The advantage of getting rained on

Full half circle over Trinity College rooftops, intensely bright,
nothing found at the end (or sought, due to the being rained on bit)

How Things Work

Alright, off the bat, let me say I love Ireland. It's cute, quaint, fun, compact, and cheerful. It's also exhausting and flabbergasting at times.

This will be a little ditty to give you an idea about how things work in Ireland.

Eircom is the main provider of broadband service in Ireland. Our landlords had service and were nice enough to leave it on while we got settled, with the idea that we would transfer the service into our names once we had a bank account set up.

(For the rest of the post, it will be helpful to know that our landlords only left this apartment because they moved to the states.)

So when we were ready, we called Eircom and said that we live here now and wouldn't they be so kind as to transfer the service into our names. They said that we can't do it, but the current subscribers could. So William (one of our two our awesomes landlords) calls Eircom from the states. Turns out that he can disconnect the service, but not transfer it unless he and we are in the same room and can hand the phone back and forth. Also, that setting up a conference call isn't good enough- we have to be physically in the same room.

So he and we decide it's best just to cancel and we'll start a new subscription. So on Monday, he cancels and Michelle then calls Eircom. They tell her that the service doesn't actually get disconnected for 24 hours, so please call back.

On Tuesday, she calls again and they say that while the service is indeed shut off, their system don't update for 48 hours, so please call back.

On Wednesday she calls again and gets the phone set up, but the broadband for some reason can't be set up, but that she will do it in the next two days and Michelle doesn't need to call back. (Short interlude here... as crazy messed up Ireland is policy-wise, the Irish do actually give a damn and it's such a small country anyway, so when the Eircom lady tells Michelle that she'll set up the broadband on Friday you can almost trust her. And indeed, this actually does happen like clockwork.)

So the deal is, Eircom sets up the broadband and then sends you out a wireless router that will work with your subscription. They put it in the Post on Friday.

I mean, you can't really expect it to arrive until Tuesday, right? But when it doesn't arrive by Thursday evening, Michelle calls Eircom, who are surprised that we haven't received it, and that it said it was supposed to be delivered on Tuesday.

PHEW. Glad that got straightened out.

Now on to the Post Office. So here's the deal: they did actually try to deliver it on Tuesday, but apparently Michelle wasn't home, or they didn't read the note saying our buzzer was out and please call X number, or whatever. In the US, they'd stick one of those little yellow "you weren't home" post-its, and deliver the next day.

In Ireland, they haven't invented this system yet. So what they do is they take the box back to the Post Office. Then they write you a letter telling you that you weren't home. Then they put the letter in the mail, stamp and all. A few days later, the letter arrives in the post, telling you that you missed the package and you should pick it up.

Crazy, eh? And don't even get Michelle started on where Bus 13's route starts. Save that one for another time.

Jazz Hands

The Cork Guinness Jazz Festival. What can I say? It was a party. I thought about writing a long post, talking about this and that and blah, blah, blah, but I do that more often than not. And since our internet was inconveniently under Irish bureaucracy for the last few weeks, I’m already posting a couple of longer entries. Thus, some random thoughts, yeah?

We’re on the train, and because of the scenery, deep dark, plowed fields, white sheep with black faces, groves of thin tall evergreens mixed with deciduous, standing water, canals, I have the oddest feeling of vertigo as we travel south when I’m convinced we’re traveling north. The sun is rising on the left, proving that we are indeed going south, unless the world has reversed itself, and it could happen, but as we travel, I’m reminded of trains and drives going north to Mount Vernon, WA, Syracuse, NY. The world has reversed itself, right?

We’re waiting for the vegetarian restaurant to open on a winding continental street with brick, new modern construction, stone, slanted roofs and school boys passing in uniform blazers. I’m using the iPhone for what it is truly meant -- to find Heaven, a poem about fish by Rupert Brooke (http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/heaven.html), to show Scott that yes, some poems, which are very good poems, are funny.

Ok, great thing about Ireland: In a crowded bar? Want another Guinness? Stick your finger in the air, and another Guinness shall appear. A lovely couple from Cork who hate Dublin told us that at this fantastic show by Cat Scratch Fever.

