I’m completely fooling you if you think I know a word of Gaelic. To be honest it’s difficult to come up with a nice sounding title for a fairly quiet sort of day.
According to Google Translate “Slán Meiriceá” means Goodbye America and “Dia Duit Ireland” means Hello Ireland. I did a teeny bit of research behind these words and discovered that “Slán” literally means “safe”. So when you’re saying goodbye you’re really just trying to say “be safe”. There are a few variations for saying goodbye depending on the context. “Dia Duit” means “God to you” and is used by everyone regardless of religion. And now we all know a little bit of Gaelic! Language lesson over.
Today we bid farewell to America and hopped on a plane to Dublin!
Chicago: One of the best cities in the United States
Before we left pretty Chicago we took a couple pics to show off one of our favorite cities:
We got our fill of this delicious Japanese food from Ramen-San. I highly recommend it if you’re ever in town. Although our favorite Japanese restaurant in Chicago is still Gyu-Kaku Japanese BBQ.
Slán Meiriceá!
We took a cab from our downtown hotel to Chicago O’Hare International Airport a couple of hours early. Just when we arrived it started to thunderstorm with ominous gusty winds. As we watched the inbound and outbound flights get delayed or canceled we started to worry that our flight might also be affected. Luckily it wasn’t!
But a few hours into our flight a dreaded announcement occurred over the speaker. “If there are any nurses or doctors aboard please go to isle 17 A.”
Addam and I have had the unfortunate luck to be on a flight with someone who had a medical emergency en route to Northwest Arkansas from a long Australia trip. We were on our last leg (Dallas to XNA) when we were forced to land at a different Dallas airport. There we were stuck for an extra 6 hours until the airline was able to find us another flight. So when we heard this announcement our hearts sunk. Not again! Not now that we were so close to starting our adventure!
Like every other passenger not the Dublin-bound flight we craned our necks to assess with our unskilled eyes whether the person looked sick enough to cause an emergency landing. I started to think about our selfishness. Inconvenience is meaningless in the face of the wellbeing of a human life. But self-centered beings that we are I know we were all thinking the same thing – please let us just get to Dublin on time.
I’m not sure what the problem ended up being with the poor lady but thankfully we were all spared an emergency landing and made it to Dublin in good time!
Dia Duit Ireland!
The days have blurred together a little bit so we are already in Day 4 as I write this but here’s a little piece of advice that you should not ignore. If you’re on an overnight flight, even if it’s just 7 hours, GO TO SLEEP. I’ve had 30 minutes sleeps in over 30 hours now. It’s been a whirlwind.
