I'm trying to organize my thoughts into some form coherent enough to pass as a travel essay, but it isn't working very well. Problem one: the more I re-acclimate to life at home, the more nostalgia I feel for Ireland and the less I remember the frustrations I felt while there. Related to that is problem two: as distance increases, I know that the truth of whatever I write will decrease . . . which I suppose is the case for most recollections. Point being, I need to write quickly if I want to avoid a flowery tale of fluffy sheep, fluffy clouds and fluffy Irish folk.
A wave of said nostalgia hit an hour earlier when, instead of the whole milk I've been given in cafes (three years later, I still don't know how to type an accent on this keyboard) for the past few weeks, I made my tea with skim milk from the fridge. It's an unwelcome adjustment. In Ireland, the choice was between low-fat milk and full-fat milk . . . skim wasn't an option. As such, my tea was always wonderfully creamy and delicious. My favorite place in Ireland to sit, drink tea and write was at a cafe called Grappa on the river in Sligo--for a Euro fifty I could get a pot of tea and a table by the window. One wall was covered in wallpaper with maroon lilies on it, and the glass dessert case positioned against said wall never had anything in it more tempting than the croissants and scones at the tall counter. The sugar came in tubes rather than packets, and I always took a handful with me to make tea back at the townhouse.
Okay, enough of that. Time for work . . . with some Irish folk music in the background.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
A shocking weekend
I've learned not to have expectations on this trip. The ability to float and adapt is one essential to maintaining some semblance of sanity, and our weekend trip totally required that. The plan was to be picked up at the Yeats Village (the townhouses where we're staying) at 10 AM on Saturday morning, at which point Rachel and Rob would already be on the bus. From there, we'd travel south to Galway and stay for the afternoon before getting back on the bus and heading to Doolin, where we'd stay for the next two nights and visit the Aran Islands and the Cliffs of Moher.
I blame every frustration on the bus driver.
He arrived at 9.30 (time is denoted with a period instead of a colon here) and stood outside waiting as we threw things in our backpacks, scrambling because of the lost half-hour. We then discovered that he hadn't gone to the Sligo City Hotel to get R & R so after we all made it on the bus we went into town to pick them up. Long story short, he drove right past Galway and nobody noticed until we were hours out of the way. After a seven hour bus ride, we finally arrived in Doolin--a tiny town filled with bed & breakfasts on the edge of a giant cliff. Cows and sheep abound, and there is a kind of intimidating beauty about the bleakness of it all.
What I really want to tell you about is the walk that Lauren and I went on one afternoon. It wasn't raining but the clouds rolled by, grey and threatening but staggering and beautiful at the same time. It felt like the edge of the world. We decided to go walking towards the cliffs, turning down a gravel road lined with little homes that were eventually replaced by small fields, gridded by stone walls and thick brambles. We found a lane between the fields that began with tire tracks but narrowed to a single path. The entire time we walked I expected to suddenly come to a giant cliff and have the Atlantic in my hands but the path just became muddier and more difficult to traverse in our sneakers. I climbed a horse gate into a pasture, and we walked along the stone perimeter looking for a good place to jump the low wall towards the cliff. Brambles and barbed wire lined the stone, but eventually I found a place that was fairly free of obstruction--there was barbed wire on one side of the stone and a thin, solid wire on the other, but they looked easy enough to get over. I was able to raise my leg over the barbed wire and get over the wall quickly as the stones clacked and loosened under my weight. Then I was standing with my back to the barbed wire and stone and in front of me was only the single, solid, unassuming wire. I grabbed it, pulling it towards my body in order th step over it and threw myself back against the stone as my body rejected the wire or the wire rejected my body--it took a few moments before I realized what had happened. It was an electric fence. I stood there, chest heaving but not about to cry, as Lauren kept trying to ask me what had happened.
It was only scary for a moment. It was clear that we wouldn't be making it to the cliffs that day but by the time we found our way back to the muddy path it was something to joke about. When people ask me about my trip to Ireland, I'll be able to tell them I got electrocuted at the edge of the earth.
I blame every frustration on the bus driver.
He arrived at 9.30 (time is denoted with a period instead of a colon here) and stood outside waiting as we threw things in our backpacks, scrambling because of the lost half-hour. We then discovered that he hadn't gone to the Sligo City Hotel to get R & R so after we all made it on the bus we went into town to pick them up. Long story short, he drove right past Galway and nobody noticed until we were hours out of the way. After a seven hour bus ride, we finally arrived in Doolin--a tiny town filled with bed & breakfasts on the edge of a giant cliff. Cows and sheep abound, and there is a kind of intimidating beauty about the bleakness of it all.
