When I tell people that I am studying in Dublin for the semester the common response has been, “Have you ever met a mean Irish person?” This, I have learned, is a rhetorical question. No, I have not.
The Irish poet, W.B. Yeats once said “There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t met yet.”
This week I experienced the perfect example of the pure friendliness that Irish people typically have.
Last Friday, my parents and I went on a road trip to central Ireland to find the house my grandmother grew up in. We knew the town and the county and nothing else. When we arrived in this small town (2 pubs, a car garage, a barber shop and a post office was the center), my dad went into one of the pubs and asked these men at the bar if they knew my mom’s family. Within minutes a handwritten phone book was pulled out and we had the phone number of the “bog oak man” who happened to have the same last name as my grandmother. We call this man who knows my mom’s cousins and directs us to the house and tells us to stop by his house afterwards because it is at the end of the same block.
We (despite our American instincts that this seems like beginning of the plot of a horror movie, or at least Taken Part II), follow the “bog oak man”’s directions and find the house. After a few pictures we continued down the road to the “bog oak man’s” house. He was waiting at his door for us and invited us in his house. He showed us his gallery of bog oak (a wood that is found deep underground and is dated back to several thousand years ago, but is preserved by bogs that keep the wood free from oxygen and sunlight which cause decay) and then started to bring up pictures of our cousins. After about 45 minutes in this man’s house we left.
In America something like this would never happen! Never would a complete stranger invite other strangers (from a different country!) into his home. But in Ireland this is a normal and acceptable experience.
This is just one example of the kindness that I have seen and experienced from people in Ireland.
After a little more than a week with my family I was sad to see them go, but in three weeks I come home and next weekend I am going to Germany!