Ireland

I turned around in my seat, and grabbed the 5 Guinness placed on the bar, and passed them out around the group. We'd been playing in the key of A for three straight hours, and I am not sure which number beer this was. Hal the fiddle player gave me a nod, and everyone burst out into some incomprehensionable joke about an old man in a flatcap who had just walked in to escape the dreary weather.

Ireland.

Cork, Ireland.

Apparently, I've got some old Haggerty family here in Cork. None of them made it to the bluegrass session at the Quarter Room, half-seven on Sunday night. Instead, I was following Hal and the rest of the Old Valley String Band. By that point, my mandolin chop was starting to lose some precision, but that's the way the music is meant to go sometimes. "Ah, maybe one last tune lads," and off we went into the key of A for another half-hour. Another Guinness, or two?, the I-IV-I-V sinking into my bones, more flatcaped old men enter, and we all sputtered to a random stop on the V. It's time to end. And "pay" for the drinks? Riley, you'll learn, when we play we don't pay.

I found my way home in the dark and rain, back to John the couchsurf host, thinking about the traditional music sessions I'd sat in earlier that day in more corners of more pubs, and the brilliant weather out on the coast from the day before, as me and the Brazilians created our own sneaking hike through farmers' wet fields and over fences. Travel is an absurd density of experience, but I needed to chill down. Too much backpack train bus road time. Time to get out of go-mode, the only mode you can get away with in Oxford, the kind of mode that sacrifices a patient pace I've come to both respect and hunger.

So today, tapping this out on an old iPod touch, wandering little back neighborhoods in the sun, finding this great cathedral to sit in and tap. Tap tap tap.