Whack For My Daddy-O

Sean has gone down home to Cork today which means I’m free – free! – for the next 24 hours to window shop and snap photos like a tourist. I can troll the Rimmel section at Boots, try on hats at Topshop, browse issues of Glamour UK at Waterstones, and pose next to Molly Malone all I like!! Yippee!! Sorry, Sean, but there are just some things you can’t do with a man around.

The drugstores sell Maybelline and L’Oreal, but not Cover Girl. There is a Boots brand of cosmetics.  Spray-on deodorants appear to be very popular for women as well as for men. I can’t afford any of the lovely clothes or shoes I’m seeing until I find a way to get paid in Euro and it is almost impossible to get a clear picture of Molly Malone since so many people pass by her on the street or plunk themselves at her feet. And all the poor girl wants to do is sell her cockles and mussles, alive alive-o. Give a working girl a chance! ‘Tis a busy life, sweet Molly Malone. Ah, that it is.

We moved in to our new apartment last night. After Sean left for the train station, I began the day by coordinating maintenance men as they fixed and re-fixed the toilet, then plastered up a hole in the wall.

“Welcome to Ireland,” said Sean last night as we discovered the non-flushing toilet and the hole. “Typical Irish standards. Cowboys, the lot of them!”

Regardless, it is a lovely apartment in a lovely brick Victorian Dublin house with white spiral staircases – flooded with light, cozy, and beautifully furnished. A lovely apartment in a lovely house on a lovely street.

Street signs are always written in both English and Irish.  Cars are always cute.

There are trees lining the street and gardens inside the wire fences.

After a day of trolling the college campus and searching for a Mac store – unless any of you know how to reset the password on my computer so I can install broadband – I’m in an internet cafe on Grafton Street. Grafton Street is lined with red bricks, forming a pedestrianized gallery of shops and restaurants stretching from the famous Molly Malone statue to the lush St. Stephen’s Green. When I first arrived in Dublin, the luxurious foliage in St. Stephen’s was all bright Irish green. It has become increasingly blanketed by yellow and red leaves as fall begins.

There is a busker playing Thin Lizzy’s “Whiskey in the Jar” down on the street as I type – a far more welcome companion to my money guzzling internet cafe hour than cigarette smoke and pervy teenage boys reading manga porn. It’s a song I’d never heard until a week ago, when Sean played it for me on his uncle’s stereo. He couldn’t believe I’d never heard it before and neither could I.

Hunched over, my shoulders hurt after a day of dragging my laptop in search of Dublin’s Mac store but I’m happy dreaming of dinner and Rimmel lipstick and the brick houses on the street where I live.