People Who Pick Up Hitchhikers
#2: Martin
Once upon a time when I hitched back home from Galway, I got picked up by Martin.
Martin was a driver of the type Tiny Car With Loads of Stuff and after some fumbling, we managed to fit both my backpack and myself in. I started off with some small talk about my field trip which somehow got him talking about last year, when he was going to emigrate to France.
He actually made it to France, but then his van broke down and he didn't want to have that much adventure after all, so he came back home.
Now he's enjoying the good life in recession country, renting a small and formerly highly expensive cottage near the sea, countryside, the city, the heated swimming pool and several nice pubs.
His main activities in life currently seem to be walks in nice scenery and swimming, as well as earning some money with playing shows, though not too many because not playing shows is very nice too, isn't it?
Maybe he was understating his number of gigs though: He was on the way to play in some pub in Ennis. I even got his CD! It has a winding Irish road on the cover.
It turned out we both spend a lot of time musing about these creepy enormous houses that were built during the boom.
[The average older Irish house is tiny, and looking at some around town I sometimes wonder how you can actually fit an adult inside without bumping your head on the ceiling and stretching your arms from one end to the other. And then you hear they are supposed to come with several rooms! It's like Moody's trunk.
This magic superpower was completely abandoned in the nineties in favour of houses absurdly large on the outside and unheatably enormous on the inside. The result are houses that are both showy and bland, still shiny and still empty, and they generally fit in so little with the surroundings they look like UFOs.]
Then he explained to me Irish health insurance. It was very convoluted, but I came away with the feeling I now have a much better understanding of Ireland as a whole. Or maybe much less.
We arrived very abruptly and a bit too early at his destination, our conversation was cut short. Sometimes I think Ireland should involve larger distances... He offered to buy me lunch but I was ridiculously well-equipped with food and eager to keep going, so I declined.
(Bonus bizarre moment of world-is-small: He had lived on the European mainland for ten years or so and spent most of that time living in a town maybe 30 minutes from my home town. )
Once upon a time when I hitched back home from Galway, I got picked up by Martin.
Martin was a driver of the type Tiny Car With Loads of Stuff and after some fumbling, we managed to fit both my backpack and myself in. I started off with some small talk about my field trip which somehow got him talking about last year, when he was going to emigrate to France.
He actually made it to France, but then his van broke down and he didn't want to have that much adventure after all, so he came back home.
Now he's enjoying the good life in recession country, renting a small and formerly highly expensive cottage near the sea, countryside, the city, the heated swimming pool and several nice pubs.
His main activities in life currently seem to be walks in nice scenery and swimming, as well as earning some money with playing shows, though not too many because not playing shows is very nice too, isn't it?
Maybe he was understating his number of gigs though: He was on the way to play in some pub in Ennis. I even got his CD! It has a winding Irish road on the cover.
It turned out we both spend a lot of time musing about these creepy enormous houses that were built during the boom.
[The average older Irish house is tiny, and looking at some around town I sometimes wonder how you can actually fit an adult inside without bumping your head on the ceiling and stretching your arms from one end to the other. And then you hear they are supposed to come with several rooms! It's like Moody's trunk.
This magic superpower was completely abandoned in the nineties in favour of houses absurdly large on the outside and unheatably enormous on the inside. The result are houses that are both showy and bland, still shiny and still empty, and they generally fit in so little with the surroundings they look like UFOs.]
Then he explained to me Irish health insurance. It was very convoluted, but I came away with the feeling I now have a much better understanding of Ireland as a whole. Or maybe much less.
We arrived very abruptly and a bit too early at his destination, our conversation was cut short. Sometimes I think Ireland should involve larger distances... He offered to buy me lunch but I was ridiculously well-equipped with food and eager to keep going, so I declined.
(Bonus bizarre moment of world-is-small: He had lived on the European mainland for ten years or so and spent most of that time living in a town maybe 30 minutes from my home town. )