On a busy, commercial street, with wide, wide sidewalks, wide enough to be streets themselves, a four piece group, guitar case opened in front of them, gather a crowd as they play. From down the street marches a marching band, all in uniform, led by a woman with a large gold umbrella. They part through the crowd, and the two bands, still playing their separate songs, stare at one another for a moment until on some unseen cue, the marching band switches songs to that of the four piece group, perfectly in time, and they jam together, ending on the exact same note, at the exact same time, as the crowd grows larger and larger with whistles and cheers.

You know how it rains? Just in general? Anywhere? It rains in Cork as well. However, in Cork water also just hangs out in the air. The sun will be bright and shiny, and the wind will come up, and this water which was there all along will start spritzing around your head, just playing, never hitting the ground. It’s the weirdest thing.

Saturday night, we saw Milk and Jade. They’re jazz meets urban, and they’re brilliant. I think Dana Leong may be able to play the cello while standing on his head. He can definitely play bent over double, afro brushing the floor.

This magnificent creation was made by me using bar coasters. I call it Jazz Hands.

Someone told us that late teens to early twenties Irish women’s evening fashion looks like Easter eggs. In truth, a lot of taffeta and satin in bright blues, greens, yellows, and reds do hop around the dance floor, but I think it’s more peacock-like. I’m making up a word, everyone: peacocking. Ah, damn. It’s already in the urban dictionary. Well, that’s disappointing.

Early events are filled with jazz enthusiasts, those who know the difference between New Orleans jazz, side-men quartets, boogie woogie, and big band. The late night crowd, though. . . . It’s midnight, and a very cool, very scat group just started playing. The lead singer wears a red bow tie and a cardigan. The crowd thunders, packed, body to body, a few facing the stage, a couple of girls dancing ,but everyone else drinking, shouting conversations blurring together, drowning out the band, and it’s like this everywhere, the jazz just a background to the party. There’s a desperation the way they drink, Guinness a constant flow from the bar, the way they laugh, head thrown back, mouth wide, faces red, the way they pretend not to notice who’s watching, who’s pushed as they tug and pull at one another in mock war and dance. I’ve seen it in Dublin too, and I sense an unspoken anger that weaves all of them together just below the forced, purposeful cheer and good nature.

Turns out that the difference between a castle like, oh say, the Blarney Castle (Actually the McCarthy Castle. Blarney was a word coined by Queen Elizabeth in exasperation at negotiations.) and jails of a certain era, like, just for the hell of it, Corcaigh Gaol, built in the 19^th century, closed in the 1920s after spending time as an all women’s jail, is very little. They’re a bit drafty, a bit dark, and both look like my concept of a castle, though the decorations vary just a bit and Blarney Castle, unlike the jail, is missing a roof. The jail has also been populated with life-sized figures, some of which are just freaky, but the castle is right by a Druid sacrificial alter, the Witches Stone, and Fairy Glenn. The castle is very difficult to breach because of the thickness of the walls and the presence of rock underneath said walls. When Cromwell first tried to take it, his troops relied on the guaranteed hospitality of the region which required anyone who asked to be given refreshments. The pretended to hunt a deer, knocked on the door, and discovered that hospitality was only given when the master was in residence. At the time he was in residence in the Cork jail. And thus, we spent Sunday peeking at the political, the destitute, and the pagan faces of Cork. I was wearing high heeled boots because they didn’t fit in my suitcase.

My feet still hurt.

My Lovely

My beautiful wife, carefully planning out the next venue to hit.

Cork at night

Pretty, no?

Co Cork, Ireland

Been a while since I posted- turns out it's hard to cram events into a
busy life and then find time to write about them as well. Go figure.
It's not like our lives are any busier than normal, or busier than
yours.

Anyway, we're on a train back from Cork right now, and I found out I
can post to the blog by emailing it, so there you have it.

This weekend, on the advice of an Irish coworker of mine, Michelle and
I took a trip to Cork. This weekend was the Cork Jazz Festival, and
we had a wonderful time. Two days of, essentially, pub hopping,
listening to some great bands all for mostly free, and we cut a wide
swath of various jazz-ish genres.

