The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost Read Online Free PDF

the same time I knew that, although they loved music, classical viola was a foreign thing to them, to a large degree out of their grasp. And a secret part of me thrilled that it was all mine.
    Like Galway itself, the hostel where I’m staying is smaller and less intimidating than the one in Dublin. The entrance archway is painted pale pink, and flower boxes sprout on the windowsills above it. Unlike in Dublin, my reservation not only exists but is extremely specific. I’m staying in room 114 in Bed 1. I insert my key into the door with a RESIDENTS ONLY sign and thankfully navigate only one flight of stairs to reach my room. Still I struggle to manage Big Red, hastily repacked this morning before my quick departure from Dublin.
    My new hostel room is packed with four bunk beds. I booked an eight-bed dorm room this time instead of a four-bed one in the hopes of increasing my chances of girl roommates. Right now the room is blissfully empty, but I can tell from various items—hairbrushes,a pink T-shirt, wedge-heeled sandals—that there are girls staying here. Again I wonder about the mysteriously small backpacks parked all over. Where are these travelers headed and for how long? I don’t think of myself as one of them, just a girl in Ireland with a ridiculously oversize suitcase.
    I immediately feel more at home in Galway than I did in Dublin. No, not at home, exactly, but somewhere simultaneously foreign and intrinsically comfortable. There’s no pleasant Canadian to keep me company, but I realize I actually want to go out and explore the cobblestone streets, pop into one of the unfamiliar bookstores, grab a floury pastry at the bakery I passed on the walk here. Plus, I need to start looking for a job and an apartment. This hostel is a little less expensive than the one in Dublin, but not much. If I budget twenty euros a day for food and twelve for my lower bunk bed, I have about two weeks before I go broke.
    Galway’s nickname is City of the Tribes, after the fourteen merchant families who bandied it about during the Norman era. It became the foremost Irish port for trade with France and Spain during the Middle Ages and the place where, many years later, George Moore traveled to meet up with William Butler Yeats to collaborate on a play. (I know this last random fact because I once randomly came across a diary entry of Moore’s during this trip in which he called Yeats’s laugh “one of the most melancholy things in the world,” a spectacularly depressing description that has stuck with me.) Only a few feet from my hostel, the fast-flowing River Corrib gushes by, and if you turn left, you’ll hit the Spanish Arch, an extension of the imposing, protective city walls that were constructed in the 1500s. If you look across the water from this point, you can see what’s left of the Claddagh, an old fishing village that used to be all thatched cottages and Gaelic speakers and is these days know for its signature rings.
    Perhaps I’m distractedly mulling over Galway’s history, or examiningthe quaint shops and already filling pubs, or pondering how Ireland has enough old castles that it can convert the extras into banks, but one minute I am confidently wandering my new streets and the next a pigeon flies straight into my forehead and knocks me to the ground. I’m sitting dazed on the cobblestones when a few kindly old Irish gentlemen, marveling at the impressive statistical improbability of such a thing happening, help me to my feet.
    â€œYou all right, love?” one asks.
    â€œDid that seriously just happen?” I say.
    â€œHe got you bang on!” which in Ireland means right square in the bull’s-eye that apparently is my face.
    It’s a startling beginning to an otherwise drowsy day. I walk. I window-shop. I stop by that bakery for a piece of brick-dense Irish soda bread. And I shyly enter a few bars and restaurants to ask if they’re hiring and