All Francisca* wanted the whole time was a 99.
Truthfully, it was just a twisty dollop of soft-serve vanilla ice-cream in a waffle cone, but that didn’t matter.
It was an Irish ice-cream cone with a decorative slab of chocolate bark shoved in like a fence post after a snow storm, and anyway Francisca had heard they were really good, so that was what mattered.
Two weeks she tried ordering one.
All the shops where she tried getting one were closed or out of ice-cream.
The tragic thing was she kept walking right past a dozen other shops where she could have bought one and never noticed.
When most of us chose to cycle the Waterford Greenway, she chose to walk. If she had only gone another mile or so before turning around she would have made it to a train depot/cafe that served them.
Our second to last night in Ireland we walked out of a restaurant and she let out a banshee-wail of dismayed laughter.
There was a melting 99 splattered in the parking lot.
She squatted next to it and had someone take a picture, since it seemed like this was as close as she was going to get to one.
Watching my group mates move through a foreign country was almost more entertaining than being in a foreign country.
Their attitudes towards going out and interacting with the public varied wildly.
Jean-Claude* and Jamie* held anxiety in the front of their minds about combatting the stereotype that American tourists are loud, obnoxiously entitled blights on European soil.
Their worst fears came true when they tried getting a table for the whole group at a pizza restaurant in Wexford and nearly everyone showed up a few minutes later with takeout from a fish and chips shop across the street.
“I don’t think you all understand how restaurants work,” said the waiter as he kicked them all right back out.
I had my own self-conscious cringe-fest when all 12 of us gathered to observe Job’s* birthday and scream-sang our way through Happy Birthday.
It was nearly 11 o’clock at night.
The windows were wide open.
I could feel people a mile down the road sitting up and glaring in our direction.
I wondered several times about how wrong the Ireland “facts” I’d gathered in my journals were.
If someone from Spain visited Wisconsin, saw a single person humming while shoveling snow and then tried telling you all Americans love doing outdoor chores in the wintertime, you’d probably think he was a moron.
A couple of my group mates met a man in Ireland who told them all Americans were basically the same, except some were Democrats and the others were Republicans, whatever that meant.
We laughed.
There’s probably an Irish bus driver laughing just as hard at something stupid I said about his country.
All the same, I did a lot of comparing between the U.S. and what I think I know about Ireland.
As a whole, there seems to be a much stronger sense of shared cultural identity over there.
Ireland is about the size of one U.S. state, so that probably doesn’t hurt.
Still, centuries of bleak historical events and world powers trying to oppress them into assimilation have made the Irish much more stubborn about fighting to preserve a specific, national identity.
Ireland is cohesive: its language, architecture, athletics, food, landscape, etc.
By contrast, America is a continent-spanning behemoth where it has been a lot easier for people to get far away from each other and develop their own unique pockets of identity.
I went to New York once and I was the first honest-to-God human from the southern United States many of them had ever met.
They acted like I was a parrot from outer space.
“Say something,” they said.
There aren’t a lot of things that everybody in American has experienced.
In many cases it’s practical.
Someone living in the mountains of rural North Dakota is not going to structure their daily life the same way as someone from metropolitan Hawaii.
Still, there’s a much wider degree of separation between different regions of America and different regions of Ireland.
With services like the national railway system, the Irish are quite literally better connected.
I’d known some of my group mates for three years, but I felt better connected to them after two weeks abroad than I ever had at home.
Maybe it was just that being on vacation relaxes people enough to be more impulsively themselves without fear of judgment.
Jean-Claude decided to scratch off a bucket list item and try keeping up with an Irish farmer at a pub.
He got drunk so far under the table they practically had to rip out the floorboards to drag him home.
Elsewhere, Francisca and Joshua* made plans to stage a fake proposal in a restaurant for free dessert.
That fell apart, so she didn’t get her 99 that way either.
Noelle* went on a crusade the find eligible Irish bachelors, refusing to let what she considered ugly haircuts stand in her way.
Job and Yara* just enjoyed how welcome they felt in all the places they visited compared to America.
Nobody had followed them around a store as if they were planning to steal something, they said.
It was relaxing being someplace where cashiers didn’t visibly change their demeanor when Yara or Job approached them.
Ireland’s history with discrimination and conflict is rooted firmly in religious territory compared to the political cracks splintering through America.
The vast majority of Ireland is Catholic or Catholic-adjacent.
Britain tried to change that when they invaded, banning Catholics from owning property and attempting to force converts to Protestantism.
Those scars run deep.
They’re still creating problems in North Ireland — a separate country where religious differences and an open love of England can (and does) cause fighting in the streets.
One tour guide did tell us that he envied how much Americans love our flag.
He wished Ireland’s flag held a similar place of esteem in its nation’s culture.
Maybe his perception was naive, but it was a point of national pride that felt nice to think about.
“Go us,” Jade said.
She was the first one to start feeling homesick.
It didn’t help that there were small reminders of home sprinkled throughout our stay: the memorial to the Choctaw tribe, the Irish-American Hall of Fame, a memorial to a visit JFK made in the 60s to his ancestral home.
Others were less ready to leave.
Jean-Claude got offered a job by a woman in a nightclub and seriously considered it.
I wasn’t sure if I was ready to come back either, but that may have been the glow of a honeymoon phase with the Emerald Isle.
We’d been on a condensed tour of its best parts, and the harsher realities would have seeped in like mold spores on the underside of a bread loaf.
At 4:30 in the morning, July 20, we left for the airport.
All the threads of the trip had been wrapped up by then:
Noelle had secured a few new followers on Snapchat and Instagram; Jade and Crystal* had gone on the 18+ tour of the leprechaun museum and been relieved to find there wasn’t any nudity; Phoebe* and I made it out of the creepy pizza basement alive; Francisca and Joshua had a fake wedding ceremony to commemorate their failed quest for free dessert.
The very last day, Francisca finally got her 99.
There was a shop down the street from the Famine Ship Experience selling them.
She bolted across the street and into the shop giving either a battle cry or the psychotic laughter of a woman on the edge.
Everyone left Ireland satisfied, and for those of us not ready to leave, the luck of the Irish smiled on us twice over.
Our flight got delayed.
Then, Jean-Claude got detained by customs.
“Explain this trip to Cuba,” they demanded.
God bless the U.S.A.
*Names changed for privacy
•Ethan Mitchell is a staff writer for The Blackshear Times. Reach him at [email protected].