What I really want to tell you about is the walk that Lauren and I went on one afternoon. It wasn't raining but the clouds rolled by, grey and threatening but staggering and beautiful at the same time. It felt like the edge of the world. We decided to go walking towards the cliffs, turning down a gravel road lined with little homes that were eventually replaced by small fields, gridded by stone walls and thick brambles. We found a lane between the fields that began with tire tracks but narrowed to a single path. The entire time we walked I expected to suddenly come to a giant cliff and have the Atlantic in my hands but the path just became muddier and more difficult to traverse in our sneakers. I climbed a horse gate into a pasture, and we walked along the stone perimeter looking for a good place to jump the low wall towards the cliff. Brambles and barbed wire lined the stone, but eventually I found a place that was fairly free of obstruction--there was barbed wire on one side of the stone and a thin, solid wire on the other, but they looked easy enough to get over. I was able to raise my leg over the barbed wire and get over the wall quickly as the stones clacked and loosened under my weight. Then I was standing with my back to the barbed wire and stone and in front of me was only the single, solid, unassuming wire. I grabbed it, pulling it towards my body in order th step over it and threw myself back against the stone as my body rejected the wire or the wire rejected my body--it took a few moments before I realized what had happened. It was an electric fence. I stood there, chest heaving but not about to cry, as Lauren kept trying to ask me what had happened.
It was only scary for a moment. It was clear that we wouldn't be making it to the cliffs that day but by the time we found our way back to the muddy path it was something to joke about. When people ask me about my trip to Ireland, I'll be able to tell them I got electrocuted at the edge of the earth.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Rene's
One of my favorite places in Sligo is a little cafe at the bottom of a hill near the Hawk's Well Theatre (where we go for lectures every morning). It's called Rene's, and it's owned by a French native named Emmanuel who moved to Ireland six years ago and has been in Sligo for the last two. Ireland's west coast has a pretty big surf scene and Emmanuel is a surfer, so the inside of this cafe has surfboards on the walls and is painted in blues and greens. There is one picture hanging on the wall of a grassy cliff with sheep grazing in the foreground, while in the background a surfer is riding a huge wave--it looks like one picture superimposed onto another. Lauren and I went there this morning before class and talked to him for about an hour about living in Sligo and the differences between countries, be it Ireland and France or Ireland and the United States, and it was really interesting. He speaks English with an Irish accent, but his French also comes through when he talks so sometimes he's a little bit difficult to understand . . . although I think he feels the same about me and my rapid-fire mumbly American English. Rene's specialties are coffee and huge bowls of pasta, so after the lecture we went back for lunch. Emmanuel told us he'd like to one day go back to France, but that it's extremely difficult not having money there because there is so much affluence around you at all times that it makes life harder as you scrape to pay rent and, in his case, raise a family. I loved getting the chance to talk to someone familiar with Ireland that could still look at it objectively, realizing the pros and cons about different policies and cultural norms. He told us he has thoughts of going back to France once he establishes himself financially, but likes the laid-back way in which the Irish see a lot of things. Rene's is becoming part of the morning routine and I'm glad I found somewhere to happily part with my Euros.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Stories from Sligo
Arrived in Sligo on Sunday afternoon on the smallest plane I have ever flown on. As I've already bragged, I packed extremely lightly but as a group we were several kilos over the limit and had to pay extra for our luggage . . . which was terribly disconcerting as we walked out onto the tarmac towards our tiny, propeller-bearing, Wright Brothers-recreation aircraft. I tried to sound out Irish vowels for about five minutes until the plane started rockin' and rollin' in the air and I had to close my eyes. The descent into Sligo was the worst bit--we circled the Atlantic and came back in at a pretty steep angle and from my seat in the front row, it looked as if we were about to nose dive straight ito it. I tried to rationalize the worst case scenario in my head, thinking that we'd all just inflate the life vests under our seats, swim the hundred meters to shore and have Buddha-like revelations as we realize the triviality of material things and the perils of packing too much. But we landed safely and were greeted by a handsome Irish lad who drove us to the Yeats Village in a coach bus while it rained, like it has every day since we've been here.
