Free Jaywalking with the Irish by Lonely Planet

people,” scoffed the Brits.
    But the visitors halted nonetheless – and shortly dropped their jaws at what waited in the hollow. There, sitting on a stool, was a leprechaun nailing shoes, another beside him whistling on a miniature flute, and a third stirring a little magic pot. Lost in reverie, they didn’t cast a glance at the white-faced Englishmen – until the embedded Clancys roared with laughter.
    A wicked joke, but scratch the Irish hard enough and you may still hear a thing or two about fairies. A country-born but city-smart friend named Lourdes, a teacher with a fashionable spiked hairdo that would fit in perfectly in London or New York, told an anecdote a few months after our arrival.
    “When I was about ten or eleven, I met a neighbor in the lane one day, an old lady named Mrs. Crowley. She looked so distraught that I asked what was the matter. ‘Have ye any news?’ I asked, because that is what everyone said when meeting back then. She said, ‘Someone has disturbed the fairy circle and the livestock are gone out of their senses.’
    “This might sound crazy to you now, but the truth was that a farmer had in fact that very morning plowed close to the village’s ancient fairy circle, and the horses had taken a terrible fright, broken through fences, and scattered for miles in a way that no one had ever seen before. You may be skeptical, but something strange happened to set them off like that, and I am telling you that even today, no Irishman with any sense would ever build a thing on an ancient fairy circle.”
    “No question about it,” nodded her partner, Hans. “There are realities still that nobody quite understands. When my mother was young, she heard a strange wailing outside at midnight and went into the fields to investigate. The sound was most horrible andgot louder and louder as she approached a nearby row of trees. And what did she find there but a banshee keening and plaiting her white hair, then suddenly vanishing before her eyes. Two days later, my grandmother died. You can call that coincidence if you wish, because she was already ill admittedly, but it’s enough to scare you, truth be told.”
    The tricky path between truth and stereotype must be tiptoed gingerly when a family of five has to forge a changed life in a new land. Favorite clichés get shattered in the midst of the simplest transactions.
    A world-favorite stereotype is that the Irish are a supremely open people. Right. And Eskimos are just waiting to rub visitors’ noses too. Well, the Irish can be extraordinarily friendly, and will certainly talk your ear off when in the mood. They can also be suspicious and clannish and vacillate between every extreme of the emotional spectrum with an elusiveness that can leave a visitor dangling in confusion. In Cork, a simple inquiry about someone’s work status, even if you have been asked a dozen questions about your own, can engender long scrutinizing glances, as if the interlocutor might be wearing a secret tape-recording device. “Keep yes and no unsplit. And give your say this meaning: give it the shade,” advised the Romanian poet Paul Celan. In the southwestern counties of Ireland, collectively comprising the province of Munster, ambiguity has been perfected to a level that would do the Sphinx proud. In fact, the native Irish language doesn’t have a solid word for “no.” Road signs, when they exist, never say “stop.” That would be too straightforward. It’s “yield,” even when anything short of a dead halt will lead to a screeching smashup. “I will, yeah,” Corkonians say when they mean “never.”
    During a later journey to the beautiful island of Valentia off the Kerry coast, the director of Ireland’s westernmost marine emergency radio command center – an institution predicated upon the need for instant direct communication – waved out over the nearby mountains as if seeing inscrutable gnomes. A native of not-so-distant West Cork, Gene O’Sullivan