What milk jugs, lederhosen, and Corinthian columns have in common…

Fall makes me inexpicably nostalgic for things far before my time. Photos of a few:

The Maison Carree, of Nimes, France. This Roman temple was built in the first century BC and now houses a museum.

A man in lederhosen outside Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. Awesome.

Scarves. Did I mention fall makes me want to craft? If only I knew how to knit…

Milk jugs in an old Ford. At least I think these are milk jugs. No?

St. Kevin’s Church, part of the 6th Century monastic settlement at Glendalough, Ireland.

How Tall This Fall?

Oh, Fall. I walked through campus yesterday kicking through every pile of leaves I could find. There’s really nothing as satisfying as that soft rustling of leaves as they explode away from my boot and then settle back on the sidewalk in small piles. I got a few raised eyesbrows on account of my goony smile and the stems stuck in my hair, but I’m used to that… I get raised eyesbrows on account of my goony smile basically every time I drink coffee.

Speaking of coffee… that’s what fall is, I think. Fall is coffee and pumpkin pie and driving to Manchester, Michigan with my sister. We visit the cider mill there, stop for a snack at the Coffee Mill Cafe, drive down M-52 on our very own color tour, and make frequent stops to ooooh and aaaaah over… tractors. Someday, when I’m fabulously wealthy, I’ll buy my Kelsey a tractor instead of just an apple or two. She’s looking forward to it, I know.

I balance an overly adult love of color tour drives with an immature delight in apple picking. When I visited the Eplegaarden – an orchard outside of Madison, Wisconsin – in October, I even made a point to find out just “How Tall This Fall?!” I was. Great news: I’ve grown a whole zero inches this year, a whole five in a hat and heels.

I know the fall weather will end soon. With the end of daylight savings time the whiskey hues of sunset color my street by five or so. But I’ll preserve the sense of the season in the foods of Thanksgiving and Christmas: the rich, just-short-of-bitter scent of fallen leaves finds its complement in my coffee; the sweet, crisp fall wind flavors the apples in a thanksgiving pie; the warm, nutmeg earthtones of the landscape reappear in roasted squash and sweet potatoes. And that goony smile I get when crunching leaves will reappear when my parents visit this weekend, when my cousin gets married later this month, when I bring my friend a birthday cupcake this weekend, when I hug my sister on Thanksgiving, when I see old friends during holiday breaks, when I avoid work and watch a Christmas movie with my roommate, … and every time I drink yet another cup of coffee, of course.

Paris, Je T’Aime

I saw Paris, Je T’Aime the other night. As I watched the various love stories unfold, each tied to its own well-known Parisian scene, I felt a nostalgia for the Paris I explored this summer. Like the American tourist at the end of the film (though the comparison is not entirely apt, as I have even more deplorable French than she), I fell in love in Paris.

I fell in love with Paris. I fell in love with the quirky art and wandering, narrow streets of Montmarte. Get lost in Montmarte. Spend an afternoon listening to street musicians and admiring boutique windows and licking nutella from your fingers as you eat a fresh crepe. By the time you stop at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant for dinner, you’ll be enchanted by the entire district, utterly fascinated by the way the sunset’s pink glow paints the white-washed apartments in a rose as simultaneously rich and light as the French wine by the same name.

I fell in love with the city’s arts – from posters for Bruno in the Metro to red figure Greek pottery at the Louvre. Just the range of arts available is astounding; a tourist can buy tickets to a dance at the Moulin Rouge or catch a free concert by a band covering the Beatles and Jack Johnson on the steps of the Sacre Coeur. I was equally fascinated by the South African artist who wove me a bracelet while telling me about his Alaskan girlfriend and by the no-nonsense construction crews pushing to complete an architect’s vision by their deadline. The mime I watched, practicing his art with the Seine and the Eiffel Tower as his backdrop, was perhaps my favorite Parisian artist.

But perhaps what I loved most about Paris was that I couldn’t stay. Though Parisians work and play and love – they live! – in Paris, for me it was an escape from the day to day. The simple recognition that I only had five days in France made me that much more appreciative of everything I saw and did there. I basked in the sun at the Jardin du Luxembourg, doing nothing more than breathing in the light fragrance of flowers and listening to children laugh as they pushed wooden sailboats in the fountain. It was a perfect moment on a beautiful day, far far away in a magical city. And as I sat on my lawn chair, taking Paris in, I fell in love.

Missing My Cat (A Day in Galway, Continued)

While traveling this summer, I often longed to see my friends and family or felt an itch, somewhere just below my ankle and above my ears, to wander the streets of my hometown. One thing I never missed, however, was my cat.

