1 post tagged “ireland”
So you may have noticed, I've posted this week an unusually large amount of articles and posts I've found in newspapers and blogs. You may have also noticed there have been no pictures, save the Excellent Italian Greyhound, which couldn't be denied. Why have I been posting so much junk, you may ask (well, I don't think it's junk). Plain and simple, I've been trying to get all the photos from previous posts off of this first page. If your computer is anything like mine, it goes into cardiac arrest every time I type in oceanorchestra.vox.com. It just doesn't like my page. All those photos and videos make it nervous, it starts breathing hard, and after that is unlikely to move at any reasonable pace. So I've been posting all these text-based articles in the hopes that I might push back the posts on Berlin and Munich and concerts, so I could write about my most recent travels in Ireland, which, admittedly, I took way too many pictures of. Let's put it this way: I went nuts with the camera. If you've already browsed the pictures, you may have noticed. I took over 400 pictures and I don't even think I loaded half of them into Vox. So if you're in for a while, you might want to read on. But if you don't have much time, or if your computer freezes up after loading a few pics, you might want to sail away from Ocean Orchestra at this point, lest the rest of your stay be a frothy ride. But if you yourself have got the time, and your computer can handle a little work, then stick around and see the pretty pictures and read of the great beauty of Ireland.
So, where can you go to encounter people with buildings out of the middle ages staring them every morning in the face, where you have to dodge sheep and horses and cows while driving on the road, where there are so many rocks that you'd think people farm them there, where the people themselves are willing to talk to total strangers for 10-20 mins. time, where the weather changes from sun to rain at the flip of a coin, where the sun doesn't set until 11 PM and rises before 6 AM, where traditional folk music & dance still happens in your local pub and isn't regulated to tourist traps, and where you can see perhaps hundreds of various land formations in a space no bigger than my homeland of Kentucky? Where? Do you want to give a guess? Yes! You're right! IRELAND!!!
So yep. Did you know I was in Ireland last week? Can you figure out I had a good time? Well, in case there was any confusion, I had a great time. A great great time. Honestly, at first, I was a little unsure about it. I got there pretty late evening Saturday night, it was raining hard, kind of cold, and I thought, "Yeah, well I guess I should've expected this kind of weather. I mean, it is Ireland!" So I took the bus from the airport to Dublin, ask a couple of American exchange students the way to my hostel, and they pointed me in a general direction, and I began to walk through all the drunk violent talking people (it was about 9 PM). They really love the F word, only they say it like Fook you! I mean, they say it as often as anyone in the states says "damn." It's just really common for them, and I figured it's not as bad a word for them to say as it is for us. (In regards to this, later in the way, I was in a taxi one day and the taxi driver just said it when he took the wrong turn. And this was a totally nice guy. I mean, really nice. I've never met a nicer stranger than this guy. And there it was, on his lips, at the wrong turn. So I remembered, yeah, it's not a big deal here. And really not a all that big a deal, anyway.)
Dublin: So I flew into Dublin Saturday night and it was raining. Really it was more gray and cool than rainy. I really didn't have much time to do anything. I happened to be staying in like the party area of Dublin called Temple Bar. I looked for a while for something good to eat, and came up empty. I did find a quiet bar where I had my first Guinness in Ireland, however. I ended up later eating at some lame fast food place that was really expensive, with loads of blasted peeps inside. I had some weird conversations I hardly understood. It was kind of hard to sleep that night, given how wild everyone was being just outside my window. I was staying in a room with 11 other guys from everywhere. I talked to them a bit before hitting the hay and...
then I woke up to the pit-pat-pit of rain outside our window. That pit-pat would continue throughout the day. I started out after eating a light breakfast in the hostel and just headed down the street. the funny thing was that I was in dublin, Ireland and really very little idea of what there was for a guy like me to see on a Sunday. On every street there was painted on the pavement "Look Left" or "Look Right" to help (maybe?) drunk pedestrians figure out which way to look before crossing one of the thousands of one-way streets. I hear they do this in England, too. So that street just led me around for a while until it led me to the giant Christ Church, some centuries old church dating back to like 800 or something when vikings built it.
