The last days in Dublin - part one.

I've decided to share a bit more of the non-knitterly lore that we absorbed while in Ireland, and this is one of my best finds: Banoffee pie. As you can see, it is a pie formed with a biscuit crumb crust topped with Dulce de lece or cooked caramel pudding, then a layer of sliced bananas and finished off with meringue or whipped cream. It is truly a work of genius (and this from the woman who isn't even that fond of bananas).

If you link to the recipe above, you will not come to the one pictured here, but I chose this illustration because it looked most like the piece that I had at Moll's Gap, an absolutely amazing gift shop and tea room deep in the heart of the Killarney National Park. The ingredients to make this particular Banoffee pie were a bit too foreign for what we could find here in Canada, so I opted for a more achievable recipe that I found on the UK Food Network.

 I will now share with you some of the Irish Gaelic that we picked up:

As you have probably learned by virtue of repetition each St Patrick's Day, a very popular term and one of the only Gaelic words that most of us know is slainte, which is actually pronounced a lot like the French: "sante", both of them meaning about the same thing - a good wish with which friends toast each other when sharing a drink. (You will excuse the lack of accent marks as I'm not sure how to make them work on this keyboard.)

We were also told that if 2 friends meet each other, the first would say to the second: (phonetically reproduced here) Dia Gwich, or "God be with you". The respondant, not to be outdone, would say (again, take my Gaelic with about a shovel full of salt) Dia Maire Gwich, or "God and Mary be with you". A 3rd person joining the group would be greeted with the addition of St Patrick or one of the other saints being added to the list, and on it would go.

As the daughter of two Cape Bretoners, I've been exposed to a fair amount of Scots Gaelic on trips to the maritimes and immediately recognized Failte as meaning "Welcome", but I'm embarassed to say that I never learned how to pronounce it. I now believe that I wouldn't embarass myself too much if I were to say "Falcha" to a Gaelic speaker who came into my store.

And easiest of all, Galore simply means "lots".

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Now back to the final days of our time in Dublin:

While planning this trip, I had made contact  with members of the Dublin Knit Collective through Ravelry. We were going to join them at their regular Tuesday evening meeting at the Moda Cafe in South Dublin, not too far from the Mespil Hotel where we were staying. When they heard how many of us that there were, they offered to come to us. So at 8pm on Tuesday, October 4th, about 35 knitters swarmed the lobby of this relatively classy hotel, moving furniture, bringing in chairs from the bar, chattting, laughing and generally having a great knitting sharing session.

We met Ger, Olive, Mary, Anne and many others. It was absolutely fabulous. The most amazing thing was that although we were planted right in front of the hotel's relatively busy front desk, people checking in just simply went around us, all the while trying to figure out what this gaggle of women of all ages was doing. We actually had several other women who were staying at the hotel with other tour groups, join us too. Knitting...the universal language.

Next post will be the about the lovely time that we had at Winnie's Craft Cafe. What a home away from home. Everyone on the trip was trying to figure out how I could incorporate such a cafe in our store.