Ok. That’s not true. But it’s difficult to remember just what I love about the Small One when I have been meowed and clawed and scratched out of bed a half an hour before the alarm. As I stare out my kitchen window into the violet pre-dawn that the Anglo-Saxons called “uhta,” I can’t help but wish I were still thousands of miles from my cat and his annoying tenor.

As this rather rude awakening occurs on a regular basis, however, I am determined to make the best of it. I’ll use the extra half an hour to blog, I’ve told myself. I have my doubts regarding the likelihood of this new goal: how can I write coherently at 6 AM? It took me five minutes just to separate this morning’s coffee filter from its filter friends! Still, we’ll give it the old college (or, rather, graduate school) try.

If I were wandering the streets of Galway right now, blessedly catless, I would stop by the market to buy breakfast. I’d probably get a donut, telling myself I’d save it for later and instead eating it before I was out of the vendor’s sight. With the sudden disappearence of my donut, I’d be forced – I know, it’s terrible – to find something more substantial. Maybe a loaf of homemade bread.

I would take my bread and (let’s be honest) some fruit and a huge cup of tea and make my way up Shop Street. A quick peek into boutique windows along my path would assure me that the fashion magazines are correct: the 80′s are back, with neon scrunchies to prove it. In an attempt to avoid a depression that only the unlikely return of jelly shoes and paint splatter jeans could cause, I would turn my attention to the street performers. The comic unicycler, a regular, would admonish his audience-turned-assistants to “quit yer clapping and hold onto the bike!” A piper would compete with Michael Jackson tribute dancers near the corner of William Street, his traditional reel piercing through “Billie Jean.” With a quick laugh and a shake of my head, I’d move on to Eyre Square, looking past rows of bicycles for an empty bench or patch of lawn.

Eyre Square, officially titled “Kennedy Memorial Park” (Kennedy visited Galway in 1963, shortly before his assassination.), is the city’s award-winning public green. It’s a perfect place to people watch over a cuppa, provided you can keep the pigeons from pestering after a breakfast of their own. The park has everything – playground, fountain, nearby shopping centre, skater-punk teenagers fully endorsing skinny jeans and side ponytails. My favorite feature of Eyre Square is its collection of flags (its “wave” of flags, if you will), each of which displays the name of one of Galway’s fourteen tribes. The city’s fourteen roundabouts – Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, D’Arcy, Deane, Ffont, Ffrench, Joyce, Kirwan, Lynch, Martyn, Morris, and Skerritt – are named after these old ruling families as well.

After breakfast I’d wander over to Charlie Byrne’s, my favorite bookstore in Ireland. I’d look through their “Books in Irish” section, muttering about wishing I knew the language, before getting lost in their seemingly endless piles of fiction. Hours later I’d emerge, my face bearing a slightly dazed look I only get when perusing bookstores and my right shoulder bearing the weight of the new books tucked into my purse.

The new books would take up the space orignially allocated for the leftover bread, so I’d be forced to head to the Spanish Arch to feed the swans.

I’d relax, soak in the sun (or maybe get soaked in the rain), and eventually make my way along the River Corrib back to my apartment. I’d walk by the Cathedral, a 20th century Catholic church located in the heart of the city.

Before reaching my apartment I would take note of a sight so frequently seen and insignificant that I usually overlook it: the fish (perhaps a salmon of knowledge from Irish mythology, perhaps just a reminder of Galway’s history as a fishing village) carved into each streetlight in the city centre.

The fish’s googly expression would make me laugh. Animals, I’d think, are so weird.

And this would make me miss my cat.

My Apologies

I’ve apparently been delinquint in writing blog posts during the month of August. That’s about to change. There’s much more to come in the following days. Teaser? California. Wicked! and Crepes in France.

My Head In the Clouds

My sincere apologies for the long delay between posts. After my program ended I spent a few days traveling through the UK and France before heading home. While the sightseeing was marvelous and my return to the States has been a refreshing one, my recent business has not lent itself well to composing long blog entries. I will attempt to play catch-up over the next few days and to provide more details on my adventures.

As much as I love visiting new places, I often find myself becoming a bit overwhelmed by the constant rush of incoming data and sensation and the sometimes frazzling surprises that accompany any voyage. It is hard to remember to appreciate the simple beauty of a rainbow breaking over the Glasgow horizon, for example, when one is desperately praying the taxi will get you to the correct airport (since you, of course, took the bus to the wrong airport!) before your plane leaves for Paris. To counteract my uneasy sense of dislocation, I often look at the clouds.

