You find yourself in the choices you make, not in the distances you travel.

He was, unquestionably, the ugliest human being I had ever seen.

Yellowed teeth jutted out from a pair of cracked, filthy lips. Beneath a dirty cap, his beady eyes were unfocused, drifting haphazardly from one side of the crowded street to the other. In his weathered hands was a dented paper cup that he rattled intermittently, coins jangling to the tune of hurried humanity. He was in nobody's way where he sat in his shabby corner of that Dublin street. But in that moment, I was furious that he even existed.

It was summer in Dublin but Dublin did not care. Instead, Dublin plunged itself again and again into soggy puddles of miserable, cold rain and refused to leave them. As I stood there in the cold, gray rain, completely lost without a single idea as where I was supposed to go, I let my panic turn into anger. After all, anger is easy and fear is not. Where was the country I had come across an ocean to lose myself in? Where was the Dublin of the fiddles and the bright skies and the warm music? Where was the Ireland of the endless cliffs and the green horizons, the Ireland the postcards had promised me?

And what was this dirty man doing in this city that was supposed to be beyond reality, this city that was supposed to change everything?

I turned away, trying to bury my thoughts and my fears as I scanned my map again, looking desperately for my stop. If I was late, I would have to stay in Dublin overnight and I could not afford that on my budget.

I was so panicked that I didn't hear the bus roll up just one street over, didn't bother to look up from where I was trying to distinguish alleys and boulevards on my flimsy, paper map. Until I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard the jangling of coins in a paper cup.

"That one there yours?" a hoarse voice said in my ear, "It's about to leave so you better run."

I stared. The ugly man was pointing at my bus, the red and white double-decker I had been about to miss and that was boarding the last of its passengers. I stammered something at him and then ran for it, catching up just as the driver was about to leave.

I don't even remember if I thanked him.

Later, I found the other Ireland I had been promised, the pretty Ireland of blue skies and grassy horizons. But I don't remember it half as well as the Ireland of the cold, rainy days and dirty, kind men. In the end, the postcard beauty of the fantasy I wanted became less than the painful beauty of the reality I saw. True beauty is always real.