Goodbye Dublin!

If I could, I would catch up on so much more posting before this--I took loads of pictures and did many things, & I would prefer to put all those up before leaving. That's not going to happen, though. I might add them afterwards, I might not. But for now, have this:

Goodbye, Dublin.

You've been good to me. I'll be back.

follow me up to carlow

So, yesterday roz_mcclure flew into Dublin & gave me a ring. "I'm on a main street," she says, "near a big metal spike!" "Oh yeah," says I, "the Spire! I know exactly where that is." "I figured you would," she says.
So I grabbed a bus up to O'Connell & met her at the Spire (the pointless Stiletto in the Ghetto, the Stiffy by the Liffey) & there was much rejoicing! Indeed. We went for fish & chips & talked at length about Derry & Belfast & Scotland & theater & things on this side of the Atlantic. Since the weather was all over rain and wind and misery, it became a museum day.
I dragged her to the Bog Bodies exhibit at the National Museum, & we decided we ought to start a business where we make fake things (like the replica gold ingots in the hoards, or the fake mini Hill of Tara in the back room). Roz wanted to start a band called zoomorphic pennanular brooch, & I wish I could remember the correct spelling of the gaelic for "zoomorphic," because that's the name I want (it was something like "zoomorfeach" but I can't find it anywhere). We tried to go to the National Library but it was closed, so instead we found the National Gallery. Also there was Grafton street and the Arcade and Turkish delight (yum). We hung out at Cozy's & watched some Father Ted, which is a BBC sitcom about priests on a fictional island off the West Coast of Ireland, & it is hilarious. We got dinner. Then a whole passel of us (Roz, me, Kate, Cozy, Lee, Meghan, Sarah, Micah, Bri, Pete) went to Corrigan's, a "good old man pub" near Bri & Nora's. It was good drinks (cider & black) & good conversations. Mostly I really wish I could have recorded the whole day so I could remember all the crazy stuff that was said. I expect it'll come back to me someday. After the others left, Roz & I went to Devitt's for some sessions. It was fairly empty, but it began to fill up as the musicians played. They were fantastic. I really hope I can find some good sessions when I get back to Seattle, because I will miss this like mad--tapping feet and hands to lively music in a pub. We nearly left at about 11:30 but then the guitar man introduced the next song & we promptly turned around & came back for it, because it was Follow me up to Carlow. We really did leave after that, crashed when we got back to the apartment, & then woke up early to make sure Roz got to the airport in time. It was short but a fabulous good time.


Now I am on the couch, still in pajamas, getting ready to write papers (yuck) and listening to NPR (yay). I need to get papers done today... *sigh*

Day 2: Belfast.

The second post! Day 2 of the weekend extravaganza, in Belfast. Well, beginning with Saturday night. We went down the street to the Bot (the Botanic Inn), a bar that had been reccommended to us by a northerner at the Gaiety. It was loud and crazy but loads of fun; we got drinks and danced around & were talked to by drunk boys, including one who butted into our group, put one arm around Charlotte and the other around me & started swaying back and forth with us like we were at a folk rock concert, and another who was flirting hardcore with Nora, mostly about her hair.

In the morning, Kate, Lee, Nora and I woke up early and tried to find a Catholic church to go to mass, it being the first Sunday of Advent and all. We had the lady at the hostel give us a map and draw on it where to go, but we still managed to get lost, our feet soaked within minutes, and getting very cold. We managed to somehow nearly get onto Falls road, but thankfully we finally found the church. There was still an hour before mass so we went to McD's for breakfast (classy, I know), & then back for mass. It was short and simple, but really lovely.

We found a cafe to get some warm beverages (harder than you'd think...everything is closed until about 1pm on Sundays), and met up with the other girls, to go on a Black Cab Tour. This is where a taxi driver will take you around Belfast and tell you about the politics and history. If you're lucky you get to go to both sides. We were lucky.