My cousin Shelly takes beautiful photographs of cloudscapes. Though I had never taken much interest in the weather (I can’t really tell my cirrus from my cumulus, to be honest.), I’ve been drawn to cloud gazing since she first showed me her work a few years ago. With its sudden rain storms and equally abrupt sunshine, Ireland is home to some truly spectacular clouds.

I had to stop and take several pictures of these clouds above the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow as well.

I reflect on clouds often as I’m traveling. Sometimes as they race across the sky I imagine flying with them, seeing everything they see on their own voyage. I picture myself in their forms as they dance above the landscape; from my vantage point in the clouds the world is a riot of silvers and blues and greens, pierced by Norman towers, 18^th century manors, and modern skyscrapers. Like a cloud, I whirl through each place, soaking up its atmosphere and leaving little more than a hint of my reflection in an inky puddle.

Rock Trees and Old Forts

I mentioned in an earlier post that Saturday afternoon brought rain. Saturday evening brought gale force winds, howling past my window and shaking my front door til I thought it might actually swing open. The storm didn’t bother me, really, until I woke up around 6 and it was still going strong. The weather had to get better! I thought. It just had to! We were headed to the Aran Islands at 9 and I was worried the ferries wouldn’t run in the terrible conditions.

Worrying about the weather, it turns out, was silly. Sure, the boat ride was a bit more like the Millenium Force than the Junior Gemini, but by the time we reached Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands, we saw nothing but blue sky.

Worrying about the weather off the Aran Islands is never actually that silly. Historically, the islanders made a living through fishing and farming, two occupations entirely dependent on the weather, and the seas around the Aran Islands are notorious for deadly storms. John Millington Synge wrote a play, Riders to the Sea (1904), about a woman from the Aran Islands who lost her husband and six sons in fishing and other water accidents. The people of Inis Mor, Inis Meainn, and Inis Oirr are also farmers. They raise cattle and grow crops, each field and pasture seperated by rock fences.

While on our trip to Inis Mor, I heard a fellow tourist ask his friend, “Where’d they get all the rock for the fences?”

I couldn’t see the friend’s face – they were sitting behind me – , but I like to imagine his eyes were twinkling with mischief instead of simply blank with confusion when he responded, “Rock trees.”

“Oh,” said the first. “That makes sense. Or maybe there’s a bigger rock wall that they chip smaller rocks from.”

Now rock trees can only be found growing next to money trees, and they haven’t been seen in Ireland since the days when wealthy landlords owned practically all the land. The idea of “a bigger rock wall” is closer to the true origin of the rocks all over the Aran Islands. Due to geological reasons which I can’t claim to understand, the soil of the Aran Islands is very thin, often just a bit of dirt between layers of rock. Basically, the islands are the tops of mountains, just sticking out of the sea. As a result, much (though not all) of the land looks something like this:

Not exactly ideal farming soil. The farmers of western Ireland, however, break down the rocky soil by fertilizing it with seaweed. (In the movie Far and Away, Tom Cruise is carrying seaweed up from the shore to his field during the opening scene. The scene was shot, incidentally, in the Dingle Peninsula!) The largest rocks are used to build walls between fields; the smaller rocks eventually break down into arable ground with the aid of seaweed fertilizer. The beautiful green fields and pastures, each divided by a rock wall that holds together, even without mortar, serve as amazing testaments to the hard work and dedication of the islanders.

Of course, the labyrinth of walls hasn’t been the only way islanders have used their abundance of rock. People have been farming and fishing on the Aran Islands for thousands of years, using the rocks to build houses and fortifications. We visited Dun Aonghasa, a prehistoric fort on the western edge of Inis Mor. The fort is surrounded by not one, not two, but three thick rock walls on three sides and a 80+ meter drop on the remaining western edge.

For added protection, the builders of this magnificent fort also thought to include large rock spikes between the second and third wall. These spikes, called “chevaux de frise” (or, I think, “horses of the Frisians”) are razor sharp and, as our tour guide reminded us, “anything but comfortable when it’s a cold night and raining and you’re trying to make it to a wall where a guard’s probably standing with a spear waiting to kill you.”

Fortunately, I made it through the walls and chevaux de frise alive. The danger was worth it: the view from inside the fort is absolutely unbelieveable. One can look to the north or south and see the cliff edge of the island, or east back over the fields toward Galway, or west, where the next large body of land is Canada. The brave tourist (myself included!) can army crawl to the very edge of the cliff, to where the rock is cut naturally at a 90 degree angle, and look down at the roaring ocean over 80 meters below. I was a bit worried for the huge group of teenagers goofing around right near the cliff, but our tour guide didn’t seem nervous; he helped stage a few pictures of tourists “falling” off the edge while he pulled them back up.

