Why you will always be confused in Ireland

Dear Flushers,

Sometimes you come across something and you just have to say WTF. Cultural idiosyncracies be damned, I do believe you will agree with me when I say that Irish sign posts are at best puzzling and at worst a waste of space.

Remember way back my first day without supervision in Dublin when an afternoon was royally botched by an incredibly misleading sign for the museum which shall not be named? I had hoped in vain that was the end to my confusions resulting from poorly conceptualized placemarkers. False. ALL Irish road signs point in the vague, general direction of a geographic location without regard to streets or human capabilities.

Yeah, you remember. I did not go in.

My most memorable set of instructions occurred on the way to the Guinness factory. Stopping at a local convenience store, a grumpy, foot trodden pack waited outside while friend Janetta and I politely asked the man behind the counter the way to the source of the sweet nectar of life. He responded with the enigmatic, "Turn left. Walk until you are tired.Then you are almost there." Perhaps we misjudged the shopkeeper. His exterior of a bored man getting his kicks by frustrating young foreigners may have simply been a cover for an existential guru with a special, Spar-based connection to the cosmos. Perhaps he was the Centra of the universe.

All this brings me to my original point, which is primarily visual. Please peruse the images below and reach your personal conclusions about Irish sign culture. As they offer little explanation, I have provided my own.

Please, do refrain from stepping on the birds.

Do what you want,

but don't blame us if someone steals your s#*%.

If one must fall off the Cliffs of Moher,

please do so in this fashion.

If you don't like it here, you can go to Hell, or a Mermaid's hole.

Watch out for the

_________!

flkdsahgoidksl.

Go do The Creep somewhere else.

Come visit Shankill road, where you can get both shanked and killed.

The worn torn area of Temple Bar does not appreciate your bombs. Please take your business elsewhere.

Feck it.

And finally,

my favorite...

Cars do not fly.

A beginner's guide to becoming obese

Lately I've been seeing food all around me. The cars vandalized by chopped vegetables, the men jumping out of bushes strapped to giant soup cans, the tasty looking dog-I mean... sheeps. I figure the universe is trying to tell me something. Is that message "Kate go eat some damn food?" No! It's "Go write a blog post about noms immediately!" So I did.

Here are some great Irish dishes that you should sample if and when you find yourself in the Emerald Isle, with links to recipes if you want to throw a stomach party.

Bangers and mash

Because bangers are more fun to say than sausages. This essential pub grub is a delicious complement to a trad sesh and a pint of Guinness after a day tripping around Dublin. Let the duet of crunchy and creamy make music in your mouth.

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Fish & Chips
If you walk around Cork for long enough saying "I want fishes" repeatedly, a gang of tween hoodlums will pass you on the street with a live goldfish in tow. But this will hardly satisfy your craving for the crisp, golden fish and thick, toasty chips (Freedom Fries) which gleam in the fryers across the island. Serve with a side of mushy peas, which taste much better than they sound.

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Bacon and Cabbage
In Ireland, bacon means pig and rashers means bacon, which is actually Canadian bacon. Bacon is best served with cabbage sprinkled in bacon, which in all honesty just becomes a game of find the bacon (see 5:37 for the power of bacon).

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Smoked salmon

One bite of this sea slipper and you will feel the ocean breeze whipping at your hair. It tastes like adventure. Serve with brow

n bread, lemon and capers.

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Full Irish Breakfast

What better way to start your day

than with meat, meat and a side of meat? Load up on rashers, sausages, fried eggs, fried tomatoes, and possibly a mushroom, and don't forget white pudding (pork fat oat sausage) and black pudding (congealed blood sausage). This is a borderline Epic Breakfast.

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Beef in Guiness stew
There is only one thing

more delicious than the combination of Guinness and stew and that is Guinness in stew. Wash it down with more Guinness.

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Steak and Guinness pie
Sometimes you are in such a hurry that you just don't have time to sit down for a bowl of stew and a pint. That is why God invented the meat pie. Warm, flaky pastry oozing with beer steeped meat juice. Mmm.

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Special notes: If you haven't already guessed, vegetarians are not allowed to enter the country. If you spend any period of time in Ireland, you are likely to grow fat. That being said, I give traditional Irish food two belly rolls up.

