entertain

Let me take you to a village in the corner of Northern Ireland, an hour away from Belfast and across the Strangford Lough from Portaferry. This village is called Strangford, named after the water that laps at its seaweed strangled shore. It is very small. No one, even in Newcastle pubs, knows it. Newcastle is just twenty minutes down the road. The reason for this is that there is no reason to go to Strangford. The people are workers with routine, quiet lives. The first café, called "The Spinnaker," just opened. Their coffee is bland, but their food is home cooked by a happy black-haired woman. Stangford is its own ecosystem. Portaferry, across the Lough, has an aquarium. People know where Portaferry is. In Strangford, the people in Portaferry are called "the people from the other side." It is a small, humble life, like everything you read about in old farm books. In the town square, which basically is the whole town, there are three pubs, a candy shop, and a grocery store.

"That shiny-shoed shite," a developer from the South who would be known as a "carpet bagger" here, is buying up all the property about The Lobster Pot in order to build a hotel. The Lobster Pot already has a bad rap. The older generation of village boys hang out here. These are a never-ending cycle of hard Irish Catholic thugs who have claimed the streets and pubs of Strangford throughout generations. They will all do what their fathers have done for generations, whether it be brick laying or fishing. The village is their only home. The occasional socialist mills about in there as well, playing pool in the room above, drunk as the Irish are said to be… night after night. This is known as the more corporate establishment in the square. There is a nice restaurant adjoining it, and swanky red chairs at the bar. I have never had their lobster.

The Cuan is a chippy (French-fry fast food place) and a pub. The heating is too intense and makes the drinking atmosphere uncomfortable. Their chips are revolting. They have a lovely dish called chilly chips that resembles diarrhea… the Irish kind. The owners are a nice couple that both take yoga lessons from my aunt and have very funny pictures on their business cards. Their pub food is delicious and the waitresses are friendly. Mostly families and married couples in their thirties frequent this place, while all the kids crowd the chippy next door. The heat is really too much in the winter, though.

The Hole in The Wall is the pub where any logical young adult goes. It is just a pub, nothing else. It is not a family establishment. There are round tables and mirrors on the walls. The bartender is a hard Northern Irish woman whose son went to school with my cousin. She always looks at me suspiciously because I’m not from Strangford.

The Irish have surprising taste in alcohol. It’s depressing, actually. My family thinks Budweiser is a special American Import Beer. In the pubs they all drink Jack Daniels and Southern Comfort, to my great dismay. They even drink a lot of Mexican beer, and some have a taste for TEQUILA! That is one alcohol that I never suspected to come across in Ireland, seeing as my cousins didn’t know what corn chips were when they came over here. Odd, the whole thing. There are the Irish that like their Guinness. There are the Irish that like their Jameson… but they are few and hard to come by.

Strangford is very sweet. It is not quite chintzy enough to be a Hallmark Irish town, but it’s small enough that if Hallmark made Northern Irish cards, it would be on there. Each night people make their rounds to all three pubs, or some are part of one pub and will not touch the others. Either way, everyone is very set in how they go about their night. It’s lovely, really. The Irish are some of the more fascinating people. I will never understand the Southern Comfort, though. Ich.