The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

by Rachel Friedman

  The kitchen is bursting with activity. Tables are painted bright summer greens, blues, and oranges. The chairs are all different shapes and sizes and look as though they have been gathered at yard sales. Now this is more like summer camp. People still wearing pajama pants rub their eyes. More disciplined groups pore over guidebooks and journals. Couples gaze at each other across their cereal. Tea and coffee steam from mismatched mugs, while various shades of bread pop nonstop out of an overworked toaster. It’s as if I’ve arrived late at a party where everyone has already been introduced. I sit down at the edge of a long table, and a short, dark-haired guy plops down across from me.

  “Hello to you!” he says joyously, as though we are old friends, then he immediately launches a litany of questions at me.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “What have you seen?”

  “Do you know when the next bus to Limerick is?”

  Pedro, a Spaniard living in Italy who is traveling around Europe for a few months, tells me all about Ireland—where I should go and the names of several restaurants where I should eat if I make it up to Belfast or down to Cork. Later, I will pull out my guidebook so I can circle his suggestions, but I’ll find none of them in there.

  “Where will you go next?” he asks excitedly.

  “Maybe Galway,” I say, surprising myself by considering Matt’s advice.

  “Che bella!” he shouts with embarrassing enthusiasm. “The food is shit,” he announces next without warning, and I don’t know whether he means Dublin, Galway, or the hostel. “I am headed to Galway in two weeks. I will give you my phone.” He pulls out a pen and a small cloth-covered book bound with a piece of fraying string. He throws a ripped piece of paper with a number scrawled on it in my direction. “Ciao!” he yells, already out the door.

  People seem to be moving at warp speed in this hostel, while I feel like I have barely managed to catch my breath.

  Eventually, I have to eat. Yesterday I got by on the sandwich I bought in the Dublin airport, but today I’ve awakened to grumbling insides. The free toast distracts my stomach for a few hours before I’m forced to locate some real food. But how to do it? Do I walk into a restaurant and say, “Table for one”? Should I strike up a conversation with someone here at the hostel, then, like Matt did when I arrived, ask if they want some company? Only when I am dizzy with hunger do I finally succumb to entering a pub a few doors down from the hostel. I sidle up to the bar and request a pint of Guinness (nearly a meal itself, I’ve already been told several times). I ask the bartender for one of the bags of potato chips clipped to the wall beside the cash register.

  “Crisps,” he corrects me with a smile.

  You have to be able to sit quietly in your own skin in order to eat alone, and that’s something I’ve never been very good at. I’m great at being by myself with a task, but I’ve always been too self-conscious to be alone in public without at least the company of a book to bury myself in. But I feel okay after that Guinness. So I order a turkey sandwich and another beer to wash it down. Usually, these days, my brain races around, filing mental lists of anxieties, goals, and questions. But right now my thoughts are focused on my new environment. I take in the pub, the gleaming oak bar against the dull, scuffed stools, a handful of Irish guys to my right debating something to do with “the footie.” I consider the little differences I’ve come across so far, like the fact that Irish garbage cans are all labeled with the Gaelic word bruscar and that they are called “bins” here. Soothing differences because they are distracting ones. I might just be fine here all on my own.

  Or … maybe not. When I return to my room around eleven P.M., the Dutchmen are gone. Their packs are open, the various contents splayed across their beds, waiting for their owners’ return. I lie waiting, too. Three drunken Hercules banging into the room is not something you want to catch you off guard. At two A.M. they finally stumble in, consecutively knocking some part of their head or shoulders against the crooked doorframe. When they collapse on their beds, the mattress springs squeal in protest against their bulk, and they are snoring into oblivion before their beds even quiet beneath them. Once again, I feel stupid for worrying, for not knowing the rules of my new surroundings.

  Around four A.M., I think I have drifted off to sleep when a drunken Irish stranger bursts through the door. He shakes my shoulders, and I leap out my bed as if it’s on fire.

  “ ’Ello! ’Ello! ’Ello!” he greets me with feverish insistence.