Our driver (who never gave us his name) first took us up Shankill road, which is the Protestant side of Belfast suburbs. Falls road is the Catholic side. They're separated by the Peace wall, and no one really crosses sides at all. In the city centre, Catholics and Protestants mix with no problems; there isn't really a lot of violence anymore. But still no one goes to the other side of the wall. We stopped off Shankill road to see the murals. Similar to Derry, people on both sides of the wall have painted murals about their history in the conflict (though in Derry as far as I know it's mostly the Catholics?).



(This one's a mural of Protestants defending their homes from an attack. The words read, Can it change? We believe!)



A mural of various branches of Protestant groups, military and political. This was the scariest mural I saw, mostly because of that gunman on the top: wherever you go, in the entire area these murals were painted around, you can look at him & the gun will be pointing straight at you.



Remember the H-block monument from Derry? Same idea...from the other side. There were protestants in prison too.



Closeup of a mural for Oliver Cromwell. And below, one of Cromwell's scary quotes:



After Shankill road, our driver took us to the peace wall. He spent more time talking here, and on Falls road after that, which led me to believe he was Catholic though he never said so. He told us about the experiences of living here, a little, how it just became normal. He also mentioned, which I thought was interesting, that though the government has muttered about joining the Republic if there's a majority vote, a small chunk of Catholics have said (via polls) that they would vote to stay part of the UK, probably for economic reasons (the pound is ridiculously strong right now, even against the euro, which isn't doing all that bad).

The peace wall:







(Why kill? & May this come down one day)



(We are here for peace, Australia)

To get to the other side of the wall you have to pass through large open gates--which are closed every night. Mostly to prevent teenagers from getting to the other side & being stupid, he told us. But it's still a sobering thought.



The first mural we saw on Falls road, of Bobby Sands, MP. He was the first to die in the prison hunger strikes, and was also elected to Parliament while he was in prison.



Falls road itself.



Offices of the Sinn Fein ("ourselves alone" in Gaelic).

Near there is a wall of murals dedicated to international causes, mostly of civil rights and freedom:



(Mr. Douglas.)



(....sigh.)




Self determination for the Basque country!

And on an entirely different note, I'll round this all out with pictures from the Christmas market we went to for food afterwards--lots of stalls of food and jewelry and fun things, right in front of Belfast's City Hall.





The Belfast Wheel! Like the London Eye. Only three weeks old. And my, what a queue to get on...so we didn't.



Yay Christmas market.


We came home on the train, our feet still wet (or mine anyway, and several others), sleepy and out of it. We ate the last of the brown bread and orange juice; some of us slept and some worked on papers.


Now we're in our last week of classes...everything finishes for Enriqua tomorrow. Friday is a semi-showcase of devising stuff at the Gaiety (should do my research (read: watch Bugs Bunny cartoons on youtube) for that soon), & rehearsal with Antoinette. The weekend is our own. Monday and Tuesday we have rehearsals; Wednesday is the showcase; Thursday is Peter's Seagull reading; Friday is packing & cleaning the apartment & last hanging out with people; next Saturday we all go our separate ways. 10 more days.

Giant's Causeway and Derry (Belfast trip, Day 1)

Last weekend was our last to go tripping, so we went out with style: weekend madness in Northern Ireland (or the north of Ireland, depending on who you talk to). On Friday afternoon, Cozy, Lee, Nora, Kate, Charlotte and I took the train up to Belfast. As you can imagine I was thrilled, since I adore trains. We bought cava & orange juice and brown bread to have a picnic on the train but ended up not sitting together, so instead I read some to prepare for my paper, & mostly slept.
We arrived at the hostel, checked in, & found our room, all the while exclaiming over how much better than the Generator this place was! (It was rather nice: a hostel, sure, but clean! And cute, and quirky, & friendly.)

So we had the party in the hostel room, later joined by Katie Manteca! All the way from London.



I'm warning you: this post is going to be full of photos, & probably of historical rambling. (For the real historical stuff, you really should go look it all up--it's fascinating, & I certainly don't remember exact dates or everything they told me. But it's good to know.)


