To Peter.

Thanks for your patience, your hospitality, the car and everything. I promise I'll translate into English little by little all the posts about my stay in Ireland so that you can read them easily. This is the first one:


I look through the window and I see the green fields of Ireland, scattered houses on the hills, trees, crows... and I feel like renting the house next door and live here. The only problem is I am an English teacher and here they already speak English.

*************************************************

Ireland was always a country of discoveries for me: nature, independence, travelling, learning a new language, meeting people... Most of the great friends I have I met them in Ireland. Things I learnt in narrow roads in which two cars could barely cross, green fields and those breathtaking cliffs by the sea. The cows, the sheep, the crows, the rain, the snow, the wintry showers shaking the electricity pylons, are my impressions on Ireland. Adventures such as treading on the snow trying not to slip, crossing a wood and rope bridge like the Indiana Jones' ones (Carrick-a-rede rope bridge in N.Ireland), visiting the mansions of the rich people of past centuries in which the servants went into secret doors and narrow passages, cutting rhododendrons in Connemara, drinking my first beer, getting into the legends of the Giant's Causeway and kissing the eloquence stone in Blarney castle, walking in those huge woods that one day belonged to noble families, discovering the history of my own country in Kinsale, in the Spanish Arch in Galway, and the Spanish Point.
Discovering Ireland in Spanish, English, French and even in Valenciano on that night in which an Irish guy told us at the taxis office in Portrush: "Bona nit". Walking and driving on the left handside or being driven in Irish or French cars and getting into buses that take you to distant towns which do not even appear on the maps. From Malin Head to Cork and Galway to Dublin, I know better Ireland than my own country. And the six counties in N.Ireland (Down, Tyrone, Londonderry, Antrim, Armagh and Fermanagh) better than the Alicante province.
This evening, while I was trying to put all this into words to tell Anaví while she was driving on the roads, tracks and paths on the wee roads as the N.Irish say, stopping to take pictures of the cows, mediaeval abbeys, the sea and the cliffs, I have lived again other Irish moments and I have felt, while the children were sleeping or singing on the back seat and Maná's CD was playing, what I had not felt for a while: that I am alive.
It was the moment for confidences, for telling each other our lives, for getting to know each other better, for laughing, for sharing what we have in common, which is more than it seemed. As one Irish friend told me once, I know we will remain friends. Just because a boring Sunday in February I decided to publish one of my Irish stories and someone, on the other side of the computer screen, read it. The magic of the Internet is almost, almost, like the magic of the Irish legends.

Ver este post en español.