  Backed up against the wall, I attempt my own echoing introduction. “Hello. Hello. Hello.”

  This only serves to confuse and agitate him. I expect the giants to come to my rescue at any moment, but they continue slumbering obliviously, hard-liquor breath curling out through their nostrils. The Irishman and I face off silently for a few more seconds before a lightbulb appears above my intruder’s head and he offers a brief but surprisingly coherent summary of our exchange: “Oh feck—I’m in the wrong room.” As quickly as he entered, he trips back out, scraping his nose on the doorframe on the way.

  It’s all I can do to resist calling my father in tears and telling him I want to come home. Instead, I give up on sleep altogether. At five A.M. I dress in the dark and head out to catch the earliest possible bus to Galway. At this point in my travels and in my life, I still regard changing course as a personal failing. I don’t yet have the hindsight to realize that some places don’t fit quite right, for whatever reason, so sometimes it’s best to cash in your chips and give it a go somewhere new, even if a mere twenty-four hours before you didn’t even know that place existed.

  [3]

  Our heroine undertakes a journey of insignificant length and significant comfort to the west of Ireland. She relateth her impressions of Galway, a very fine city, and explores the traveler’s constant companions—transience and loneliness. She battles a mighty winged one and determines to find gainful employment and permanent residence.

  I arrive at the station in time to catch the six-thirty A.M. bus to Galway. The few times I took buses any distance back home, they were filled with unkempt college students (myself included) and what seemed like the entire population of smokers from any given region. There was always one guy drinking in the back, and far more than one on the Chinatown buses I rode to Manhattan to visit friends. Their don’t-ask-questions seats smelled like ash and sweaty bodies.

  But the buses in Ireland are clean and new-looking. They’re painted with bright red stripes and sport a leaping red Irish setter. The usual gaggle of twentysomethings is present, as disheveled and boisterous as their American counterparts, and there is always a set of too-young Irish parents with their mouthy kid, the mom telling a story about someone who is a “gobshite” and the dad concurring this person is indeed a “fecking eejit.” They wear matching tracksuits, as is the fashion here, though I never once glimpsed an Irish person out for a jog my entire time in Ireland. But there are also well-dressed elderly Irish on the bus, white-haired women perched demurely with handbags on their laps and becapped men making quiet conversation with the bus driver. Excited tourists ooh and ahh, and preteens in plaid school uniforms bounce on and off. Even the drunk guy seems slightly less smelly and offensive, like it’s all a good laugh that he can’t quite locate the equilibrium necessary to remain upright as he makes his way down the aisle. The whole experience is somehow neater and tidier, like Ireland itself, a journey after which you don’t feel the need to peel off your outermost layer of skin in order to feel human again.

  Everything here is smaller than in the U.S.—cars, houses, portions, people. Once we leave the bus station, it’s a quick glide alongside Dublin’s rangy River Liffey before we emerge out into the countryside. Small stone and stucco cottages set out on trim patches of grass line the roads. Moss has taken hold anywhere it can, growing like fur on the roofs. The more modern houses look ostentat
ious and out of place where they occasionally pop up, and the developments—where, as in U.S. suburbs, it’s row upon row of the same—are positively embarrassing themselves among the quaint, aged homes. Stone fences in various degrees of disrepair partition the green pastures that stretch for miles in all directions, dotted with sheep and cows and the occasional trash-burning fire.

  It takes only three and a half hours to traverse the width of Ireland’s midsection, from the east to the west coast. We alight on Galway at the edge of Eyre Square, near John F. Kennedy Park, renamed after his 1963 visit, and it takes only a few minutes to cross it and find myself on the pedestrian-only cobblestone street that forms the center of this small city, whose population is about one fifth of Dublin’s. Growing up, I’d always considered myself a city girl woefully trapped in a small suburb where the biggest attraction was the local swan pond. I vowed to slough off my geographical birthright as soon as humanly possible, which, when you’re a good middle-class girl from upstate New York, means college. I have not been home for more than a few days at a time since my mom helped me tack my ratty Janis Joplin poster to the white wall of my freshman-year dorm room.