We woke up ludicrously early on Saturday in order to go on a Paddywagon day tour. Our morning walk to the bus stop was made slightly better by passing near the gorgeous campus of Queen's University:



We grabbed breakfast and hung around the Paddywagon, which was a short little bus painted bright green with a leprechaun on it. Our bus driver showed up, boarded us all onto the bus along with the other waiting (& cold) passengers, and began to drive through Belfast to pick up others. Along the way Rachel and Katie Rice, & Rachel's friend Sarah, who had all come all the way up from Dublin that morning, joined us on the tour.

Our driver was hilarious. I wish, now, that I'd gotten some video just so I could show you a taste of how fantastic he was. He spent the whole time in Belfast singing (Black Velvet Band, Tell Me Ma, some others) or whistling or doodel-doodley-do-ing or somesuch. His name was Joseph Patrick Mulligan, "but you can call me Joey." He told us about pieces of history, random anecdotes. How St Patrick went to France to study Christianity, & while he was there he began to hear voices: "You ever hear voices? ... You ever hear them? No? I do. Round about four in the afternoon, I start hearin' em.... Guinness! Guinness! Buy a Guinesss! ...I'm startin' to hear em in the morning too. Well, Patrick was hearing these voices... Patrick...Patrick! Come back to Ireland, Patrick! Get your ass back here! ...cheap flights. Just pay all your taxes. ryanair.com." At one point, as we were rattling along Irish roads, Nora said, "We're going to die, & it's going to be hilarious!"

Our first stop was where the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge would be, were it not past October--in winter it's far too windy to have it up from the mainlaind out to the island. The Antrim coast that we were driving along is gorgeous, though, rope bridge or no rope bridge.





Look to the upper left in this photo, along above the fence line. See that land mass in the mist? Yeah. That's Scotland. Only 24 miles away!

We got back in the bus, shivering and swearing at the cold, and Joey took us the rest of the way to Giant's Causeway. It was breathtaking--partly because of the incredible natural beauty of the coast & the bizarrity of the rock formations, & partly because it was so fecking cold it was hard to breathe at all.



(The waves were enormous, & when they reached the shore the wind was so high and fast that it sent ocean foam skidding all up into the air like it was snowing.)



(Katie Rice, against a backdrop of what the winter sun can do to an Irish landscape.)

The Giant's Causeway proper is a spit of land that's made of (mostly) hexagonal pillars of rock, created either from magma lakes under Panagea, or by Finn McCool, depending on whom you ask. Either way, it's pretty good fun:



But you have to be careful of going too far out toward the ocean, because Irish waves have no mercy:







(The Giant's Gate.)

We warmed up with some soup and tea, and then piled back onto the bus to drive to Derry, just as the rain began. This is where my other major will take over now, and all the historical stuff will come pouring out. I knew some about the conflict in Northern Ireland, and a little about Bloody Sunday and the civil rights marches in Derry, mostly from seeing Joel's Carthaginians & then doing a monologue from it for Amanda. But I learned a whole hell of a lot more when I was there, even in two hours. And when you're standing on the very spot that something happened, being told about it by a Derry citizen, it becomes much more real than textbooks can tell you. I'll try, though. Now, this is going to be a lot of history. If you just want pretty pictures, scroll down a bit. But I'm going to give some context first, most of it learned from a walking tour of the Bogside area, led by a local man named Mickey.

Most of the people who talked about the conflict in Derry began in 1689 (no, stay with me), when the siege of Derry began. Northern Ireland had been colonized by British Protestants years before (remember Oliver Cromwell?), but in 1689, James II (a Catholic) and William of Orange (a Protestant) were in battle over the crown. James began a siege on Derry, but the Protestants living within the walls shut the gates and endured over 100 days of siege until William came to their rescue. The Protestants, understandably, are quite proud of this victory. More or less from that time until the late 20th century, in Derry, as in much of Northern Ireland, the Unionists (Protestants loyal to Britain, wanting to keep NI part of the UK) were in political power, though not necessarily in the majority.
In the late 20th century, civil rights marches began in Derry, over the treatment of the Catholic citizens of the city. Loyalists (Unionists) lived inside the walls; Nationalists (Catholics) lived outside the walls, in rented houses, unable to buy their own land or home. If you weren't a homeowner, you weren't allowed to vote; and so by gerrymandering the Unionists had control of Derry. In 1968 a civil rights movement began, over housing conditions and the right to vote. This Wikipedia article goes more in depth than I can. All you need to know at this point is that most of the marches, and therefore counter-protests, riots, and violence, centered around Bogside, one of the Catholic housing areas just outside the walls of Derry. When the local police failed to protect the marchers, the British Army was called in; in fact it wasn't until a year or so later that they really became the enemy. Eventually this gave rise to the IRA (Irish Republican Army), and the violence continued--petrolbombs, tear gas, rioting.