Last night we saw Milk and Jade open for Imelda May. I highly highly
recommend Milk and Jade- they were the highlight of the weekend and
put on a great show. Awesome fused mix of hip hop and jazz, great
musicality and very skilled artists. I think they are from Brooklyn.

Today we went to the Cork City Gaol (Jail) in a "just visiting" sense.  It has mostly been preserved as-is since it closed in 1923 and it was a historical, if a little kitschy at times, tour.  Bleak is an understatement.

After that we took the bus out to Blarney Castle and had a wonderful time traipsing the grounds.  They pretty much give you the run of the place, and I was glad it didn't rain today- not so much because the castle is roofless but because that stone would have been immensely more treacherous had it been wet.  The American in me was both shocked and awed by the seeming lack of safety checks put in place.  If the castle were in America they'd be so worried about lawsuit that the place would have been boarded up long ago.  Here they just put up a sign, something to the effect of "we want the castle to remain authentic; therefore if you step beyond this point you absolve the castle of any fault for any injury or death whatsoever."

The lawyers over here haven't really gotten their game face on yet; clearly we Americans can teach them a thing or two.

Also, something I knew but love experiencing... Train travel is an incredibly convenient and peaceful way to travel, though I wouldn't want it to be very crowded.  We're just about to hit Dublin... Jiggity jig.   

It's the Little Things

Ahh, daily life: Cute little children coming home from school;

Packing for the recycle center;

Building where rebels held out for awhile against the British during the Easter Rising;

Scott putting a pot on his head…..

Soundtrack: Mario Brother's Theme Song

I love irony both in good times and in bad. It makes me smile, albeit occasionally with a great deal of bitterness. Today, the heavens opened and the waters literally poured down upon my head. Inside our apartment. I sat at the kitchen table and heard the shower in the main bathroom start. I thought it strange because Scott and I use the shower in our en-suite bathroom. We consider the other shower the guest shower. I was also home alone, and the last time I checked, we didn’t have a magic shower. But that’s the thing about magic, isn’t it? It starts and ends randomly.

I switched on the light and water poured from it – the light in the shower, not the shower. I turned off the light, seemed the prudent thing to do, and ran upstairs, but alas, I knocked to no avail. So I called the management company. Our manager was sick, but a nice woman urged calm, a task I felt well within my reach being that the leak was in the shower. She said they would take care of it. Not long later, she called back and asked if I had the number for the gentleman who managed the entire building. Not only did I have the number, I noticed, while beseeching my upstairs neighbor to open, that his door was open and he had workers.

I again ran upstairs. I called, “Hello?” and waited, knocked, called, “Hello?” and heard an echo back.

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

Until finally a man, balding, jeaned, and pleasant appeared.

“Are you Michael?”

“No, I’m doing some work for him. You just missed him.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“I think he’s gone for the day. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Well, I live below that apartment, and water is pouring through my light fixtures. No one seems to be home.”

For all of you who wonder what Ireland is like, what the Irish are like, this is what the Irish are like:

“I’m a plumber. Would ye like me to take a look at it?”

I never really understood why the Mario brothers were plumbers rescuing the princess until now. I’m not a princess, but I don’t know shite about plumbing, particularly when water is coming out of embedded lighting fixtures.

When I turned on the light to show him, all the lights in the bathroom were crying cold, dirt tears. I ran to the pantry for a bucket while he called Michael to gain access above. The pantry wasn’t crying; it was weeping steady drops, like being high in the mountains inside a cave with crevices and cracks in the wall, perpetual mist outside, water oozing through soil, tree roots, and moss. Yeah, that was my pantry.

Michael didn’t answer, and the plumber ran upstairs to try the neighbor again while I called the management company, in more of a panic, to say that the situation was becoming dire. I could just see it, in a moment all the lights throughout my apartment would be raining water.

The plumber broke into the apartment above. Well, the balcony door was opened so I suppose he didn’t “break” per se. A valve under a sink had broken and water gushed forth. He said the rain would ease in ten. I put out more towels and called Scott from the house phone in the kitchen. As I we spoke, the light over the counter spewed water on my head. It eased quickly, and I put towels everywhere I could find a leak: the entire main bathroom with an inch of water on the floor; the pantry on the same wall as the refrigerator, washer, dryer, ovens, and microwave; by the phone; and one over the book shelves in the hallway.