So that street just led me around for a while until it led me to the giant Christ Church. The church just struck me as massive, even though it might not be even half as massive as Vienna's own Stephansdom. Nevertheless, I think this picture I have to post will give you an idea of how big it looked, as it crowds its way into the picture. On the outside I caught sight of some really nice old doors, and saw that one of them was fitted with a very modern security device. Quite the anachronism.
As I was going in, the organ player was just about to start warming up for that morning's service. This wild organ music started playing, really creepy sounding, like you'd hear it in a old vampire movie or something, as dracula was approaching the young lass he's about to bite. That's the scene I was thinking of as I was listening to this church music. Made me feel very holy. Later, the choir came in to warm up, and while the organist kept playing the minor key music, it fit really well with what the choir began to sing. It was a really nice and unexpected treat, to get to listen to this choir just practicing. The church itself struck me as really old (I guess you might expect that of a church built around the year 800 AD and by Vikings). Before the choir really got started, I just quietly strolled through the various compartments of the sanctuary. There was a baptismal room with some very interesting stained-glass pictorals of various famous Irish/English saints, and the baptismal pool itself was really something to examine.
Anyway, the factory was pretty cool I guess. It was a pretty chintzy, though, with this video tour guide "guiding" us through the factory. This guy had to be the worst actor I've ever seen. I guess he was actually one of the higher ups in the Guinness business, but whereas he spoke with a pretty even tone, he moved his body like he were some sort of liberty speaker, shaking his fists in the most falsely energetic manner to tell me just how important Guinness Stout is. My favorite part of the tour was the floor where they had on display a lot of the old classic Guinness advertisements, like the old cartoons of the bamboozled zoo keeper who keeps getting his Guinness stolen by the animals. While I thought they were brilliant, I couldn't help but wonder at all those famous phrases, "Guinness is good for you," "Guinness makes you strong," etc. and how appealing that little mustachioed man might've been to children whose greatest pleasure was to bask in the warm glow of Saturday morning cartoons (presuming they have those in Ireland). And just think of what happened to poor Joe Camel....
So after this, Lhamo and I decided to go to the nearby Modern Art Museum of Ireland. It was actually one of the more engaging Modern Art museums I've been do. Modern art tends to have a distancing effect, as those who don't "know art", or who don't presume they know, often feel at odds with what they're seeing on the wall or screen. A perfect example would be two sculptures outside the building, both called "Woman and Bird," with one featuring a pitchfork and a small ball-shaped object, and the other sort of a column with a cylinder at the top. Yeah, this is not a pipe, I know. But that's what I feel to be one of the great pretensions of our time. As a column and cylinder, it might be considered a fine piece of work, but entitled "Woman and Bird," well, what's the point? It gets to the point when those "in" are only working for those "in" and to tell with the rest. Anyways, one of the interesting themes I noticed in this particular museum was the use of film or photo to depict mundane repetition. For instance, one exhibit showed a clip of the rising steps of an escalator. The clip itself was only a second or two long, but then at its end it would loop to the beginning, simulating almost what an actual rising escalator looks like. Why bother, one might ask. But that might be the point. An escalator's movement is nothing spectacular, and I'm sure many a mallrat spend hours a day remarking the phenomenon, but to loop so short a clip of an escalator and thus reproduce almost exactly what the escalator already does (instead of, perhaps, filming an escalator rising for 10 minutes straight), and you come up against superfluity, which one might accuse an escalator of being, anyhow. There was another exhibit of photographs of meticulously constructed office space scenes (not the film). An orderly desk, a corner office, a men's bathroom, etc. All the scenes were built out of a sort of card-stock, and then painted in realistic, but a little too bright to be realistic, colors. Apart from the brightness of the colors, the scenes were extremely life-like. One thing I noticed, however, was how the most mundane things, like a desk telephone, were made even more mundane in the exhibition. A normal desk telephone will at least be a little personalized by the list of phone numbers it has written on the white note card at the top. Only the phone in the exhibition had no numbers on the card. It was blank, and thus even more mundane. Again one might ask, "Why not just take a picture of such an ordinary scene?" But again, in the reproduction of the mundane, the meticulous detail put into every scene, and then even transition from mundane to über-mundane (like the telephone), superfluity was elicited. A couple other examples: a film (about 10 minutes long) of a nude woman lying on a table in a fetal-like position. For the entire ten minutes she barely moved. Again, superfluous. Why not just take a picture of the woman? But again, perhaps superfluity was the point. Or another film of just a garden scene, about 5 minutes long, an occasional wind blowing the leaves, but nothing else really happening.