  So I’m wary of the sense of relief sneaking over me as I drag my suitcase through Galway’s compact city center. I pass between the unfamiliar shop signs that stand at attention on either side of the main thoroughfare: Vodafone, Cambridges, Boots, Eason’s, Hynes, Flanagan’s, Ladbrokes. It’s ten A.M. on a Saturday, but, like me, the town is barely awake, bleary-eyed and uncoordinated. People in cafés halfheartedly suck cigarettes and stare blankly through one another. The street is currently cluttered with delivery trucks allowed to descend briefly to unload, their boxes disappearing into various back doors. The stench of stale beer lingers faintly in the air, whipped around by the heavy winds washing the city clean. From somewhere close by, the aroma of fried fish spills out onto the streets like a thick haze.

  My new hostel is at the end of the main street. Outside the front door, a violinist tunes her instrument, case open and ready for donations. If my dad were here, he’d toss a dollar in. “So it won’t be you one day,” he’d say, half joking.

  I started begging my parents to buy a piano when I was five, after my father played a recording of a haunting Chopin nocturne at dinner one night. My great-grandfather was a pianist who accompanied silent movies, so maybe my musical inclinations were genetic. Or it could have all started with my mother. When she was pregnant with me, she read the emerging literature on the connections between music and intelligence and often placed a pair of large headphones around her expanding belly. I can see her rocking back and forth in our favorite chair, eyes closed and head back, an old quilt across her lap, absorbing Beethoven into our bloodstreams. She adores “Ode to Joy.” Pure and direct communication, accessible without being ordinary, that’s how Leonard Bernstein described it, though I’ve never asked my mother why it spoke to her.

  My parents decided it was safer for me to try out the guitar first: smaller, less risky an investment in case the music thing turned out to be a whim. Also, my father had a guitar. We could play together, they reasoned, my dad conveniently forgetting that his instrument was more of a shrine to his sixties youth than anything currently getting much use. His father-daughter folk-duet dream died hard. Classical guitar, where you use your fingers instead of a pick to delicately coax the sound from the strings, and not rainy-day Bob Dylan songs, is where my heart was from the very beginning.

  I was eight when I first laid hands on a viola, practically ancient in the world of string beginners. When I first dropped my long, thin bow down onto the strings, coaxing out deep, rumbling sounds from the belly of my instrument, the notes were wobbly, lilting at the edges of the pitch as opposed to cutting right through the center of it like they’re supposed to—but I didn’t care. In the beginning, all noises were equally beautiful and fascinating because I was making them. I’d press my nose against my horsehair bow and inhale the rosin slathered on. When I practiced for long stretches, the tips of my left fingers became stained charcoal black where the strings of my viola dug tiny canals into the soft flesh. Only my thumb remained pink, arched against the wooden neck that extended out from my viola’s curved body, which protruded from my own jaw. In this space, squeezed between my left shoulder and chin, we fit together like puzzle pieces. For a long time, I remained convinced that it was us—us bendable humans—who were made for violas and not the other way around.

  Once in a while my parents came upstairs after I finished practicing. My father would take out his neglected guitar, scratched and dull, and strum it while we sang Eagles and Peter, Paul and Mary songs. “Leaving on a Jet Plane” was by far my favorite, even though my mother sounded so sad when she sang it. She has a beautiful voice—soft but operatic. I searched their faces. They smiled at each other and at me, and I thought it must be the music making them feel that way, because outside that room, they frowned a lot.

  Mostly, though, they stayed downstairs while I practiced, my mother making dinner and my father grading papers. When I practiced, I willed the music to reach them. I imagined the melodies drifting down the stairs and casting a happy spell over them like a net. Some days I didn’t feel like practicing or didn’t want to practice as long as I knew I must. But still I stayed up in that room for the requisite hours, whiling away the time with a book or journal. I didn’t want to disappoint them. I wanted to be good. At the same time I knew that, although they loved music, classical viola was a foreign thing to them, to a large degree out of their grasp. And a secret part of me thrilled that it was all mine.

