Across the Irish Sea

"Fourth floor," the ferry terminal attendant smiles at us, "and you're in paradise."

Sure enough, the ferry to Wales is grandiose. We climb the mirrored stair to explore the double cinema, James Joyce lounge, red velvet armchair arrangements, children’s playplace. There is a full cafe, gambling machines, and a duty free shop.

Four floors of vehicle decks are topped by a passenger deck, a deck of cabins, and above the promenade, a helicopter deck.

It's very, very quiet. Apart from the uniformed woman behind the information deck, we see only one other person — until a very loud passel of teenagers board and swagger all around the deck. Seventy-seven of them: Eileen asks. They're on a school trip to Manchester.

We've claimed a set of four armchairs in an aft lounge. I sit with my feet up on the back of a chair, eating last night's takeaway pizza and practicing Welsh on Duolingo. I probably won't have much opportunity to speak it, but it'll be helpful to be able to read and pronounce the sounds.

Here's a primer, assuming I'm right:
Ll, as in "Llyn Peninsula," is like a soft "thyl." This might be a sort of double-letter lisp; I notice "dd" is a soft "dth" too.
"C" is a hard sound, "cennin," leeks, like "kennin."
"Holyhead," where we're landing, is "Hollyhead."
"Ch" is soft, aspirated. "Dych ch'in.." ("do you...") is like "deechh chheen."
And so on. There's a lot more: w and y sounds that are contextual, vowel sounds in consistent combinations I can't yet remember.

Tricky, given that it took most of a week to say "Glendalough" correctly in Ireland. Eileen thought "-low," I thought "-lew," and we were both wrong. It's actually a slightly softer-than-Scottish "-loch."

We read and lounge. The three hour voyage feels like the most daylight hours we've yet sat still.

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