To soothe the Tiger King's weather-beaten skin

This one is for Brian, Charlie, and all of my past Celtic Cinema students (one of whom I bumped into on the street yesterday!)

I was visiting a small farmer's market a few weekends ago, and came upon a great find: Man of Aran beauty products! Aran, of course, refers to the islands off the coast of Galway. They are known for their dramatic cliffs, windswept vistas, and proliferation of Aran sweater shops. When I visited years ago, Inishmore (made famous more recently by Martin McDonagh's macabre The Lieutenant of Inishmore) seemed to be populated by artists, innkeepers, and tourists. So that's Aran.  

Man of Aran is something else - a film released in 1934 about the poor and rugged but romantic Irish folks who 'scratched out a meagre existence' on the islands alongtimeago, digging dirt from between rock crevices in order to plant gardens, and fishing for sharks to obtain oil to light their lamps. The film was marketed as a documentary, but came under significant criticism when it became clear that many elements of the film were anachronistic, or fabricated for effect. Anyway, that's enough of a lesson for now. It just completely cracked me up when I saw Man of Aran beauty products at the local/organic market. The irony of branding luxury items on a film about the decidedly beauty-product-free characters in the film was too much. I expect several folks were wondering why I was crouching down in front of  a serviceable metal shelf to take photos of shampoo and body lotion.

Speaking about the shelves, the market had one stand that served a fabulous lentil soup (they only had half a bowl left, so I was charged half the price, and went around that afternoon half-full), and the most reasonably priced natural soap that I've seen in Dublin. Many bars are 7-8 Euros (ahhhhh, don't convert!), but this place had some for 2.50. Small pleasures...

 

The SuperNatural Food Market operates indoors at the St. Andrews Resource Centre on Pearse Street, and is open until the mid-afternoon on Saturdays. If you walk along Pearse St. past Trinity College in the direction of Dublin Bay (notice I refrained from saying 'east', 'cause Dubliners don't use compass directions), you'll find it on the right (south) side of the street, across from Pearse Square. If you reach the bridge over the Grand Canal/docks, you've gone too far.

Dispatch from the couch

If you want an idea of what I've been seeing in Dublin for the last week, then look no further than the picture above. It is a very pretty view, indeed, but after four days, it becomes a little less interesting.
I do admit that an extended view has brought out things I may not have noticed from an everyday glance out the window. Look, for instance, at how my plants are magically lined up to colour-coordinate with the trees and ivy outside! This was a fluke. I have one flowering plant, which is a nice hot pink colour right now, and from my current view, it appears to be placed right in front of the reddening ivy that is growing on the opposite side of the courtyard. And my little bonsai, bought at a street sale days before the plague hit me, is placed nicely in front of a similarly shaped tree outside. Most plant pots are white; so is the wall of the building! It's amazing, really.

I should have noted at the start that this posting very well may not make any sense. I make no promises that the grammar is correct, or that my writing will be relatively free from typsos. You see, I've been prostrate and mewling to myself for days, and as of this morning, I can add 'delirious' to the list. It's probably H1N1, but they don't bother testing for it anymore because it's so prevalent. All I know is that I've been on the couch since Tuesday am, watching the thermometer rise as the ibuprofen wears off, and watching it fall as I metabolize another dose. And things were coming along swimmingly (swimming in my head, in my bed...) until this morning, when I woke up feeling so dizzy that I had to lie down approximately 30 seconds after I finally got out of bed. I felt...completely stoned. The rest of my symptoms -- sore lungs, achey body, cough - were all lessening, but this dizzy thing was new. Of course I pictured myself passing out, only to wake up hours later wondering where I was...so, I called a doctor.

Thankfully my colleague Lisa had given me the number for the clinic she attends. She said it was run by a handful of female doctors, and that they were all the no-nonsense type. Sounded perfect to me. I called up, and the secretary said that she could fit me in right away. Now this is amazing to me. I've waited months for an appointment in Kingston before, and even weeks in Toronto. This clinic -- the Suffolk Street Surgery -- is very near to me, so I managed to get myself upright, stuff my feet into a pair of shoes (I was happy to see that the pair matched when I took them off after returning home), and off I went to the clinic.

Sometimes I really appreciate the more relaxed demeanor in Ireland, even if it is scary. For instance, the secretary knew I was coming in with potential swine flu symptoms, but she still had me into the reception to get a form. Then she asked me to go sit on the stairs, in order to stay away from other patients. It was all very casual - no mask or clear quarantine - just a half a flight of stairs between me and potential new victims. To be fair, I wasn't hacking all over the place, and I was clearly aware that I should keep my distance from others. I was able to see the doctor within 20 minutes of my arrival, and she checked all my vitals. The overall diagnosis: definitely a bad case of the flu -- swine or otherwise. The diagnosis for my dizzyness: just what I had felt: I WAS stoned out of my tree! Unable to find Neo Citran in this fair city, I had purchased a capsule medication called "Night Nurse." Night Nurse has acetaminophen (known as paracetamol here) in it, as well as an antihistamine for drowsiness, and the antitussive dextromethorphan hydrobromide, otherwise known as DM. The DM is definitely the culprit. "But my last dose was 14 hours ago! And  I've been taking it for 3 nights," I protested, "And this is the only time I've felt wacked out!" Apparently the Nurse can have varying effects on the same person at different times. My sickness combined with my slightness had somehow brought about an extreme sensitivity.