This is the second day of the Yeats School; there are about two hundred students of varying ages and levels of education. During the opening convocation I sat next to a reverend professor from Saskatchewan who's been coming to the school for the past twelve years and later, I talked to a 65-year-old Irish woman living in Liverpool who came here for the first time because she's always loved Yeats and wanted a new experience. Among the students in my fifteen person afternoon seminar are PhD candidates, published Yeats authors (including my professor) and a headmaster from a private school for boys in Virginia. This certain headmaster was told by our professor, Warwick Gould (who, surprisingly, is not a character from Harry Potter) from Oxford, that he could not read poetry correctly: "How do I say this without sounding critical? Well, I can't." Part of me felt really sorry for him, but I kept thinking about how much money his students would pay to see their headmaster given the what's-what by a Yeats scholar. Probably a lot. Unsurprisingly, when Dr. Gould asked someone to volunteer to read the next poem, nobody raised their hand. Unfortunately, he made eye contact with me and I was the lucky gal . . . but, not to be a braggy pants, there was no criticism of my reading. Bahahahh.
Last night Seamus Heaney gave a poetry reading to a full house and there was a reception afterwards at a restaurant in town. He's turning seventy this year and had a stroke recently, but he's still witty and sharp and his poetry is dead-on. At the reception, Dr. Doggett took me to go talk to him (although neither of us quite knew what to say to him) but he left before we could get close enough. Instead, we talked with the program director, who introduced me to his wife. I was terrified the entire time, mostly because she wasn't wearing a name tag and I couldn't remember her first name. I get the feeling that I'll be practicing the art of small talk a lot while I'm here. Main goal: forcing myself to remember names upon introductions.
Yesterday I learned that Sligo has a terrible sense of ironic humor: on break between lectures and class, I found a thrift store on a side street that had a lot of great stuff. I bought two dresses (one of which I wore to the reading last night), a jacket, a pocket Irish dictionary, a scarf and a wool sweater with the Normal School of Sligo's crest embroidered on the left chest for €21.50. Before pulling the sweater over my head to try it on, I took my glasses off and placed them on a shelf. Twenty minutes after walking out with my purchases, I realized I'd left them in the store and ran back to retrieve them. They'd already been stolen. I was frustrated and upset with myself, especially when the woman working at the desk asked for a phone contact if someone returned them or if they were found and I couldn't give her anything but my name. So the irony of the situation? The sign above the door of this thrift shop reads Charity Shop to Support Ireland's Blind. Funny, Sligo. Real funny.
Despite my stupidity in leaving my glasses, things are good in Sligo. Although the pace here is much less exhausting than in Dublin, it's certainly grittier than home. For me, traveling thus far has been trying to strike that delicate balance between exposing yourself to everything unfamiliar while still keeping a wary sensibility. The scales tipped a little bit in the wrong direction yesterday, but I'm still safe and feeling comfortable with my surroundings. Lesson for my next travel experience: wear croakies.
This is the second day of the Yeats School; there are about two hundred students of varying ages and levels of education. During the opening convocation I sat next to a reverend professor from Saskatchewan who's been coming to the school for the past twelve years and later, I talked to a 65-year-old Irish woman living in Liverpool who came here for the first time because she's always loved Yeats and wanted a new experience. Among the students in my fifteen person afternoon seminar are PhD candidates, published Yeats authors (including my professor) and a headmaster from a private school for boys in Virginia. This certain headmaster was told by our professor, Warwick Gould (who, surprisingly, is not a character from Harry Potter) from Oxford, that he could not read poetry correctly: "How do I say this without sounding critical? Well, I can't." Part of me felt really sorry for him, but I kept thinking about how much money his students would pay to see their headmaster given the what's-what by a Yeats scholar. Probably a lot. Unsurprisingly, when Dr. Gould asked someone to volunteer to read the next poem, nobody raised their hand. Unfortunately, he made eye contact with me and I was the lucky gal . . . but, not to be a braggy pants, there was no criticism of my reading. Bahahahh.
Last night Seamus Heaney gave a poetry reading to a full house and there was a reception afterwards at a restaurant in town. He's turning seventy this year and had a stroke recently, but he's still witty and sharp and his poetry is dead-on. At the reception, Dr. Doggett took me to go talk to him (although neither of us quite knew what to say to him) but he left before we could get close enough. Instead, we talked with the program director, who introduced me to his wife. I was terrified the entire time, mostly because she wasn't wearing a name tag and I couldn't remember her first name. I get the feeling that I'll be practicing the art of small talk a lot while I'm here. Main goal: forcing myself to remember names upon introductions.
