What have I been up to the past couple of weeks?
A Trip to County Wicklow
Two weekends ago, my fellow interns and the participants of Notre Dame's Irish Seminar in Dublin went to County Wicklow, a beautiful area where everything has 'glen' in its name, like Glenmalure or Glendalough. I swear, I had the line from the song
Danny Boy that goes 'From glen to glen, and down the mountainside' stuck in my head all. day.
County Wicklow is known as 'The Garden of Ireland', and for good reason:
lots of green stuff.
flowers.
waterfalls.
and cows, horses, and sheep!
(OK, so I may not have waterfalls, cows, horses, or sheep in my garden, but someone does, right?)
Our bus got stopped behind a tractor. Nebraska flashback!
So. Beautiful.
We've also been following the US in the World Cup. We proudly proclaim our American-ness during the matches (something I would have been a bit hesitant to do in France). The tie against England was exciting, the Slovenia match slightly disappointing, the Algeria game was impossible to watch because England was playing at the same time, and incredulously, ALL of the pubs decided to show the England game instead of the US one, despite our pleas of "America is Ireland's FRIEND! England is its OPPRESSOR! You really want to show England's match right now?" Apparently, they did.
And last week was the sad end to the U.S.'s streak in the World Cup with a disappointing loss to Ghana.
We were a little sad, to say the least.
Performances of all kinds!
Through the Irish Seminar program (aka paid for by Notre Dame :), we went to go see The Importance of Being Earnest at the Gaiety Theater. Stockard Channing played Lady Bracknell, and she was good, but I couldn't stop thinking of her as Rizzo from Grease!
We saw La Boheme at the flashy new Grand Canal Theater. I'm not a huge opera fan, but they set it in modern day New York, so that made it a bit more Rent-like (read: bearable).
(outside the theater, on the docklands)
Hurling.
No, it doesn't mean vomiting, it's a really exciting Irish sport!
It's a fast-paced game a bit like lacrosse, except you use wooden hurls (like baseball bats with a flattened end) instead of lacrosse sticks. The matches we saw were in Croke Park, a huge stadium where the Irish sports of hurling and Gaelic football are played (annddddd where Notre Dame will play a football game in 2012, hint hint mom and dad...)
It was a sunny day, and it was easy to identify the fans.
My friend Kaitlyn came to visit me for a week en route to Uganda last week, and we had a lot of fun while she was here:
We visited the Jameson Distillery.
Downside: It's not used as a distillery anymore (the real one is in the south of Ireland, near Cork) and there are a lot of rather cheesy manequins in the museum.
Upside: Free sampling! We each got a 'Jemmy' (whiskey and ginger ale) and then compared Jameson with Jack Daniels and a scotch. Kaitlyn was a selected taste-tester (and she has the graduation certificate to show for it) , while I just mooched off of hers later.
We learned the difference between whiskey and scotch: whiskey is made using a dry heat and scotch is made using a peat fire so as to impart a bit of a smoky flavor (in addition to the whole geographical region thing, i.e. Scotch is made in Scotland).
It was all in the name of education, I assure you.
The two of us visited the seaside fishing village of Howth, to the north of Dublin.
It was a really quaint little place, complete with:
sailboats in the harbor,
fishermen,
seals (!)
and the ruins of an old church
We got a tour of the Irish Parliament (the Dáil) with one of the (beautiful) Irish senators.
We sat in on a debate session, unfortunately over the recent decline in tourism in Ireland not the very, very serious state of the Irish economy (The government just admitted that 20 million dollars is 'gone' by bailing out Anglo-Irish bank, currently the most debt-riddled bank in the entire world right now. Oh, and the population of Ireland is about 5 million). The Celtic Tiger is a currently a curse word.
(us with Senator Mark Daly, our tour guide)
We went around the buildings, including one of two bars (one is reserved only for senators and TDs), the other anyone can go in. I was a bit taken aback at how nonchalant everything was. The ex-Prime Minister passed us in the hall with a friendly hello. Although we walked through a security 'area' to get in, and they had a x-ray machine, it was turned off, and our group casually walked through complete with backpacks and large purses. State security is clearly not a priority.
We saw Riverdance in Dublin.
