20.03: leaving Dublin, discovering Ireland

So I left Dublin on a wet Saturday morning, getting on a completely empty over-ground tram that crossed a dark and sleepy city. Once at the train station, I printed my ticket and found my pre booked seat in the carriage number 9.
Leaving Dublin meant passing by the industrial area, blocks of council houses where “everything looks so regular, tidy, clean, depersonalized..”(everything looked exactly the same: paths, front doors, parking spaces, colours and architecture of the houses, the way they set up those little green zones/parks.. it seemed you were looking at something reflected on a mirror.. ).
Half an hour later, only fields and farms were populating the countryside. Few cows, some sheep, a horse or a donkey here and there, a tractor forgotten in the middle of the field, waiting for someone to rescue it.
“.. fields and farms, farms and fields. Flat land, still somnolent under a morning light dimmed by a cloudy sky”.
The train seemed to follow the sun, and kept that path when I had to change train at Limerick junction. Where the sun was, there the train was going. Later that day, the bus I took followed the same philosophy: where the sun was, there it was heading.

PS: a woman sat next to me spent the first hour working with exceptional patience and attention on her makeup. She used all sorts of products: hydrant cream, some coloured cream to cover her eyebags, face powder, eyeshadow, eyeliner.. at every new stroke of her little powder-puff, she would carefully inspect the result on the mirror she was holding with her left hand, her eyes moving swiftly form one corner to the other of her face.
Somehow I admired the effort she put in improving her look. Not much of a change between “before” and “after”. Once, long ago, I have been told that that is exactly how a good make up should be: it is there but you cannot actually notice it.
She might have been pretty in her 20’s but time and age did not forget about her. And make up- whatever good it may be, could not hide it.