Philadelphia Weekly

We're on the bus getting trundled bumpily through the Irish countryside, where it's green and there are fields and cows and a great many sheep. The sheep all have curlicues of paint on their butts so everyone knows who owns them, which I admit I hadn't anticipated, but otherwise this is exactly what I had in mind when I decided to get the hell out of the city.

Lil Red is my ginger-haired friend who's here visiting from Philly. First she spent a week in London, shopping at the street markets and shooting graffiti with her old-school manual camera, which she rigs up with electrical tape because she's clever like that.

When she got to town I fed her Guinness and took her on the tour of the spookily historic and excellently dank Kilmainham Jail. But what really excited her were the serendipitous sightings I hadn't noticed before-the colorful tags and Che Guevara stencils on walls and postboxes that are all over what they rightly call this dirty old town.

And that's the thing. I have one more weekend before I fly back to Philly for Christmas, and as much as I'm looking forward to a chef's salad at Campo's and hunting for new old clothes at the big Salvy on Ridge Avenue, I need another kind of change.

In coming to Dublin I traded one big city with puke on its streets for another, and I can't forget what a cab driver told me one night, in a tone just a shade away from chastising: "Dublin isn't Ireland."

So I called up my friend R. and asked him where's quaint to go. R. grew up in Dublin, and he said Kilkenny, named for St. Canice, has a castle and some old churches and a round tower where monks stashed their books and other valuable stuff 1,000 years ago. Plus, the bus will take you there for 10 quid roundtrip.

Done.

R. and I are the founding members of what I've deemed the Board of Obvious Tourism. When I explained to him that studying literature in Ireland just felt right to me, he squinted and nodded slowly in this way he does, and went, "Yeah. When I lived in France I worked at a vineyard. And in Holland I picked flowers. It was feckin' hard work too. All that bending down, like. And the one guy who ran the place, I remember he used to smoke like a chimney, him and his wife both, Jesus ... "

He went on like that for a while, but you get the idea. Anyway, with his blessing Lil Red and I boarded a bus in Dublin's belchy bus station this morning, dreaming of a sweatery weekend filled with tea and brown bread and creamy butter.

When we reach the village the busload of us pour out onto the main street and start trickling down ancient little alleyways with steps and turns and cubbyholes. Lil Red and I have booked a room above a pub called Billy Byrne's on John Street, which we should try to look for at some point, but we're not in any rush.

Thanks to Red's project I'm noticing photogenic wall-words too. I find a Guinness ad with the slogan in Irish and a fantastic "FISH AND CHIPS" sign in '70s orange. There's also a Toni & Guy, a Jaguar parked on a side street and about 11 Internet cafes. But it's terrible to be a tourist and want someone else's country to be in the dark ages for amusement purposes.

Nonetheless, we came here for some castle. We take the road that runs between the castle wall and a narrow, dreggy river, walking in silence for a while. The only sound is a man calling to his dog off in the distance.

I'm smoking and strolling and thinking, I realize, somewhat dreamily about R. and his perpetually dirty dark hair, when I turn to tell Lil Red that I like guys with dirty hair, and find she's not beside me.

She's a few yards away, squatting and aiming her fiddly camera at the wall. I go over to her so I can admire her best find yet: "Fuck de corprid world." It's slammed right on this medieval fortress that smells of moss and damp and other ancient things, which is so wrong it's right.

I decide right then defacing castles is a calling something like the monks in yon tower must've heard. I decide deliberate misspellings make me happier than a lot of things. I decide Red's not-so-obvious tourism can give you an interesting perspective on the world. I light my 19th cigarette, and Red wraps her wrappy sweater tighter, and we start to wend our way back toward the village.

Eventually we find the street where our pub is and head over the footbridge, being careful to hop away from fast drivers where the sidewalk narrows into nothing. And then, on second glance, the name of the street takes on a meaning I can't believe I missed at first.

"Nicky!" I yell, because that's actually her name. "Look! We're on John Street!"

We both look and laugh and take it in for a second. This moment is ironic and surprising in a way that doesn't make me feel happy or sad, particularly. But as my friend from home lines up a picture I can't help but think of our graffitied, castleless city waiting for us.