Deaf in Dublin

Yesterday morning was absolutely brill for hoofin’ it around Dublin, hunting cool art (the continuing Searching for Cian McLoughlin tour). I found the cool art easily-ish too! The only thing that kept me from going to the very last of the hotels was this — my poodles were barking ferociously. We’re talkin’ feets doin’ serious Cujo impressions.

On the mega whole, awesomeness abounded – I only got a tiny bit off course ONCE! Yes, I deserve a rock solid round of applause for not getting hopelessly lost. We’ll pause here while you stand, stamp your feet and raise a lit Bic or two. Grazie, grazie, (curtsies prettily).

Not only did I see fab paintings by Cian and other local artists, I now know where I’ll stay next time I’m in Dublin. It won’t be here, my current crib.

I’m at The Gresham. It’s, as a friend put it, a Dublin institution. While my room is nice, warm and comfortable and there's a decent restaurant (though the lighting in the bar area is blinding), in other, more calm, circumstance I totally would not have shelled out the bucks. Why?! The staff is friendly but it’s clear that NONE of the employees has ever met a deafie AND, quite possibly, the entire concept of a customer having NO bloody sound system is utterly brand-y new to each and every one of them.

Fine. Honest. BUT they’re also all incredibly slow learners. How many times do I need to go through my I’m-deaf-so-you’ll-need-to-write-down-what-you’re-saying spiel? With one worker bee, it took five run throughs (including at least one where I helpfully provided the definition of the word deaf) and even that wasn’t enough. She just kept talking at me, full speed ahead. (Just FYI, English was, in fact, her first language) Later, when I stopped by to ask the front desk fellow about airport shuttles, it took three full run throughs before he put pen to paper. Every exchange here, small to large, is a major struggle. Is saying “you need to right down what you’re saying” somehow confusing?

I’d booked this place while I was in a pressurized, kinda freaked out state. My vaca had done a radical, unhappy 180 on the very first morning I woke here. I needed to get someplace comfortable, centrally located and I wanted to be there fast. I really wasn’t up for an extended, meandering, gosh-what-suits-me-best search.

At first I thought, perhaps this complete unfamiliarity with the very notion of deafness was, mebbe, peculiar to Dublin in general BUT at the coffee houses I stopped in, the bakeries where I got directions AND at The Dean and Shelbourne hotels, folks seemed to easily and immediately grasp the sitch. NO problems.

So, I gotta ask, what the everlasting, gob-stopping Christ is your prob, Gresham? For the rent they ding, the staff RILLY ought to be capable of a bit more than pretty smiles. Ya know?

On the art front though, the Gresham does a fine job – holds its own with the competition. While it doesn’t have (yet?) any of McLoughlin’s work, it does exhibit some pretty tremendous stuff.

I was truly impressed with all the hotels' original, local, very interesting art, versus cheap bland repro crap. Hotel as art gallery – how mondo cool is that! Granted, none of them were Holiday Inn Express type joints. I wonder what they’ve got on their walls. If I’d more time, I’d investigate.