Member-only story
I Was an Irish Cheesemonger
A winter in Galway that I’ll never forget
It seemed stupid to pay for a hotel in Dublin when we could take a one-hour train and arrive in Galway only a little late — 6 or 7 pm — where my husband Joe and I had an apartment waiting for us.
When we arrived it was a fully dark November night, and raining. No, not raining. Sleeting.
The Galway train station does not have an abundance of taxis at 6pm in November, so we yanked on our backpacks and dragged our one little wheelie suitcase across the rough sidewalks.
We were soaked and shivering almost immediately. We must have looked exceptionally miserable because as we trudged past the Skeffington Arms on Eyre Square, two men guffawed at us. It was not entirely good-natured. “Welcome to fecking Ireland!” they hooted.
We arrived at our little one-bedroom apartment to discover two things. One, what the advertisement had called a “double” bed in the bedroom was in fact something called a 3/4-sized bed, which is just what it sounds like. Since we are normal adult-sized humans, this was not going to work. The couch was a loveseat and so Joe would spend the next 2 months building a bed out of couch cushions on the floor every night and giving me the bed.
