We parked in a quiet area near the downtown and disembarked from the coach, passing through city walls constructed by the Romans 70 AD or thereabouts into the older part of the city.
We spent some time walking along the walls, and I was impressed by how well they have weathered all of these centuries. I know some walls in Highlands that have not lasted 50 years!
We walked past Chester Cathedral , which dates from 1093 but was likely used as a worship site by the Romans at the time the walls were constructed.
Chester was just waking up, and we enjoyed walking down one cobbled street after another. The city is known for its unique two-story shops called "The Rows," which we have not seen elsewhere in England.
Steve pointed out this shop and its historic sign. The house and shop were protected from the Plague in the 14th century, and its owner asserted it was saved by God's Providence.
We bought muffins and tea at a little shop and sat outside listening to a young woman with a beautiful voice singing a song I had never heard before.
We had been told to arrive at the square in the center of Town at noon to hear the Town Crier of Chester, one Dave Mitchell; Chester is the only place in Britain to have retained the tradition of regular midday proclamations at a fixed place and time, and Dave fulfilled his role with good humor and a booming voice. I drew his attention because of my height (or was it something I said as well?), and I may have narrowly avoided being locked in the pillory (as opposed to the stocks) until sunset.
We crossed the border into Wales (our third country!) and noticed that the signs were written in both English and Welsh. The Welsh language is alive and well in Wales and is actually taught in schools. Its old Celtic language exists, and indeed the country itself still exists, because of its mountainous terrain, which made it easy to defend against invaders.
We drove past more wind turbines than we had seen before, and Steve told us that they now power one-third of the country. I noticed, too, as I have before in Britain, that all of the cars are small and energy-efficient - there are no SUVs, and pickup trucks over here are rare. That is because gasoline - "petrol" - is £1.30. - per litre! That comes out to nearly $5.00 per gallon. We also passed through the town in Wales made famous by having the longest name of any in the world:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
Roughly translated, that means "St Mary's Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel near a Rapid Whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the Red Cave."
Then we arrived at Holyhead port and boarded the huge ferry Ulysses, once the largest car/passenger ferry in the world.
I thought of Tennyson's poem Ulysses:
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
But I realized that I had the wrong Ulysses in mind when I spotted this large wooden carving of James Joyce, from a famous picture of the author, on the wall behind our seats.
Nobody seemed to know who this man was (I pointed him out to some Brits seated next to us), but he was an inspiration to me when I was a college student devouring A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. How ironic (and I think he might have found it hilarious) to discover as I wandered through this huge ferry "Leopold Bloom's Lounge," a bar on, if I remember, the seventh level.
Bloom was the famous anti-hero, a Ulysses from his own time, who famously sailed the streets of Dublin in Ulysses, perhaps the most important novel of the 20th century. The novel took place in a single day - June 16, 1904 - a date still celebrated in libraries and literary circles in various cities around the world by readings from the book, especially that famous single-sentence soliloquy by Molly Bloom, the remarkable climactic conclusion to the book:
. . .and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of
the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian
girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the
Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked
him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to
say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and
drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
All of this was a long time ago, I thought, a chapter from my academic past, but our fellow-passengers crossing the Irish Sea with us seemed oblivious to what the man whose face was carved in wood behind us had written more than a hundred years ago. We talked to two men from the north of England about Trump and Boris, who shared some chocolate with us - "Have some good chocolate!" they said - and then a nice couple from Sheffield on a tour of their own who would be celebrating their 40th next year. I browsed in the bookstore for awhile, where there were plenty of best-sellers but, alas, no Joyce.
I went on the upper deck and watched England disappear behind us, and in a little under four hours the rocky coastline of Ireland appeared before us.
We arrived to find ourselves in a country of Euros and Kilometers, instead of Pounds and Miles, and we began to learn a little about the complicated history of this country that has produced so many great writers, not just Joyce but W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney - what can account for so many literary greats originating from such a small country?
Our hotel was on a quiet, tree-lined street in the Leapordstown district of Dublin, originally "Town of the Lepers," a place where in the middle ages people with leprosy were kept outside
the city to avoid infection. We weary travelers were grateful for comfortable accommodations for the night.
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