If, on the day that I graduated from college in 1983, a djinn with certain knowledge of the future had appeared to me and said, Forty years to the day from today — May 13, 2023 — you will board a jet airliner and fly to Ireland, my response might well have been, Really? Cool. Where else do I go over the next 40 years?
But he would be gone in a flash, as that is how djinn seem to disappear, before he imparted any other information about the one score and ten other countries between those two days. Just as well that djinn are not known to appear to Americans of our time. Not me, anyway. I just had to let the four decades unfold.
This not-very-important coincidence of May 13ths exactly 40 years apart occurred to me a few days before Yuriko and I took an Aer Lingus flight up and over eastern Canada, just south of Greenland’s southern tip, and on to Dublin the next morning, May 14.
Ireland was our place to recover from jet lag, but that didn’t keep us from treading (and tram riding) the streets of the Irish capital until May 17, and looking at as much as possible.
The evening of the 17th we flew to Barcelona for the second and longer leg of the trip. Except for an excursion to Montserrat for a day, we stayed in that city of 21st-century renown, a place for sensation overload of all kinds and highly recommended by friends with passports and travel inclinations. We returned home yesterday via a flight back to Dublin for a layover, and then another to Chicago.
Wake up in Catalonia, go to bed in Illinois. Too ordinary to be regarded as the marvel it is.
New cities for us; new countries. We liked Dublin. We really liked Barcelona. I expected it would break that way.
This month’s jaunt was our first visit to Europe since before smartphones, the wide use of the Internet or email or texting or QR codes, Google maps, or the euro. I’m not sure whether all that has made overseas travels any easier.
Regardless, we kept up an active pace of quick-step tourism, something like our passage through Arizona and Utah last year, except that walking and driving through wide open spaces seeking natural splendor became walking and public transit through the urban corridors of central Dublin and Barcelona, seeking human-made marvels.
We found some. Centuries-old churches, ornate palaces, imaginative modern buildings, sites of historic violence, plazas thick with people at play or merely rest, depositories of famed art and books, vistas of the ocean and among mountains, and Euro-designed urban greenspaces a bit different from what we’re used to in North America.
We passed over brick, cobblestone and asphalt, down sidewalks narrow and wide, up and down stairs, in the footsteps of centuries of people, mostly unknown and unknowable except in the broadest strokes, who walked these exact spots in times hard or prosperous. The early 21st century, as it happens, is a prosperous era in both cities. Shops are many and various and full and busy.
Concentrated prosperity. For an American used to dispersed prosperity, this is a novelty.
Temps in Dublin tended to be lower than in Barcelona, though only a few degrees. By mid-day most days, the sun shined and it was 20 degrees C. or a few more, as they reckon things. The spring air had the happy effect of encouraging bare midriffs among young Irish and Catalan women both. We were rained on only twice, briefly, and only on one day in Spain did we feel anything like high heat.
The more a meal featured some regional product, say milk and cheese in Ireland or seafood in Spain, the better it tended to be. The restaurants we visited were usually linear rooms with expansive menus, or simple takeout joints, or we sought food at convenience stores or actual grocery stores. I confirmed that, if I were a drinking man, Guinness wouldn’t be for me, but sangria would be.
We passed through endless seas of faces along the sidewalks and jammed in the subway cars and trams, maybe not quite as various as in New York or Chicago, but of great variety all the same. We encountered signs in English that were readable but not always quite comprehensible. Others in Catalan were either easy, or matters of guesswork. We noticed the way ordinary bits of a city’s infrastructure look just a little different in another country, or sometimes a lot different. We saw graffiti on the walls and graffiti on skin.
What is graffiti in Spanish? I had to look that up. El graffiti, turns out. Despite the presence of surveillance cameras in countless street-facing nooks, graffiti artists are not deterred in Barcelona, or Dublin either, from casting their paint on walls, doors, railyard surfaces and occasionally (the wankers) useful signs. Still, you have to be amused sometimes.
Do they know Andy Capp in Barcelona? Someone does.