This post brought to you by Guinness.

Ireland is experiencing a shortage of pants

Note: This post is not directed at any Irish man or woman of my personal acquaintance. I appreciate both your excellent taste in clothing and your sense of humor.

This is a promo shot from Mean Girls. It will make better sense contextually in a few paragraphs, but I need a thumbnail.

Folks, I don't mean to be rude, but we've got a problem over here. As the balmy joy of springtime rolls over the fields of Ireland, I can't help but feel a sense of dread and horror for the hemlines of the youth. Perhaps I have grown old and crotchety among the wizened haunts of the Irish pub scene, but I believe the fashion sense of Ireland's 14-35 age group needs a bit of tailoring.

Irish fashion can be pinned down to a few key elements, especially among the arts student population at UCD. Flatmate Ciaragh has come up with an inspired name for a female art student- a YOP. This acronym chromatically describes a female specimen top to bottom: Yellow, Orange, Pink. Irish girls are rather fond of changing not only their hair color, but also the tone of their skin. I see no reason for this, since I find dark hair, redheads and freckles rather striking, but apparently this does not hold true in the Irish state. Cake on a few layers of makeup, die your hair pink or aqua, and you're on your way to appearing Irish.

I haven't taken any pictures of Irish students because that's creepy. Even I have a sense of boundaries- I only photograph random children.

Next we reach the clothes. I have on multiple occasions walked behind groups of girls wearing almost exactly the same outfit. Short shorts or a mini mini skirt over tights, leather boots, a massive shoulder bag, a top and a cardigan. Think the Plastics, but with more knits. The prevalence of this outfit does not exclude the occasional sighting of Uggs, Cruggs (the homely love child of Crocs and Uggs), and Jaggings (like jeggings, only with Jaguars). I can go for hours without seeing a pair of jeans or a backpack, and only through immense personal restraint can I stifle the fingertip-length-rule brainwashing in me to stop the exclamation of "PANTS!" in my throat.

Guys too wear a distinctive Irish look. If you are an Irish male, cultural standards demand you take every opportunity to don sweatpants, prohibit you from wearing any form of waterproof clothing, and advise you to style your hair in duckfin fashion. If middle school was your jam, you're all over this right now.

Going out attire is a different matter altogether. For the most hyperbolized example of Irish club clothing you'd need to go to Belfast, which actually lies in Northern Ireland, so based on your political views you could turn this issue into a very patriotic debate.

In my experience with Belfast club attire, it would be more than reasonable to assume that the average female passerby was, in fact, a hooker. Before you jump on that slanderous stereotype let me point out one key cultural image.

This is a statue of two ladies of the night in the middle of Belfast.

Above you will find a photo of a public monument honoring several especially hardworking trollops. As my cabbie on the Black Cab tour through Belfast put it, "Do you know why there aren't any statues of prostitutes in Dublin? Cause they weren't any good."

In clubs girls wear stiletto heels which are longer than their dresses, and guys wear striped shirts to go with their Jersey Shore battle action. I have never seen heels so tall as those I have seen in Ireland. One time I was having lunch in the main UCD restaurant with some friends and we saw a pack of girls wearing saran wrap like dresses and seven inch heels walk by rattling buckets of loose change. We all concluded that this was probably part of the marketing campaign for the upcoming UCD fashion show. It wasn't. Approaching strangers in constricting outfits and demanding money from them is apparently the most effective way to raise funds for charity. It's good to know feminism has done its work.

I can only wait in apprehension to see if the fashion of Ireland's winter months will reveal a time-fabric trajectory for the spring. As I write this post, my fears are already being validated. I just saw a grown man perform a naked backstroke in the Toxic Lake in front of hundreds of library students with elevated window vantages. But perhaps spring is not arriving as swiftly as I thought. As one student remarked upon viewing the spectacle, "Oof. Must be cold out there."

CRITICAL UPDATE! THE NAKED MAN NOW HAS A FACEBOOK FAN PAGE!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-naked-lake-guy/216045905078417

Massive kudos to Joanna Ebejer for finding this.