All around Free Derry (a declared zone, which Bogside is a part of) are murals representing their history.







The monument in the front is in the shape of the H-block prisons that nationalist and IRA prisoners were kept in. It's a monument to the blanket strikes, shit strikes and hunger strikes, and the ultimate success in keeping those prisoners political prisoners rather than criminal, as Margaret Thatcher was attempting to do. (Criminalizing the prisoners would have meant that the IRA was a local criminal gang, & not Britain's problem; by keeping it political, it kept Britain implicated.) The H monument is broken, slightly, in the middle, to symbolize the breaking of the criminalization attempt. In the background you can see the wall--the only real Derry wall, according to Mickey.



And this is the monument to Bloody Sunday.

Bloody Sunday was in 1972. 14 civil rights marchers were shot dead by the British Army. The worst part, according to Mickey, was not necessarily the shooting but the fact that the Brits said they had shot armed insurgents, in self defense. In fact no one was firing on the army. "One man," Mickey said, "was standing right there (& he gestured across the road), trying to help a victim, waving a white handkerchief--and he was shot in the head so closely that his eyebrow stuck to the wall right there. My dad used to work with him." What can you say to that? It's realer than I can possibly write about here.







The adventure wasn't over. Joey drove us up into town, and reminded us of something Mickey had said. The day we were there, the Apprentice Boys' Guild, a group in the Orange Order (a Protestant, Unionist fraternity) was having an annual march, having to do with the Siege (the apprentice boys were the first to shut the gates), and a traitor named Lundy. Every year they have a march, & then burn an effigy of Lundy--like Guy Fawkes, but less jolly. Previously they would march on the walls of Derry above Bogside, and it would incite riots; now the parades are more or less peaceful. Joey dropped us off on Shipquay street and said we could walk around Derry, watch the parade if we wanted. Well, it was freezing, and raining, but did we ever want to watch it! So some of us ran up the hill to the town and stood behind barricades and policemen to watch the Orange order go by.





We ducked into a nearby shopping centre after it had gone by, to get a bit warmer. Rachel, Katie Rice and I wanted to go find a way to walk on the walls of Derry, so we braved the rain again. As we were crossing the street the parade had turned up, we saw that the air was all smoky and the street was blocked off by a full line of police. I'd forgotten about the burning of the effigy of Lundy, but there we were with a reminder:





(There it is closer, the shape of a hanged man.)

The police were quite friendly, and let us through to go look at the fire. Turning around, this is what the line looked like from behind. The bits of floating black in the picture are pieces of Lundy that were flying around. I got effigy in my eye.



We continued on, and found a ramp up to the walls of Derry, which are fourteen feet thick and rather tall, all the way around the medieval town (traditionally nationalists never went inside; the division is less so now). When we got up onto the walls we saw policemen in black riot gear, with full helmets on--nothing like the fairly laid back guards in the streets. The first one we saw didn't seem to stop us, so we continued, figuring that was just par for the course? Until a second one did stop us, and told us, You'd better get off the walls, there's people with petrolbombs down there. So we got off the walls, stat, and scurried back into town, eyes wide. We managed to find another wall entrance, onto a part of the walls that weren't overlooking the Bogside and didn't have riot-dressed policemen on them, so at least we did get to walk the walls. Without the danger of petrolbombs.



One last look up Shipquay street.