Lhamo and I began our long trek (we had no bus pass) back to the center of the city. It took what seemed like forever in the rain. We eventually made it back and decided to try our first fish and chips. This is sort of the food Ireland is known for. I can't imagine why. It was extremely expensive for fish and fries (chips) (like everything else) everywhere we looked. The cheapest placed we found was a fish + chips + coffee deal for 9.50. It looked to be sort of a fast food joint, so I wasn't really expecting much, but to my pleasurable surprise, I really liked it. The fish was cooked in such a way that it didn't taste just like fish. I was satisfied afterwards. On the way there we found James Joyce, and a few bits of his Ulysses, as well as seeing a few other interesting sites.
Lhamo and I took a break from one another for a while. I went back to take a short nap at my hostel, and people were already on the streets and very drunk. I passed a few guys who were screaming at each other, almost spitting, in a drunken tongue I couldn't really decipher. I had to move on quickly before things escalated. I saw another guy pissing in the middle of the sidewalk, his member out and leaking onto a public telephone. I walked down through the temple bar area to my place, and passed a number of women fitted in their playboy bunny outfits, and everywhere I looked I saw young people, tourists and locals alike (the local men chasing after the tourist women) going to great lengths on a Sunday evening to have a "little fun."
I met Lhamo later for a drink at the quiet bar I had found the previous evening. She had something called a "baby Guinness," which turned out not to be Guinness at all, as she had thought, but rather a liqueur drink with a little Baily's on top. I had a Guinness and then a Smithwick's.
Carrick-on-Shannon: I couldn't sleep well Sunday night for fear of missing my 8:30 bus, so I was waking up every 20 minutes from 3 AM on to look at my watch. Finally I got up and got ready, and got to the bus station way early. I got on the right bus and settled in for a relaxing three-hour right through the midlands of Ireland. As we passed out of Dublin into the country-side, it was like God's curse of gray skies and rain was lifted, and the most beautiful sunny skies began to show up. I began to see a little of the beauty I had hoped hope for in coming to Ireland. Rolling hills, lots of sheep, cows, and horses, and LOTS of green, green grass. I got to Carrick-on-Shannon, where my good friend Andrea has been living the past year or so, and she met me with a wide smile and big hug as I got off the bus. After a short rest from that burdensome bus ride, she showed me around the little town of Carrick-on-Shannon, which is to be distinguished from another Carrick in Ireland, which isn't on the Shannon river (uhh. forgive the obvious). Carrick-on-Shannon (a pain to type) was a nice little town. Very friendly, bright, and the nightlife wasn't nearly so wild as in Dublin. Seemed people were more interested in living than dying. Andrea showed me the river and surrounding parks (everything cast in the bright tones of the blue, bouncy white-cloud sky), as well as maybe Ireland's smallest church (smallest I've seen in the world). We also met up with one of Andrea's friends, a fellow immigrant from Hungary (Andrea's from Slovakia), named Judith. Judith didn't speak much English, but as the week went on I came to know her pretty well, and found out just how sweet a girl from Hungary can be.I also found that drunkenness is not only an evening activity in Ireland (or Carrick-on-Shannon, for that matter), as we came up on a group of young punks (or rather, they came upon us as we were looking at a particular sculpture), and they seemed pretty keen on getting into Judith's and Andrea's respective pants right then and then, if they'd been allowed. I got pretty frustrated at my own silence, but I knew if I had spoken up we might've been in more trouble than we could handle, so I did what I could to detract their dripping jaw's attention from the girls by letting them tell me how stupid Americans are. All in good fun, of course...
