Ah, beautiful Ireland. Very green, very quiet and very nice. In fact, I frequently and distinguishedely describe it as being a very nice country, this being it's prime characteristic. It appears, in approach by air, as a disorganised patch of various shades of green, arranged randomly and fenced off.
Upon landing in Dublin, notice the unfriendliness of the airport staff towards the arrived visitor, and their incompetence at reading Egyptian passports. From the point when you enter the island to the time when you leave the airport in the car, you are practically visiting cattle. We moo our way through and exeunt, rapidly, by the highway.
After that, as if in apology, the country improves markedly and rapidly, slowly turning from an industrial variety of smells to the smells of the village of the country, and finally the pastoral, and the sea. Still enchanted by the various qualities of the greens of the trees, the meadows, the grass, hedges, bushes and all the rest, one settles into a comfortable idea of this string of houses arranged along a neverending road. Sometimes they arrange in tiny settlements with no street names and a pub and a wool manufacturing museum. There are a string of these, every town boasting it's own special take on the matter of the spinning of wool and the weaving of it and the wearing of it at varying, prices which remain invariably high throughout the entire voyage. Not a country for the faint of credit, a toothbrush cost me up to 6 Euro! Best toothbrush I ever had, though.
Now, there is a great difference between our perception of the ideal pastoral scene, mountains, a beautiful sunset, the ocean softly roaring behind steep, craggy cliffs and a few horses, cows, or animals of your preference gallivanting through the background. You get those, in abundance. You also get what our ideal fantasy does not include: horseflies, moths, huge flying objects, the eire cong, the cowshit and the stench of fresh animal droppings.
Traveling, I could not help but notice the many and sometimes very touching graves from many time periods for people of all ages.
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