Yesterday I learned that Sligo has a terrible sense of ironic humor: on break between lectures and class, I found a thrift store on a side street that had a lot of great stuff. I bought two dresses (one of which I wore to the reading last night), a jacket, a pocket Irish dictionary, a scarf and a wool sweater with the Normal School of Sligo's crest embroidered on the left chest for €21.50. Before pulling the sweater over my head to try it on, I took my glasses off and placed them on a shelf. Twenty minutes after walking out with my purchases, I realized I'd left them in the store and ran back to retrieve them. They'd already been stolen. I was frustrated and upset with myself, especially when the woman working at the desk asked for a phone contact if someone returned them or if they were found and I couldn't give her anything but my name. So the irony of the situation? The sign above the door of this thrift shop reads Charity Shop to Support Ireland's Blind. Funny, Sligo. Real funny.
Despite my stupidity in leaving my glasses, things are good in Sligo. Although the pace here is much less exhausting than in Dublin, it's certainly grittier than home. For me, traveling thus far has been trying to strike that delicate balance between exposing yourself to everything unfamiliar while still keeping a wary sensibility. The scales tipped a little bit in the wrong direction yesterday, but I'm still safe and feeling comfortable with my surroundings. Lesson for my next travel experience: wear croakies.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Learning Irish
We've toured quite a few museums in the last two days and have a few more on the itenerary today, and wherever captions accompany a painting or an exhibit it is posted in English and in Irish (or Gaelic, but most here refer to it as the former). While I've heard many a brogue, though, I haven't once heard Irish spoken. Part of it is because Dublin seems to be comprised wholly of tourists (save for the two cabbies I've spoken to) and it's also because nobody speaks the language anymore. I asked Kelly, a friend on the trip whose father immigrated from Ireland, who actually spoke Irish and she told me that there are parts of the deep country where Irish is the primary language and nobody speaks English. That was heartening, but I still felt this sort of sadness for the valiant effort the country makes to keep this dying language alive and current. The cab driver last night told Rachel and Rob (my professors), Jake and I that learning Irish is now the equivalent of learning a second language in school--the way we learn Spanish or French or Italian. After grade school, it's largely forgotten save a few phrases.
Anyways, I feel this responsibility to make an effort. Ireland has extended itself to me and, in turn, I want to hold up my end of the deal. Yesterday I was just wandering around when we had a few spare hours before dinner and the ceile (pronounced kay-lee) we went to for Irish dancing and music, and found this international bookstore where I bought a book on Irish and an accompanying CD with pronounciations and everything. I'm not saying my goal is fluency or anything, but without getting all "MY PEOPLE!" on anyone, there is the thought that this is where my family is from. They probably spoke Irish at one time, and I think that's a pretty cool thing. History feels more important and more real in a place that's so old (I touched an 800-year-old mummy's hand yesterday at Saint Michan's Church).
There is so much I want to write about but there is only so much time before we have to meet to start another day. Hopefully tonight I'll be able to get back onto here and convey at least some of it, but if not, tomorrow we're flying to the west coast to move into the apartments and kick off the two weeks of the Yeats school. Touring Dublin has been amazing, but I'm looking forward to a sense of relative normalcy for a little while.
Anyways, I feel this responsibility to make an effort. Ireland has extended itself to me and, in turn, I want to hold up my end of the deal. Yesterday I was just wandering around when we had a few spare hours before dinner and the ceile (pronounced kay-lee) we went to for Irish dancing and music, and found this international bookstore where I bought a book on Irish and an accompanying CD with pronounciations and everything. I'm not saying my goal is fluency or anything, but without getting all "MY PEOPLE!" on anyone, there is the thought that this is where my family is from. They probably spoke Irish at one time, and I think that's a pretty cool thing. History feels more important and more real in a place that's so old (I touched an 800-year-old mummy's hand yesterday at Saint Michan's Church).
There is so much I want to write about but there is only so much time before we have to meet to start another day. Hopefully tonight I'll be able to get back onto here and convey at least some of it, but if not, tomorrow we're flying to the west coast to move into the apartments and kick off the two weeks of the Yeats school. Touring Dublin has been amazing, but I'm looking forward to a sense of relative normalcy for a little while.
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