This weekend I went to Galway to visit Caitlin Dickinson, one of my best friends from Ann Arbor. The train ride might have been the best part. Riding through the pastures and fields of Ireland, as green as ever even in January, with the sheep and cows grazing up and down the rolling hills--it's so picturesque, it's almost nauseating. Once I got to Galway on Friday evening, Caitlin and I went grocery shopping and came home with a shit-ton of white pudding and potatoes. White pudding, for anyone who doesn't know, is a sort of sausage made out of oats, spices, and all kinds of pig, one of those foods that are supposed to make non-native squirm. The potatoes came in a huge sack, and inside, they looked as if they were fresh from the ground (i.e. dirty as fuck). We baked the potatoes and fried up the sausage, creating the most stereotypically Irish meal two exchange students have ever produced.
We woke up early on sunny Saturday morning to walk down to the Bay. On the way into town, we stopped in this beautiful old graveyard. Like most older European graveyards I've seen, the ground was neatly plotted and entire families were buried within these small sections of earth. We even found the grave site for an entire flock of Jesuit priests.
We walked down through the medieval quarters, which allow pedestrians only, like so many shopping/restaurant districts I've seen thus far. There were a multitude of darling pubs and celtic shops, even though the whole Celtic mythology was largely made up, largely by Yeats. I looked for yarn, but alas, all of it was on the Aran Islands, so I bought some pesto and pears at the farmer's market instead. I also got a Claddagh ring at a cheesy tourist stand. The Claddagh people are those fishermen who wore the big wooly sweaters, and they wore rings to show their marital/relationship status. If you wear the ring right-side up, it means you're taken, and upside down indicates you're free for the taking. Now that I'm wearing my Claddagh ring, maybe the Irish boys will be deterred, either because they'll know I have a boyfriend or because I'll look like such a campy tourist. I think I'm just starting to understand how sinister medieval European history was--there's a monument to the man the Galwayians claim invented lynching, for instance.
By the time we got down to the bay, the sun had disappeared and the wind had come. Standing out by the Atlantic Ocean was freezing, but it was also so comforting to know that I'm sharing an ocean with all of you, and that I'm not so far away from home after all. The bay had oodles of swans, and ballsy swans at that. The swans let you come within inches of them, and even heckle you for food. The Claddagh clan said that the swans were the souls of the dead, so I suppose you can't help but feed dear departed Aunt Tilly, Uncle Paddy, and so on.
We stopped briefly in the (free) Galway Historical Museum, just long enough to enjoy the big JFK exhibit. Apparently, JFK came to Galway for four days in the 60's and Galway never got over it. One of the kids in my program visited a cathedral that was made in the 60's, and said that there is a huge mosaic of JFK praying in it. Apparently there are monuments to Bill Clinton all over Northern Ireland because he was so much help during the Troubles, and a county in north-eastern Ireland is trying to claim Obama as one of their own. It puts me off that the Irish grovel to American authority figures, but maybe I'm just being cynical, or I don't appreciate what America does for the rest of the world.
We had lunch at a small traditional Irish restaurant, and for five euro I got a massive bowl of seafood chowder and five pieces of bread (two brown, three irish soda). It was incredibly tasty, on parr with clam chowders I've had on the east coast of the USA (but again, same ocean).
In the afternoon we made our way down to the resort area called Salthill, and visited the Atlantaquarium. I've not been to many aquariums, but this was much different than any I'd ever visited before. For one, all of the tops of tanks were exposed, so you could reach out and pet a mantaray or a starfish if you so chose to. There weren't any exotic fish, just fish that could be found in the lakes and oceans surrounding Ireland, and those common species appeared in multitudes. The biggest fish tank was full of huge sea bass, and since we opportunely showed up just in time for the big fish feeding, we got to watch the hundreds of sea bass fight each other off for pieces of squid. It was the most matter-of-fact zoo-type institution I've ever visited--the guide wasn't squeamish about telling a little girl that she might kill the starfish she was holding if she brought it out of the water, or that some of the fish were all born female and became male if the population needed more males.