And I'm quite tired, & making more typos than it's worth correcting at this point. I'll just let Day 1 be for now, & put up Day 2 (in Belfast itself) tomorrow.
Peace.

i seem to remember being in pain from movement the last time we traveled...

The good:

- We are heading to catch a train to Belfast in about 15 minutes!
- We'll see KATIE tonight!
- We have cava & orange juice and Irish bread for the train.
- Did I mention we were taking a train? Yeah.
- Huzzah for Giant's Causeway, Derry, Black Cab Tours & the whiskey distillery!
- Also I got a letter today & they make everything better (& no, you might not have enough time for another one, though you should expect one in Seattle when you get home).

The bad:
- Diane did more swingy choreography last night & we all hurt like hell.
- I am rapidly running out of socks. I really can't explain it.
- Belfasting this weekend means seriously less time to write the papers that I hate. Blech.
- I am feeling stupid over little things.

The ugly:
- Um. Mostly the socks. I'm running out of socks.
- Also the weather. But what can you do.

Farmer's Market / Kilmainham / Rainbows!

So, this week...& last week. First I'll just start with a picture of the upside of all this rain we've been getting: what happens when it stops.




On Friday night, Cozy, Kate & I went to Devitt's, for the live music sessions & to hang out & chat. We got drinks and sat near the bar & the musicians. A guy came up to us, started chatting--mostly, he said, to get away from the frightening drunk women at the other end of the bar. He was from Melbourne, & was in the middle of a long backpacking trip (headed to Russia at the end of the weekend). So we all talked for a couple hours, about traveling & Ireland & Americans. Apparently we were the best Americans he'd met so far, since too many of them were like the other US'ers in the bar that night--a pack of boys in matching shirts, with one tarty blonde girl all over one of the boys. I mean, they were entertaining, sure, but there's some days I really wish I lived two hours north of where I do. Oh, to be Canadian. Still, Devitt's was a blast, we had a good time having the craic (as they say) with the Australian electrician, & the fab live music:



Saturday a pack of us (Cozy, Kate, Meghan, Lee, & I) went to the farmer's market in Temple Bar. Oh, the glory of real food! It was amazing, especially the fresh hot apple cider that we bought. Mmm.







After the market, Cozy, Kate & I worked our way up toward Parnell Square via many small shops & interesting byways, to get to the Dublin Writer's Museum:



Mostly it was just readable information, though it had a good audio tour, & lots of objects like so & so's pen or first editions of books, etc. Upstairs there was a gorgeous library:




Sunday, Kate & Cozy & I (we were the culture team for this weekend, apparently) made our way to Kilmainham Gaol. I'm not really going to be able to give you all the history I'd like; suffice to say it was where all the leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising were held, as well as many political prisoners from the War of Independence and the Civil War. It fell into disuse after that, and it wasn't until the 1940's that a group of volunteers stepped in to maintain it as an historical landmark (now it's under the care of the office of public works).



See those two lighter stones? That's where the gallows used to be. Huzzah for public hangings.



Passageway in the older part of the jail, the Georgian Wing.



Inside of a cell.



Old graffiti above a doorway: "Beware the Risen People that have harried and held, ye that have bullied and bribed."



Now, into the newer portion, the Victorian area, or the East Wing. The architecture is gorgeous.





One of the more bittersweet stories from Kilmainham is the marriage of Joseph Plunkett & Grace Gifford. They were engaged before the Uprising, and Joseph was brought into jail. The night before he was scheduled to be executed, they brought Grace to the jail at Joeseph's request, & they were married in the chapel there. They weren't allowed to speak except to exchange wedding vows, and after the ceremony Grace was escorted back home and Joesph was brought back to his cell. In the wee hours of the morning Grace was awoken and brought back to Kilmainham, for a last ten minutes, in the presence of two guards, with her husband. After that, Grace was sent away & Joseph was brought outside to the yard and shot.

A few years later Grace was held (in the new wing) as a political prisoner during the civil war. She painted a mural in her cell:



And finally, the stonebreaker's yard, where all the executions took place:




Now it is back to classes, and writing papers & all that jazz. I'm coming home in less than three weeks. Yikes.