Europe. It feels a lot smaller than most, for one, and that's probably because it is. But it's also a completely different fusion of the old and the new than you find in cities like Rome, where the old is omni-present and totally its own thing, or like Paris, where the old has been given a spit-and-polish and made to look classy and completely up-to-date. Dublin wants you to know that it's been around for awhile, but not in an in-your-face kind of way. It's more matter-of-fact about its history, and focuses particularly on its Irish-ness. The most notable element of this is the bi-lingual signs. I don't speak a lick of Irish, but it was still fun to see the two different languages on basically every sign. It's an encouraging sign that, even in our increasingly globalized world, we're not forgetting the importance of preserving our heritages.

It was wonderful to spend Christmas with the Johnsons. I was sad that my family couldn't be there, but honestly, Maribeth and Scott have been like other parents to me since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and I don't remember a time when Ryan and Corbin and Kealey weren't like other siblings that I fought with less. So, if I couldn't have my own parents and siblings come for Christmas, I couldn't have asked for anything closer. We spent Christmas in a little cottage south of Dublin, near a town called Wicklow. It was fun, once we got it warmed up, and we went hiking on Christmas Day in the Wicklow Mountains. While we were up there, it started snowing. Now, for a girl who has spent pretty respectable portions of her life wishing she lived in Narnia and went to school at Hogwarts, the aesthetic was nothing short of perfect. The consequence that we were all soaking wet at the end of the day (eastern Irish snow has little staying power, and tends to turn into slush mid-air. The west is a different story). Corbin knew a lot about the area, and we got to visit an old monastic city that has been preserved. It was so cool to see this reminder of all the things that have gone on on this tiny little island.

The Irish are big on heritage. That's awesome, because post-colonialist diaspora is alive and well all over the world, and I, though from an extremely well-assimilated family who are American, have had my moments of really wanting a solid grounding in where we come from, more than just the hazy idea of Ireland.

Well, all the grounding I could ever want was brought home with all the force of a frying pan full of rashers to the face on basically one day. My cousin, Sean, who is the oldest of our generation of the Molloy family, has some pretty incredible contacts that we got to take full advantage of while in Ireland. Remember what I said about that princess thing? Well, there's a castle in Birr, which is in County Offaly, which is basically in the middle of Ireland. This is O'Molloy Country. It's also, problematically, O'Carroll country. Apparently the two clans were cousins, and, being family, decided that there was no better way to spend the time before the invention of Scrabble than to feud. And not the kind with Al from Home Improvement, either. Apparently, this is the kind that gets so destructive that the English can just get right on in there and steal your castle. The thieves (not really... it's just selective memory. They're wonderful people) in question are the Earls of Roth, and yes, that's Earl, like royalty. Not Earl like My Name Is.

We (including by this point Sean, who flew in from China, and Teague, my barely younger brother) stayed a night in the Bothy, which is apparently Irish for enchanted cottage in the middle of a ridiculous woodland park. The next morning we walked up to the castle through this beautiful park, and all the while I oscilated between noting good, defensive points for when we put the castle under seige and drive the intruders of 400 years out and composing my letter to Oprah, appealing to her love of helping homeless people get their homes back... or something to that effect. Dear Oprah, I'm an upper-middle-class, liberal-arts-educated white girl with an extremely supportive family and a Golden Retriever. Can you help me get my family's castle back from the people who have owned it for almost four centuries? ... yeah. That'd go over really well.

And the thing is, we didn't end up needing to storm the castle by force. The Earl and Countess (!) let us right in, gave us tea and the grand tour of their home. This included (I shit you not) three different secret passageways, a portrait of Anne Boleyn (they're related. Distantly, but still...) and a letter from a guy named Phelam Molloy (that's an ancestor, folks) dated 1645 or some ridiculous date. It all didn't seem quite real, even while the Earl was leading us around and showing us, white-gloved, this incredibly old parchment with my middle name written on it in this incredible old calligraphy. They were really the most wonderful people, and I can't begin to express how much that experience meant to me.

But Sean hadn't finished digging up the family tree yet. Not even close. We next made our way to Tullamore, which is the home, for you whiskey fans, of something called Tullamore Dew. I, who had never tried whiskey before this day, was fairly ambivalent about the whole thing. But I have to say that it was cool that a Molloy was the original owner of the distillery, and that I now know how both Guinness and Tullamore Dew whiskey are made. It makes me feel cool. What did not make me feel cool about this visit was the tasting at the end. Though the woman who gave us the tour was originally from Michigan and her neice is the student body president at Teague's school (the little dolls from that horrible Disney attraction seem to be following me around, singing their horrible song at every opportunity), the drinks she gave us made me gag. That's because all of them were whiskey, and despite my hard-bitten, lusty Irish lass exterior, I am a total weenie when it comes to whiskey. I'm glad that I tried it that day, and I'm fairly certain it was a once in a lifetime thing in more than one way.

We continued on, stopping a little while later at the house of, get ready for this, our clan cheiftainess. Yeah. We have a cheiftainess. Her name is Frances. And she gave us bacon sandwiches and tea, forever endearing her to me. It was incredibly surreal to be sitting here in this woman's, who I don't know from Eve, house, and her telling me that I look like a Molloy. Like, there's just nothing cooler than that. She announced to her daughter, when she called, that there were eight of her cousins from Montana there at the house. Hahaha... I love how far-reaching family can go, when you have the right mindset. Frances's mindset certainly made me want to get to know her better, and hopefully return the hospitality she showed us (bacon!) when she can make it to Montana.

This all happened in one day. You must remember that. We basically went on a whirlwind tour of our family origins in the space of about 15 hours. If I had any diasporic inclinations before this trip, they've certainly been quieted now. That night was the beginning of what the Irish call "The Big Freeze", which those of you who have ever experienced a Montana or a Michigan winter will find very funny. There was quite a bit of snow on the mountain passes, and I use both the words "mountain" and "snow" ironically, but the irony was lost on the tires of both our vehicles. Apparently gravity and what the Irish call snow tires do not mix, so we took the long way round (after about an hour of fruitless pushing... thanks, Volvo) to Doolin, where our home was to be for basically the rest of the stay.

Since this post is getting extremely long, I will stop there for now. Stay tuned for tales of Doolin, Galway, Lisdoonvarna, Kilkenny, more Dublin and Belfast, as well as later stories about London, Stockholm, Oslo and the other crazy places I'm currently exploring!