  Like Galway itself, the hostel where I’m staying is smaller and less intimidating than the one in Dublin. The entrance archway is painted pale pink, and flower boxes sprout on the windowsills above it. Unlike in Dublin, my reservation not only exists but is extremely specific. I’m staying in room 114 in Bed 1. I insert my key into the door with a RESIDENTS ONLY sign and thankfully navigate only one flight of stairs to reach my room. Still I struggle to manage Big Red, hastily repacked this morning before my quick departure from Dublin.

  My new hostel room is packed with four bunk beds. I booked an eight-bed dorm room this time instead of a four-bed one in the hopes of increasing my chances of girl roommates. Right now the room is blissfully empty, but I can tell from various items—hairbrushes, a pink T-shirt, wedge-heeled sandals—that there are girls staying here. Again I wonder about the mysteriously small backpacks parked all over. Where are these travelers headed and for how long? I don’t think of myself as one of them, just a girl in Ireland with a ridiculously oversize suitcase.

  I immediately feel more at home in Galway than I did in Dublin. No, not at home, exactly, but somewhere simultaneously foreign and intrinsically comfortable. There’s no pleasant Canadian to keep me company, but I realize I actually want to go out and explore the cobblestone streets, pop into one of the unfamiliar bookstores, grab a floury pastry at the bakery I passed on the walk here. Plus, I need to start looking for a job and an apartment. This hostel is a little less expensive than the one in Dublin, but not much. If I budget twenty euros a day for food and twelve for my lower bunk bed, I have about two weeks before I go broke.

  Galway’s nickname is City of the Tribes, after the fourteen merchant families who bandied it about during the Norman era. It became the foremost Irish port for trade with France and Spain during the Middle Ages and the place where, many years later, George Moore traveled to meet up with William Butler Yeats to collaborate on a play. (I know this last random fact because I once randomly came across a diary entry of Moore’s during this trip in which he called Yeats’s laugh “one of the most melancholy things in the world,” a spectacularly depressing description that has stuck with me.) Only a few feet from my hostel, the fast-flowing River Corrib gushes by, and if you turn left, you’ll hit the Spanish Arch, an extension of the imposing, protective city walls that were constructed in the 1500s. If you look across the water from this point, you can see what’s le
ft of the Claddagh, an old fishing village that used to be all thatched cottages and Gaelic speakers and is these days know for its signature rings.

  Perhaps I’m distractedly mulling over Galway’s history, or examining the quaint shops and already filling pubs, or pondering how Ireland has enough old castles that it can convert the extras into banks, but one minute I am confidently wandering my new streets and the next a pigeon flies straight into my forehead and knocks me to the ground. I’m sitting dazed on the cobblestones when a few kindly old Irish gentlemen, marveling at the impressive statistical improbability of such a thing happening, help me to my feet.

  “You all right, love?” one asks.

  “Did that seriously just happen?” I say.

  “He got you bang on!” which in Ireland means right square in the bull’s-eye that apparently is my face.

  It’s a startling beginning to an otherwise drowsy day. I walk. I window-shop. I stop by that bakery for a piece of brick-dense Irish soda bread. And I shyly enter a few bars and restaurants to ask if they’re hiring and hand over my carefully printed résumés, which are regarded with the same level of scrutiny one might a coaster.

  “Come back in three weeks,” they say, or “Try next door.”

  The sun emerges only in weak spurts, but it stops drizzling by late afternoon. Turns out it doesn’t rain all day long in Ireland, as I had imagined initially, but it does rain for a portion great or small of each day, leaving one to conclude that being a weatherman in Ireland is about the biggest scam going. It’s chilly, more like early spring back home than summer, and I wrap myself in my heaviest wool sweater. When my stomach begins growling, I follow the delicious fish smell near my hostel to its source, McDonaghs, and order fish and chips to go. I douse my meal in vinegar, which, unlike the miniature packets of ketchup and tartar sauce, is plentiful and free. I’ve never had to calculate my portions so precisely, have never had to worry about how spending a measly euro on condiments will strain my meager budget.