Road Trip: The third part of my trip took place when Andrea and I decided to be daring and rent a car. We found a place to rent to us for 50 euro a day, and we planned to keep it two days, drive down along the west coast of Ireland, through Galway and eventually make it to the Cliffs of Moher before turning around and making our way back. This had to be the best experience I've had traveling so far in Europe. For one, it was a complete dare for me to get in the right-hand side of the car and be the driver, while rolling along on the left-hand side of the road. Plus, the roads we were taking were mostly these tiny blue highways that were a scenic alternative to the rather boring main roads (equivalent to our interstates). Basically, I'll give you the short run down of our trip, and then I'll show you the pics (because there are a lot).
We started out from Carrick-on-Shannon and traveled along some dusty overgrown roads, occassionally passing a bunch of sheep or cows and seeing some high relief landscape, and lots of rocks. Ireland is full of rocks. It's amazing they can grow anything there. We stopped in a little town to take some photos of an ancient rotting castle and a neat church building, and later we came upon another abandoned abbey, where I had sort of a showdown with a pair of horses. We got a little side-tracked somehow, but eventually made it to Galway, where we only spent a few beautiful hours, and mostly at the beach section called Salt Hill. At this point it was Andrea, Judith, another friend and I, and the other friend (for the life of me I can't remember her name, she's pictured above in the green t-shirt, tho), had to leave almost immediately in order to catch the only bus to Carrick-on-Shannon, so she could go to work the next day. That was a bummer, because she missed out on some true beauty to come.
We left Galway and began to travel down along the west coast, stopping pretty frequently for pictures and gawking sessions. It was all so amazingly unusual. The hills were getting bigger and the rocks more numerous, not to mention the sheep, and at points we were stopping to let cows or horses pass. Also, at a gas station, I happened upon one of the ugliest -- or at least the dirtiest -- dogs I've ever seen. I mean, it was just sad, and yet pretty hilarious. Plus, on the way to Galway we hadn't any CDs for our rented car's very modern CD player, and the girls didn't seem too keen on listening to either classical music or Gaelic talk shows on the radio, so they stopped in a CD store while in Galway. I was a little nervous about what they'd buy, because I knew our tastes in music didn't quite match up, and I was uncertain whether I could really handle hours upon hours of thumping techno while driving those narrow streets on the left-hand side. I lucked out, however, by convincing Andrea to purchase a "best of" Nina Simone CD, which turned out to be pretty BA, and Judith bought a Sarah MacClaughlan (surely misspelled) "Remixed", which turned out to be pretty good, for the most part, a HIM album and a Bon Jovi Album (New Jersey). In the coming hours on the road, I came to see how "good" (or at least enjoyable) the old Bon Jovi was and how bad the music of HIM is, and how, in fact, it sounds very similar to what Bon Jovi would sound like if he were actually very bad and very uncreative. So yeah,we were busting out those tunes, and I was encouraging more Bon Jovi and Nina Simone and less HIM and Sarah M. (most of them made me want to fall asleep at the wheel).
When we knew we were getting close to Doolin, where our hostel room was waiting for us, we came upon what had to be the most beautiful thing we'd seen yet. It was an extension into the ocean of an area of Ireland called the Burren. Basically it was an extremely rocky landscape, with some of those mile long stone walls stretching in every direction. "Who would care to build all these walls?" we thought. Apparently somebody's particular about their territory. We FINALLY got to our destination in Doolin around 9 pm, about an hour late from the time we had booked the hostel room for. While the proprietor of the hostel, Karl, did seem a little ticked that we were showing up that late, he was overall a really great guy, and helped us get situated quickly and showed us where we could get some great food and hear some terrific Irish music, with a bit of that Irish river dancing to boot, and ended up giving us the best hostel experience I've ever had (now, that's not saying a lot given my exp. with hostels, but you have to take my word for it -- this hostel was great!). I was really impressed with all of this, because this town wasn't especially for tourists. I mean, there were certainly tourists there, but it wasn't overflowing, and I could tell that there was still actual life happening here, and not just life put on for show because tourists want to see what true Irish living is. We ate our fish and chips and drank our beer, and then took a walk through Doolin as it was getting dark (around 11 pm), and trying to pick out the first stars. The air was so quiet and welcoming I thought I could never leave.