I have the windows opened in each room in the hopes that the apartment will cease to smell a basement. The wallpaper in the bathroom is damaged where the water seeped through the walls. Yes, indeed, it is quite a mess. The wiring is only a year old, and the renovations two. Apparently, we’re separated from our upstairs neighbor by bedrock, and William, the lovely man who owns our apartment, happens to be in the country and is stopping by to assess the damage. Our goal is not to have to move while repairs are completed. I’m hoping, thinking, that it’s not as bad as it seems.

I walked away from it, and I’m sitting in my chair in my very first home office, and before sitting down to work, hours after I had intended, I played an anagram game on my phone. My first long word allowing me to move to the next level was ‘coping.’

The Celtic Tiger

Ireland has been a very poor country, destitute at times. We all know that. Until recent years, its emigration levels have been astronomically high compared to its neighbors, and some statistic has the number of native born or first generation Irish higher in the US than in Ireland. However, the Celtic Tiger took hold and business boomed, construction began, and thousands flocked to Dublin. Dublin is alive and vibrant, proud to be Irish even as the recession deals blow after blow. Although not at the level of dire risk faced by countries like Iceland, experts whose names I don’t know expect the future of Ireland to be bleaker than in many parts of Europe, but the city continues, albeit with fewer tourists, shorter lines at immigrations, and dozens of cabs lined down the street from the Guinness Storehouse, hotels, and night clubs. Because of a relaxing of the laws, Dublin has more cabbies than Manhattan, but more and more people forsake cabs for the cheaper bus fare or walking. Dublin is a small city. I can walk from Trinity College in the city center to either of the large stadiums on the outer edges of the city in forty minutes, maybe less. However, despite financial setbacks, the city continues, determined to hold onto at least an echo of that Celtic roar.

But on the bus to Ikea, passing through lovely neighborhoods with trimmed hedges, fresh paint, large modern churches, one passes into Ballymun, a northern suburb of Dublin and the home of Europe’s Most Successful Neighborhood Rejuvenation Project. The sign that states it is spray painted over in green, black, and red. Just beyond it is a mall that looks to be abandoned but isn’t, and just beyond that, on a dead end street, is a grouping, three maybe, four, of concrete apartment buildings, slabs with cutouts in the shape of doors and windows. As the bus passes, one can see through the stairways opened to the sky, and trash piles of mattresses and cardboard camouflage where house-cement meets road cement.

Scott thought it looked like something from the Eastern cell bloc. Maybe. I can see in it movies from the 1980s depicting the USSR and East Germany. I imagine living there, and it isn’t the type of place you come for a viewing and say, “This feels like home.” You move into those gray walls, and you fight and claw to make it a home, and undoubtedly some people succeed though a great many fail. Where does it fall in the Celtic Tiger? It’s older than the recession, maybe older than the Tiger, and it is a part of the Tiger, left in the droppings and scraps amongst the small parasites all tigers must have. Though these truly bleak buildings may be unique in Western Europe to Ireland, a country that has been so destitute in moments in its history to send such great swaths of its population fleeing elsewhere, anywhere, the concept of these buildings are universal, large and crowded and ever present in the neighborhoods where we chose not to look.

Internet woes

Today is the 28th, but I'm posting it to be dated the 17th because from the 9th to about the 22nd, we did not have internet service, and I have postings that predate the 22nd. For those of you who complain about broadband/satellite company bureaucracy, not to mention the post office, you have no idea.

The perils of expatriothood

I was stupid just now. I mis-remembered the little numbers on the back of my xbox 360 power supply and didn't double check. And so when I plugged it in with just a little plug converter instead of a voltage transformer...

A loud click.

A oxide smell.

Blew the fuse labeled "bedrooms".

Probably killed the little plug converter.

Definitely killed my power brick.

.... hopefully didn't kill the box itself. Either way, it means a trip to the game store tomorrow to see if I can buy an EU power supply. And tomorrow we're having a little apartment warming party where I've all but promised Rock Banding.

Oh well. The worst that could come is that my xbox is totally fried and shucks, I need to buy a new one, with an HDMI output instead of the measly component outs that I've got.

Early adopters take all the knocks, I tell ya.