You can buy many a book on Irish culture, Irish sayings, and what it’s like to be an American in Ireland (and vice versa). We thought we’d contribute our own small observations based on what we ran into during our trip to the Emerald Isle.
Accents and word usage
Being impressionable Americans, we found the Irish accent as charming as always, to the extent that after a few days, it was almost painful to hear other American accents in the streets.
Here are the accents and (to us, charming) word usages we ran into most often:
In Dublin especially, any word with “ar” in it was pronounced like a pirate: Put your carrrr in the carrrrr parrrrrk.
In addition to one of the door signs in our
first Dublin hotel room, someone did tell us they’d done something that was “good craic” (fun, good conversation, entertainment). It turns out there are several types of the craic to be had; click
here to learn more.
You don’t “line up" or “get in line,” you “queue up” or “form a queue.”
Although the word “wee” is still used as an adjective, it has become like “um” for many people and can appear multiple times in a single sentence.
If asked how you are, especially in the Republic of Ireland, an acceptable answer is, “I’m grand” (meaning “okay”). Things and events can also be grand. And where we might say “No problem” here, there you might be told “You’re grand” (e.g., the answer to “oops, I made a mistake,” is “you’re grand”). Alternatively, you might be told, “You’re fine then, you’re alright.”
In other words, there are certain circumstances where something can be both "wee" and "grand" 🤣
Many areas pronounce “th” as though it is just “t”: Cuh-tee-dral for cathedral, tirty for thirty, tread for thread.
You don’t have weekend plans to see a movie; you are going to see a fillum at the wee-Kend.
The f-word is often pronounced with an “e” instead of a “u.”
You can ask where the restrooms or bathrooms are, and you are understood. But the Irish call them “toilets,” or the “ladies” and “gents.”
Garbage is “rubbish,” and so are a lot of situations or people. You bin your rubbish.
The shoulder of the road is the “verge.”
An intersection is a “junction.”
An elevator is a “lift.”
Food
The big cities had all the food choices, and the restaurants were prepared to deal with allergies and other food preferences—although in some areas, oat milk was the alternative to dairy milk, rather than soy, almond, or coconut.
However, in the smaller towns and villages, there was not much choice at all. You could go to a “carvery” (usually at a pub) to get a slab of meat, with rolls, one or two types of potato (usually roasted and mashed), carrots, and possibly some cabbage. There was usually a pizza place, too, interestingly enough, and convenience stores that carried some hot items, possibly some vegetables, and
really good coffee.
Almost everywhere we went, we saw at least one ethnic eatery that declared it was “open all the time,” but it was never open.
“Irish hot breakfasts” all over the country were poached or scrambled eggs, blood pudding (blood, meat, fat, oatmeal, and bread or potato fillers), white pudding (same as blood pudding but without the blood), broiled tomatoes, Irish sausage, Irish bacon (kind of like Canadian bacon), fried or broiled button mushrooms, and toast. The bigger city buffets also offered items with vegetables in them (e.g., frittatas), as well as fruit, yogurt, and even chia pudding in one place.
Most restaurants do not bring your check to your table, and even for the ones that did, we had to get up to pay at the cashier station. Some places had numbered tables to match food to table to check, but others had a map of the restaurant on their computers. When you pointed to the table where you’d been seated, they found it on their computer and were able to identify your bill.
Usually when we walked into a place for breakfast, we were asked, “Tea and toast?” We would say, “Coffee, please,” and even if a lot of our fellow diners were also American, the servers would look momentarily confused--and often had to disappear to a secret location to fetch the coffee for us.
No matter the size of the city or the quality of the restaurant, a “house salad” was so much nicer than the iceberg lettuce, three croutons, and two cherry tomatoes you might get in the same sort of place in the U.S. On the other hand, we were rarely given a choice of dressing.
Roads
It was weird (and often scary) to drive on the “wrong” side of the road. But we clipped only one sidewalk corner (although we came close to a few walls and hedges).
The
roads in Ireland are identified with a letter and one or more numbers. The M roads were usually equivalent to our multi-lane freeways, and were often divided. The N roads were usually pretty good—they usually had one or two lanes in each direction, and they usually had a shoulder. The R roads varied all over the place, from being indistinguishable from N roads to being very narrow and/or hairpin-curvy (often with blind curves) and/or hilly, and often without a shoulder.
And the L roads. It turns out “L” stands for “local road,” but we thought it stood for “lane,” because that’s what we encountered. Our experience with them was that they were narrow dirt tracks, often very rutted, often with very tall weeds growing in the middle. We carried some of these weeds throughout the countryside in our rental car’s undercarriage.
Other observations
We’re not sure how laundry machines are arranged in houses, but in apartments, you can often find a combination clothes washing and drying machine in the kitchen, under the counter like a dishwasher. When the machine is in dryer-mode, it is not gas and does not vent to the outside—it sort of cooks your clothes (more or less) dry.
There was rarely a choice of paper towels in the public restrooms; usually only hand dryers were available.
We did not encounter any taxis that accepted credit cards, only cash. In fact, when we first arrived at Dublin Airport and engaged a taxi to take us into the city, the driver asked loudly and clearly, “Should our first stop be at the currency exchange, then, so you can be sure to have enough cash for the ride?” We earned points by already having the correct currency, and enough of it.
Speaking of currency, the Republic of Ireland uses euros, and Northern Ireland uses British pounds. Apparently some establishments are savvy enough to accept either, but we didn't encounter many of those, and the euros and pounds looked enough alike that we sometimes brought out the wrong bills. Much hilarity ensued.
It was interesting, too, that sometimes credit card machines would ask us which currency we wanted to charge in.
Ireland does not have TJ Maxx stores. Instead, they have TK Maxx stores, and it is the exact same place.
Ireland does not understand our gun laws. While we were on our two-week trip, there were three mass shootings in the U.S.: in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton. The Irish were aghast and wondered why it doesn’t stop. Of course, a fair amount of hunting goes on in Ireland, and so they understand why you might want certain types of guns, but why does anyone want or need an automatic rifle that has no purpose other than killing nine humans in 30 seconds (and anyway, would ruin a good piece of meat if you tried to use it for hunting)? We really had no good answers for them, other than trying to explain the power of lobbyists.
Related to this, Rodney (
the man who showed us around Belfast) talked about the 3,500 people who died during the 40 years of the Troubles. We had a moment of silence in sadness for that loss of life, then pointed out that somewhere between 35,000 - 45,000 Americans
a year are killed by firearms (exact number not known due to NRA-sponsored laws that do not allow us to track or study gun use in this country). Rodney went pale and stared at us in disbelief.
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| Photo by Valentina Razumova © 123RF.com |