I stayed up pretty late that night in Doolin. I just didn't want to leave that quietness and go to sleep. I took a pretty far walk up the in the opposite direction of where we'd already been that night, and when I finally came back to the house, it was already going on 2 am. I stayed outside a bit longer to read a little of Eliot's the Four Quartets, and let a sweet kitty sit on my lap as I stroked her fur.
We woke up pretty early that next morning and went for a walk. Basically the same walk I had taken the night before, only illuminated by the sun. Apparently there was a place could you take horse-riding tours of the area, and we were willing to check it out, but even at 9 am nothing was open yet. So we just went back to our car, having bought a few sandwiches and bottles of water from the only store open at that hour, and began our short trek to the Cliffs of Moher. My experience at the cliffs was maybe too much for me to really put into words. Basically, I felt small and I felt that nothing mankind had in mind for this natural phenomena, save, of course, tourism, would ever be achieved. I felt like the cliffs were saying something to me as the wind blew swiftly past me there at that great height. "You can't rush me," they said. In other words, they'll wear away at their own pace, and no ambition you or I or the kings of this earth have in mind for them will truly come to pass, for everyone who stands on those cliffs is taking his own life into his hands, and in view of the cliffs, his life seems very small and nevertheless very precious.
We broke the rules and went across the barrier that said, "Don't cross this point." We spent quite a while walking along the cliffs where there wasn't any wall to protect us from be swept over. A lot of people were doing it, because honestly the barrier was in no shape to keep people from going over, so we went over, too. Only we went quite a bit further than anyone else, and just sort of sat up there a long time, soaking it in. It was one of those moments when I wanted every loved one I have to be there with me.
After getting spoked by a car down the way honking and flashing its lights in our direction, we ran -- jogged -- back to the original barrier which read, "Private Property" as well as "Don't cross this point." We decided to be true tourists and visited the tourist center, where Judith bought a lot of expensive things, and I bought an Irish tweed hat.
We got in our car and knew that we would have to start the long trek home, only we were still intent on seeing more of the beautiful countryside along the way. So we did. We drove up through the Burren and found another old abbey, this one with cows. I was pretty amazed by the ancient Christian ruins that just litter Ireland's countryside. Then we drove through Galway again and entered an area called the Connemara, a much more mountainous region than anything we had seen yet. I had to be especially careful here driving, due to all the sheep that were just standing along the road grazing, as if 2 ton cars weren't passing them at 80 kph and the power of many horses. We eventually found one more abbey, only this one looked to be much newer than all the other old abandoned places we had already seen, although by no means new.
Finally, we took our last stop in a small town to get some dinner. I had a nasty burger, as did Andrea, and Judith had some nasty liver. Then we hit the road again, nearly getting lost several times (on my account), and finally getting back in to Carrick-on-Shannon around 10 pm with still a lot of light in the evening sky. I stayed there one more day and night with Andrea and she took me out to a really nice Italian restaurant, where she treated me to some delicious cheese cake. The next morning I started the trip back to Dublin Saturday morning, and then to Salzburg, and then to Vienna, which ended up being about 14 hours traveling in one vehicle or another. I left Andrea at 8 am, and got home around 11 pm. Yep. Ireland is beautiful. You should go.
Going to Galway:
Galway and Salt Hill:
Out of Galway towards Doolin:
In a Graveyard:
The Burren:
Doolin:
Trip through the Burren and the Connemara on the way home:
Once again in Carrick-on-Shannon, and then Dublin:
