A Thousand Warmest Welcomes

Back in Texas, I have no problem finding a nice “please” and “thank you.” If I’m lucky I might even find that chivalry isn’t dead and a man will give up his seat on a packed bus for me.

But all of that above really only adds up to being polite. A “thank you” doesn’t turn into a conversation and two strangers don’t have interest in each other or anyone else around them.

That is just how Texas is and it’s not a bad thing, but it’s certainly not how it’s done in Ireland.

There is a reason the country has an old saying of a thousand warmest welcomes. The Irish people truly are the nicest people I have had the privilege of meeting.

 With my “accent,” as the Irish call it, it doesn’t take long for an Irish person to wander over and ask me where I’m from. The people are truly interested in why I came to Ireland, what I’ve seen so far and mostly what I think of the country overall.

I’m always happy when they ask these questions because I get to share how much I love this country, and a lot of that has to do with the people. I’m excited each day to go out and see something new and meet a new person. I never worry about getting lost because I know there will be someone on every street corner happy to point me in the right direction.

This blog was about defining what it means to be Irish, and after four weeks I’m not much closer to finding the complete answer, but I do know that to me Ireland in general means a welcoming country.

Because the people are so welcoming, I was able to steal away some time from an Irish student and ask him to define being Irish. He seemed to do it one word, “tea.”

“Irish people love their tea. Whenever you visit anyone, they always offer you tea first,” said Andrew McCreddin, a 25 year old graduate student at Trinity College Dublin.

I was lucky enough to experience this when my class visited several companies. Tea was always the first order of business, and I think that all goes back to the warmest of welcomes.

Street signs in Killarney with Gaelic and English.

When I asked about Irish heritage, he told me about another distinct Irish trait.

“We are all taught the Irish Gaelic language starting at the age of 4, yet nearly absolutely everyone is terrible at it,” McCreddin said.

I had talked to other locals throughout the trip about the Irish language, mostly because I never knew there was actually an Irish language. From what I learned, Irish is not only very difficult but it’s even more difficult to find proper teachers, and that is where the problems begin.

Continuing my conversation with McCreddin, he finished the conversation off with a list of more of his definitions of Ireland.

·         Appreciation of chippers (fried fast food restaurants) even though all the best ones seem to be run by Italians

·     Going to the bog for a day with a plastic bottle of tea and cutting turf

·         And of course, drinking. Especially on St. Patrick’s Day and Arthur’s Day and basically the entire year

Comparing his Irish to Irish list to my American to Irish list of music and dancing, I definitely feel like more of a tourist. I guess it takes more time to become Irish.