Just Another Sign…

I promise a much longer post on today’s trip to the Aran Islands tomorrow, after I have finished my end-of-term papers (“States of Confusion in Brian Friel’s Translations” and “‘Intoxicated by Grace’: Food and Drink in the Bethu Brigte“). For now, I’d like to add one more image to my post on street signs in Ireland. This sign appears on several of the short lights surrounding a car park near my apartment.

 

Oh, my…

She Moved Through the Fair

It’s market day in Galway. Every Saturday and Sunday the streets round St. Nicholas’ fill with vendors selling everything from hemp bracelets to turnips to pineapple curry. Though my everyday shopping takes me to Dunnes or Tesco – the Irish equivalents to Meijer -, I’d by all my groceries at the market if I could. I can’t help but appreciate my salad more when I’m on a first name basis with the farmer who grew its lettuce and carrots. Michael caught me taking a picture of his booth and insisted on another picture of the two of us, all the while making jokes about the famous “jam sessions” of the woman selling strawberry preserves nearby.

The market makes shopping a personal and sensory experience. Instead of smelling plastic packaging, I breathed the rich sweetness of summer in the sundried tomatoes (pronounced “toe-mah-toes,” I was reminded by a vendor) I purchased. Buying cheese was a matter of sampling shavings from a round of Italian herb killeen, not choosing between bricks of unnaturally yellow cheddar.

There’s a music to the market as well. This morning it’s rythm was fast and lively, like the flow of shoppers, and syncopated by the laughter of children playing hide and seek in the trees near the cathedral.  It was a jaunty, light-hearted tune perfect for whistling or a quick two-step past the crowds around the man selling fresh oysters – “Eat them right here, for only one euro!”

By noon the weather had changed (as it so often does in Galway), and with it the music of the market. The soft murmur of the rain dampened the noise of the streets; the air became heavy and almost melancholy. I was reminded of one of my favorite songs, a traditional Irish tune entitled “She Moved Through the Fair.” The quiet made me aware of other sounds, sounds I’d missed in the market’s earlier cacophany. Two old men near the pretzel stand were speaking rapidly in Irish, shaking their heads ruefully as they watched the scene before them. Tourists splashed unknowingly through puddles, their thoughts as focused as their cameras, on their guided walk through the city. A car honked at a farmer, who had blocked the road with his van full of additional produce.

Though we’d arrived around 10:30 and though it was raining, we stayed for lunch. Meals are an international experience at the Galway market: Iva and I ate boerewors, a sausage from South Africa, with chutney; Sarah tried falafel; Katelyn had samosas; Berit even found a vendor selling sushi! Note the vegetarian sushi roll – it comes complete with turnips!

The market showcases art as well as food. Jewlers sell beautiful necklaces in Connemara marble and charms carved with Ogham. One stall holds oil paintings and prints of Galway Bay and the Claddagh (once a fishing village, now a district of Galway city). Cheerful hand-knit jumpers, complete with images of farm animals and clouds, are available for purchase – though they’re so intricately woven I’d be afraid to put them on a toddler. (We saw one little girl today greatly enjoying a chocolate bar; she was so adorably smothered in candy goo that my friends and I actually stopped to coo at her. Her father, who hadn’t yet noticed the mess from his position behind her stroller,  just sighed. “Is she completely covered then?” he asked us.) One of my favorite booths is owned by a carver. He sells amazing boxes, tools, and jewelry, all made with local woods. I managed a decent picture of the artist and his work.

I would have loved to spend the entire day at the market, but school was calling. I’m back at my apartment now, delaying writing my final paper by watching the rain fall as I drink a cup of tea. I’ve been sorting through pictures of the day as well. Though they can’t quite capture Berit’s disgusted curiosity at seeing live lobsters or the delicate fragrance of roses, available potted or in bouquets, I’m sure I’ll look back at my photographs often, remembering the day I moved through the fair.

More Pictures and Stories Available!

My new friend Sarah, a fellow participant in NUI-Galway’s program, is also keeping a blog. Her fantastic pictures and videos, as well as her thoughts on school, travel, and theater in Ireland can be found at A Theatrical Study of Ireland. Check it out for further descriptions of our shenanigans around Galway.

For those visiting my blog from Sarah’s, the pub we visited in Dingle was called An Droichead Beag, which means “The Small Bridge.”