Legit, no? We got 'partially obstructed view' tickets for 12 euro (aka we were in the box closest to the stage). But since it wasn't a sold-out performance, we moved after the first song into more expensive seating! Great Success! (said in Borat voice)
Riverdance was really amazing and it made me wish I wasn't born with two left feet. There were a few eye-rollingly cheesy scenes (including this really deep, dramatic narrative voice that would say things like, 'he was a sunbeam in the day, and a fire at night' or 'it was the dawn of the Celtic rising'), as well as a dance-off (complete with theatrical smack-talking) between two black jazz dancers and three white Celtic dancers, who all become friends at the end.
Kaitlyn and I went to the Guinness Storehouse
...like any good Dublin tourist should (we figured doing the Jameson and Guinness tours in one day would have been too much :), which was really well-done.
There were about seven floors detaling the process of making Guinness, from the collection of raw materials (barley, hops, water, yeast) and fermentation,
to the barrel making (or coopering),
to the bottling,
to transporting Guinness,
to advertising through the centuries,
all of the way up to the Gravity Bar to get our free pint of Guinness and stare out at the city.
We did a lot of walking and sightseeing the week Kaitlyn was here, from Phoenix Park (kind of like Central Park in NYC except not so central) to the harbor, as well as hitting up some Irish pubs.
Aaaaannnndddd: a trip to Galway!
We woke up at 5:30 am (the morning after the terrible defeat to Ghana...ugh) to catch a two and a half hour bus to west of Ireland. Kaitlyn slept most of the way, but I couldn't manage to fall asleep for very long. A rather dirty man smelling strongly of whiskey (this is at maybe 7 or 8 am) sat down in in the seat in front and me and proceeded to talk to me the rest of the way there. He introduced himself as Cormack, and we actually had some really interesting conversations about the role of Catholicism in Ireland, whether people can be held morally responsible for things that were accepted at the time (i.e. slavery), the role of the courts in the U.S., on and on. For how completely drunk he was, I was stunned that he could carry a conversation like that.
Cormack asked me to guess his age (never, ever a good question to ask). In my head, I thought he was probably in his 60s, but to be nice I guessed 50. He was 38, and I was stunned. He began to tell me that he was a recovered alcoholic (recovered no, alcoholic, yes) and I just wanted to cry for him. What circumstances and events in his life had led him down that path? What awaited him at the end of the bus ride? Cormack offered to show Kaitlyn and I around Galway, an offer that I politely declined, and he fell asleep right afterward. We hurried off the bus, but he remained in the back of my head the rest of the day.
The weather in Galway was ridiculous. Cloudy, sunny, rainy, sunny, cloudy again, rain, sun. Kaitlyn and I both got sunburned and soaked more than once.
Spanish arch (a famous arch from the 15th century or something that was kind of a letdown in real life)
The beautiful harbor
Salthill beaches
JELLYFISH GENOCIDE!
We couldn't figure out what was going on, but we literally saw hundreds of beached jellyfish dead (dying?) on the beaches. Kind of gross.
Check that one off the bucket list!
A long walk...
It was a great day full of salty air, beaches, ice cream, and sunshine (well, some of it). Basically the essential ingredients of a great summer day anywhere.
Toss in a guy using a kite as an umbrella, and voila! Perfect day!
And just to complete the awesome day, we had a completely full bus on the way back, thus spending the way back with a huge group of German schoolkids and being scrunched next to an old guy who snored. You win some, you lost some.
On another topic, I'll be 21 in just a couple days, and it's starting to dawn on me that my last days of what can be called childhood are waning. I've been thinking a lot about how in junior high I used to see high schoolers and say to myself, 'When I graduate from high school, that's when I know I'm old.' The same thing happened graduating high school; the bar then lifted to college, or from turning 18 to turning 21. Well, 21 is sort of the point of no return as far as birthdays go, it's the last birthday where you receive any benefits in the US (driving at 16, voting at 18, drinking legally at 21), besides getting your social security benefits several decades later.
It's made me think a lot about what I want for my life, what I was put on this earth to do, what I can realistically accomplish. 21 is an exciting age to be. My whole life stretches before me, full of possibilities. I'm at the age when life's sobering realities and cynicism have not yet jaded me. 21 is going to be a good year.
Cheers.
Claire
p.s. The people in my office have been complaining about the heat and humidity. To be clear, it's in the 50s-60s, always with a nice breeze, and maybe 30% humidity :)
