Dingle, part the first.

People, including a good many of the ones from Ireland, apparently love Dingle. A German girl with whom I spoke for a bit at the first hostel in which I'd stayed mentioned that it was the one place an Irish family she'd met told her she absolutely had to see. The locals I've encountered couch surfing seemed genuinely happy for me when I told them that I'd been there. I cannot imagine why. It was Irish Disneyland. It was ugly and cheap and fake. It turned good stories, and worse than that, good people, into plastic clichés.

The scenery I passed on the bus ride over, actually, was really overwhelmingly pretty. Mountains, fields, ocean and shore arranged themselves in combinations more impressive than any I'd yet seen. This only had the affect of making me long even more for the ride back out again.

For Dingle's sake, perhaps I ought to admit a few complicating factors. I arrived there on the first day that the amount of time that I've been spending on buses began really getting to me. I've ridden between four and eight hours nearly every day since I started this trip, and although the view from the bus is often spectacular, it's getting to be a bit much. My sometimes tricky back doesn't seem to be enjoying it much either, honestly. Also, I had no idea of what I was getting myself into. Perhaps my sense of geography is occasionally a bit more American than I might care to admit? This was the first tourist town I'd ever stumbled into in Ireland. Had I known what the place was, I would have braced myself for it, and bemused, a bit dismissive, I would have ignored it.

My goal in going to Dingle had been to see the Gallarus Oratory, a stone monastic structure shaped a bit like an upturned boat. I allowed myself to be too tired to make the trek to find the place the night I got into town, deciding instead to get something to eat, to read a bit, and to sleep a great deal. There's something nice I can say about Dingle: I bought a cheap fish chowder in a restaurant there, and the salmon, cod, mussles, and perch that, in part, comprised it were the freshest fish I've ever tasted in my life. For reasons of professional pride, I wouldn't even admit this if it weren't so overwhelmingly true. Dingle is a fishing town, and the fish I ate were so fresh they were barely recognisable. The salmon was, I think, wild Atlantic, a thing that cannot be legally sold in the States. The mussels had a different texture than what I'm accustomed to selling and cooking. The cod was so fresh it tasted like a different fish entirely. I don't even normally like cod; the stuff in the chowder was spectacular. The dish as a whole was simple and well made, and served with Irish brown bread and butter, two things I'm really going to miss when this trip is over. There: you're not all bad, Dingle. Thanks for the soup.