On the Emerald Road

I haven't slept well for the last two nights. In some parallel universe it was because I was out all night, drinking copious amounts of cheap booze, or smoking hash with mushroom-infested hippies, or even engaging in multilingual hostel dorm orgies. Unfortunately it was all thanks to the wonders of some random French guy and a relentless snore that sounds like he's inhaling Clag paste through a sponge.

The first time his apnoeia invaded my dreams, I had this image of some wild beast being slaughtered by medieval peasants. Eventually, the sleep dropped away and I realised where the sound was coming from. For the next twenty minutes I had front row centre to the nasal symphony of gasps, chokes, gurgles, roars and snorts that erupted from this tiny man's mouth. When it finally finished, I sighed and rolled over to sleep, only to learn that his breathing disability was set onto some demonic rinse and repeat cycle.

This week marked my first time traveling away from the comforts of a family. For the most part, it has been a really fun experience.

Over the weekend I was staying with an Irish man called Aonghus, who lived in the tiny town of Inverin, Connemara, just outside of Galway. All the towns to the west of Galway, at least on the southern part of Connemara, are Gaeltacht. This means that they're a region where people speak the traditional Irish Gaelic as their first language. I'd first learnt about the Gaeltacht while watching a stand-up comedian, Des Bishop, perform to Irish audiences in a mix of Gaelic and English, so immediately Aonghus and I had a good point of cultural reference.

Aonghus lived alone in a house that he'd inherited from his aunt. It was a tiny place, built without insulation and equally devoid of both a shower and heating. That didn't seem to really matter too much, as there was always a nice fire burning, and a pub next door.

Things took a bad turn, however, on the first night I was there. I went out on the town with Aonghus and his friends, playing billiards and drinking pints of the cheapest beer I could find. At the end of the night we all hopped into a hackney, which is a minibus that runs up and down the one road between all the towns in Connemara.

The bus was packed with drunk bodies, and I found my head swimming as I tried to work out if people were talking to me in Gaelic, or if I was just having a bastard of a time understanding their accent. Aonghus yelled out to the hackney driver to stop, as we were at his house.

When Aonghus stood to hop out, another young guy, his head shaved down to all but the bizarre flattop that so many Irish men sport, leapt over a seat and took a swing at Aonghus. Instantly, the hackney erupted into a mini-brawl and we were all pushed out onto the street (incidently, it did mean that I got out without having to pay the cab fare).

One big difference between an Irish street brawl (at least in Connemara) and an Australian pub brawl, is that the freezing, sleeting Irish nighttime chills a fighter's heart pretty quickly. The brawlers backed down and scattered into the night, leaving me to help Aonghus out with his bleeding mouth.

It turns out that about five years earlier, Aonghus had been attacked by the same guy and, over the course of their fight, put the man's head through a car window. It had been hell for him ever since, and, despite losing a tooth in the hackney brawl, he knew that their revenge was still far from paid.

Galway city provided a very different experience for me. After the mostly good times with the Irish in rural Connemara, I moved into a multinational hostel right in the city centre.

Perhaps it's because I can be a bit of a dirty, shower-free fellow at times, but I took to hostel life quite quickly. On my first proper day in Galway, I decided to lose myself in the city, just walking around and pretending to know where I was going. It was, by far, the best way to get my head into gear and by the second day I was actually leading other foreigners around, recommending restaurants, and pointing out local oddities.

I may or may not have been making up some facts, but that's not the point.

Hostels are like an underground UN, and I fraternised with delegates from France, the United States, Canada, Germany and Brazil over the course of two days. For the record, everyone was brilliant, but there's not enough space to talk about all of them in one hit. Maybe I'll introduce them later.

But, I did have the pleasure of spending a day with two Lyonnesse men, Blaise and Clemont. These two were gentle madmen. Both worked in a library back in Lyon ("we, err, how do you say, we stole books and sold them to pay for our trip. It is something with which we are not proud"), and had come over to live in Ireland for about a month. We walked around the city, and almost got shot for walking onto a military base in an attempt to make a short cut (military bases in Ireland, or at least Galway, look more like UNESCO tourist spots).

The two were about to start living and working with an old hippie woman out in the town of Spiddle, just west of Galway.

"We will be helping her with the work, like, errr, painting the 'ouse and, weeding and, maybe help with the organ," Clemont explained.

For a few seconds I thought he meant that their hostess was a keen pianist.