It's been a while since I was in Ireland last time, probably over 15 years but the country itself left a mark in my memory for its bravery, its strong cultural identity and its astonishing green fields and wild coast lines. During my limited Irish time, I was able only two visit two places Galway and Dublin. Galway for us was nothing longer than a day trip, a night out in local pubs and a wake up call that rang pretty early to make us able to go to the train station and take a train to Dublin and the san Patrick day parade. The 17th of March is for me an important day since it is the day I started my first job abroad as a kitchen porter at "the Globe" in Marylebone road (London), exactly 20 years ago. Therefore I consider that day a sort of self-celebration and that allows me to drink more than the usual, which makes the memory of that san Patrick day I was in Dublin a little more blurred than the usual.

The city that lies on the river Liffey reminds me of a beautiful song like Radiohead, How to disappear completely, it is overall walkable and has its highlights in the Trinity College, the Jameson and the Guinness factory and the Temple bar district. Some of the most noticeable, inspiring Irish folks I had the pleasure to come across in my readings are Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and Ernest Shackleton.

The Irish explorer, obsessed as many other explorers of his generation with the cross of the Antarctica, became famous for being able to survive and eventually save the life of most his crew after a terrible shipwrecking on the boat Endurance that happened in 1915. The wreck of the Endurance was subsequently found in 2022 (over 100 after the incident) at the depth of 3000m under water, which is something I personally find amazing. Shackleton despite of this episode, lived generally a very restless and intense life and died of heart attack on another expedition 6 years afterwards, leaving his family in debt of 40.000£. His end marked the end of an era called heroic age of Antarctic exploration, an era of brave romantic heroes who managed to reach the South Pole for the first time, despite the very limited resources they had at disposal, in opposition to the "mechanical" age that came afterwards.