Saturday night, Caitlin and I met up with some of her friends from school and my friends from the Butler program at a bar called the King's Head (I guess the original owners came to own the property because they were integral in beheading a tyrannical king). We were having a fine time, drinking Galway Hookers (a local brew named for the Claddagh fishing boats), when a bunch of women in slutty costumes stumble in. I'm talking slutty prisoner, slutty Snow White, slutty witch, just about anything one could pick up at a sex fantasy shop. Later on, a bunch of women wearing flashing bunny ears came in, and after that, a group of women adorned in bejewelled shutter shades. Us clueless city folk didn't understand what was going on, until a Galway girl explained to us that Galway is one of the top location for hen and stag parties, but especially hen parties. I suppose that explained the poor groom in a banana suit. The bejewelled shutter shade bride even brought her mother, who was bustin' it out on the dance floor to one Brittany Spears song after another. The older woman acted as I suppose my own mother would act at a hen party. I turned to Caitlin and told her that when and if I get married, I don't want any sort of bachelorette festivities. I think she was relieved.
Other than my trip to Galway, life has been pretty quiet. My Butler friends and I are slowly learning the tricks of the trade as far as partying goes. The first few weeks we ran all over the city trying to find good clubs and bars, but recently we realized that most of the youthful nightlife takes place right in our neighborhood. Tripod, a club literally right outside our front door, has student nights on Wednesdays where cover is 6 euro and then all drinks are 2 or 3 euro once you're inside. We tried to go to Tripod last Wednesday, but underestimated the power of cheap drinks, and therefore came way too late when we stumbled out the door at 11:30. We bummed around Wexford Street and decided to go to Whelan's, a popular pub that was lively enough to still be open after midnight on a Wednesday. The bartenders told us there was live music upstairs, so we ascended only to find... a ska band. In the middle of Dublin, I found Ann Arbor. It's especially funny, because a week before I was listening to punky-looking Dubin men sing country and motown songs. The lead singer of the ska band was giving out colored popsicle sticks (because what else is a ska frontman going to do?), and he could sense my ska-roots from across the room, because he singled me out to hand me a yellow popsicle stick. I think he was from Arizona. Strange.
We found another great place called the Porter House, who brew their own beer. My favorite was chiller, which tastes like beer in its purest form, no aftertaste. Think, the Fiji water of beer. Other popular choices were strawberry beer and Brainblasta. I think I'm really starting to appreciate beer for it's taste, not just for its effect it has on me. I think this means I'm growing up.
I'm laying low for the next couple of weeks while some friends visit me, but I AM seeing Of Montreal at this club called the Button Factory in the Temple Bar district. My goal is to make friends with a few cool real Irish kids, though I still feel this is an impossible task. I sent emails to a few societies this week, but I doubt I'll meet anyone in the yoga society classes, and I'm starting to think the Rock Nostalgia society is a long shot. Trinity does have a radio station, but I think they're much more legit than what I'm used to.
And now it's everyone's favorite list:
--The Irish are snarky as all get-out when they're drinking. They're not mean, per se, just very willing to tease anyone they come across. I've been teased for saying I was from the USA instead of from Michigan, and visa versa.
--Irish people also don't watch their children very closely. A little boy walked up to me at the train station and started talking to me about how he comes to the station every day, and makes friends with hundreds of pigeons. I looked around frantically for the boy's parents, but he ran away before I could ask him who he belonged to. When I got on the train, I decided the boy must have been some sort of orphan peasant, someone out of a Dickens novel, but halfway to Galway I saw him running up and down the railcar with a little girl in a bare mid-drift sweater, who I took to be his sister.
--To go along with that--Irish people in service industries are not very helpful. I'd even go so far as to call them flaky. Even the secretaries at the international students office at Trinity don't really act as if they know what they're doing, or what they're talking about. Maybe Americans don't know everything they're supposed to know, but at least they pretend like they do. All of this lack of authority makes me very uneasy.
--All Irish women seem to have very slutty clothes. See hen party descriptions above.
--Everything they say about sausages and potatoes is true. They're everywhere, and unavoidable, in all of Ireland. Thank God I'm not on a low fat or low carb diet.
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