Since today (I’m writing on the evening of the 17th) was our first full day in Limerick and we’d begun to shake off a bit of the jet lag, we decided we needed to take full advantage of the pretty weather and do a meet-Limerick walking tour. To fortify ourselves, we had a hearty breakfast at the hotel restaurant, Harry’s. With our room fee, we paid an additional fee for breakfast daily.
The restaurant is pleasant, with windows letting in the morning sunlight, and it was quiet and peaceful even though quite a few other diners (or does one say breakfasters when it's that meal?) were there when we arrived. There’s a fairly good buffet, and in addition, you can order items from the menu. I ordered boiled eggs with soldiers and Steve a full Irish breakfast. That was, of course, gargantuan — scrambled eggs, ham, bacon, bangers, black pudding, tomato halves, mushrooms. My eggs were slightly on the too-done side, so that the yolks weren’t as runny as they should be for soldiers.
The buffet offered several pastries — croissants, chocolate croissants, and so on — with bread and soda bread. The soda bread was lamentably sweet, like cake. I won’t have it again tomorrow. There were machines to make coffee and also to draw hot water to make tea. Unfortunately, the tea that’s offered to put into the stainless steel pots is in tea bags and had nowhere near the robust, delicious taste of the tea we had the afternoon before at The Locke Bar. I also found the jam — raspberry — and marmalade — offered on the buffet substandard, both of them, of poor, cheap quality and without much taste. This in contrast to a compote of stewed fruit also on offer, that was delicious and a bit tart, a mix of blackberries, strawberries, and blueberries.
Breakfast ingested, we set out on our walk and headed first to King John’s castle. We didn’t go inside, just poked our heads into the gift shop where one buys tickets to go inside, I think, and then looked around the exterior of the castle. I especially enjoyed standing beside the castle as one reaches the wall overlooking the Shannon, a reminder, this juxtaposition of old castle and river, of the strategic importance of Limerick as a Viking settlement along a river allowing egress into the interior of Ireland. This opportunity for the Vikings to extend their invasion of Ireland inland was what caused Brian Boru and his kinsmen, including my Ó Loingsigh forebears, to go to war against the Viking invaders and try to push them back from Ireland’s heartland.
After we’d seen the castle, we walked on to the Hunt Museum. I really liked the two brightly painted fiberglass horses as you enter the courtyard in front of the Hunt. They were painted by Limerick young people, I’ve read. There’s a school of art and design in Limerick, and as we left The Locke Bar on our first evening here, there was a group of students with sketch pads standing on the sidewalk next to The Locke, drawing some of the architectural features of nearby buildings. And today, twice as we walked around Limerick, we encountered young people sketching this and that.
The Hunt was small and eclectic, with items ranging from a surprising (and rather unsettling) silver death mask of Joyce to an Egyptian statue of the god Thoth as a baboon and a late medieval majolica devotional panel. It was also dauntingly warm. Buildings in Limerick and our hotel already have the heat cranked up, though it’s mid-September and by no means cold outside. Walking a few steps starts me perspiring, always has done so, and when I then walk into a heated building, I begin perspiring all the more. So after a few minutes, I was ready to step outside again, and off we headed to find a bookstore I’d read about on O’Connell Street, O’Mahony’s.
It was a bit of a search to find O’Mahony’s, but when we finally found it, it was well worth the searching and the walk. The selection was wonderful and extensive for a not huge bookstore in a smallish Irish city. Lots of Irish things, of course. I found a tiny book by Colm Tóibín I haven’t read, A Long Winter, and bought it. The very nice man staffing the main desk of the store told me he had some signed copies of the book and offered me one — no additional price — and I gladly took one of those. Steve found a James Patterson novel he hasn’t yet read and has been looking for, and bought it. And in the upstairs part of O’Mahony’s, in the cookbook section, I found a gargantuan history of Irish food, which Steve insisted on buying for me, though I think it may be too heavy and bulky for our suitcases.
From O’Mahony’s, we walked around a corner or two to the Limerick Museum, and enjoyed looking through it. One of the men at the entrance desk was a bit off-putting, though his coolness was balanced by the smiling friendliness of the other man at the desk. I wouldn’t call the museum first-class, but I did learn something I hadn’t known before visiting it, namely, that Limerick was once famous for its lace-making, with many local women engaging in that art and Queen Victoria buying and sporting Limerick lace.
After the museum, we headed back to our hotel and, again, slept a bit in the middle of the day, then read and rested up till the evening, when we took a nice walk to a chippy called Donkey Ford’s that is apparently a favorite of locals and highly recommended. Entering it was like stepping back in time. As Steve said, places like this will soon be gone. I replied, “Yes, and they’ll be replaced with places selling smash burgers” — we’d passed just such a place on our walk to Donkey Ford’s.
The smiling small woman at the order counter at Donkey Ford’s seemed deaf as a post and had a very thick Limerick accent, and I’m none too keen of hearing any longer, either, and my accent was probably incomprehensible to her, so we had a jolly few minutes exchanging words with each other and then saying, “Sorry, what did you just say?” Finally got the order sorted out — cod for Steve and whiting for me — and brought it hot and wrapped in paper back to our room and enjoyed it very much, though as Steve noted, the cod was “manufactured,” some kind of pressed fish, and that was disappointing. It was also way too much food for us, so that we ended up not finishing our meals and will probably not be able to stomach the cold fish and cold chips tomorrow, so I fear it will be discarded.
Limerick — again, the art angle — is full of murals of all kinds on walls throughout the city. I’m enjoying both seeing and photographing them.
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