A good ten or fifteen years ago, I had an out of body experience after taking a cough medicine with DM in it, and I swore off ever using it again. I remember sitting at the round white kitchen table with my mom, and thinking that I was floating above everyone, and that the world wasn't actually real.  But a few years ago I was experimenting with cough suppressant alternatives to the narcotic codeine, and I successfully used DM on a couple of occasions. But now I am thinking, No More Night Nurse for me. It's been 17 hours since I had the last dose, and I am still feeling stoned.

I must say that my first encounter with the healthcare system in Ireland was successful. They managed to fit me in right away, and the cost for the consultation was only 55 Euros. I must remind myself that I paid 55 Euros to be assured I wasn't dying, as opposed to paying 55 Euros to be told I was stoned from medication I had knowingly and willingly taken. The Doc did provide me with a prescription for Tamiflu, an antiviral that has proven quite effective against H1N1, but it's up to me to decide if I want to fill it. Right now, I am feeling remarkably better, so I think I will wait. Now I just have to muster the strength to get those damn pink elephants out of my livingroom. Hey! You! This is not some kind of circus ring! This is my FLAT!

PS: A few other things I have learned about drugs: While Neo Citran doesn't exist, you can get a hot lemon drink that contains paracetamol and vitamin C. It's called LemSip. Ibuprofen, which is best known by its brand name at home as Advil, is known as Nurofen here. Acetaminophen is known as paracetamol. Apparently, you can take these two together without any harm, because Ibuprofen is excreted by the kidneys and Acetaminophen is excreted by the liver. So you won't over tax either organ if you have regular doses of each medication. I had always lumped the two, along with Aspirin/acetysalicylic acid in the general category of "pain killers" and thought that if you were on one, you couldn't be on the other. But my local pharmacist told me otherwise. This page from the brand Nurofen gives a brief explanation of the differences: Ingredients. A friend of mine who is in medschool here told me that this is the best website for medical advice -- it's the one that doctors use: www.emedicinehealth.com.

Yoga Studio 1: The Elbow Room

Since I arrived in Dublin almost a month ago, I’ve been keeping up an (almost) daily practice in my living room, which is much nicer now that I have wooden floors, and not the industrial carpet of the residence room I was staying in at the beginning. I’ve been surviving on audio podcasts that you can download for free through iTunes – check it out, there are tonnes of yoga podcasts to satisfy every kind of practice. My favourite hour-long ones are Greg’s from Yoga to the People – a New York based studio that wants to, well, bring yoga to the people. At their live classes, they charge very little, and pack everyone in like happy little yogi-sardines. There are nine classes currently available from YTP through iTunes, but I find they can really handle repeat playings.

I’ve also done podcasts by Wade Zinter, Kinndli McCollum (who does a Baptiste-style power class), Eoin Finn, and the super-hot Seane Corn, whose grace and core strength I long to achieve (see her Body Prayer on YouTube for an idea of what I mean – watch those feet float back into Chattarunga like someone had rigged her up à la Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon!)

As a quick fix, Yogadownload.com offers 20-minute classes that target a specific area, such as “Shoulder Opener,” “Hip Opener,” and “Yoga for Buns.” The cool thing about these 20-minute podcasts are that they offer a pick-and-mix approach: you can choose a couple, fire them up on your iPod or through your computer speakers, and have a longer class tailored to what your body and mind need that day. They also come with PDFs of pose guides, so you can consult the visual if you’re not sure about a particular pose. You can download these directly from their site, but if you download them through iTunes then they go directly into your Podcast folder, which I think is preferable to having them show up under Music.

As much as I find yoga to be a deeply personal practice, I’ve been starting to feel that it is way more satisfying to practice it with other humans. For one, I’ve been concentrating on my alignment in some of the central asanas, but without having a teacher around to guide me, I might be on the path to perfecting an incorrect alignment without knowing it. And I somewhat begrudgingly admit that I like chanting Om with other people at the end of class. So with this in mind, and my chest cold/sore throat on its way out, I decided to hit a studio last night. And I decided that I wanted Hot Yoga.

I don’t think hot yoga has caught on in Dublin the way it has at home, but there are a couple of studios in Dublin that do some version of it. Dublin has at least a couple of Bikram studios, and if you're interested, here are the links: Bikram Yoga, Bikram Yoga Fairview. However, I’m not a big fan of Bikram yoga – it just seems too militaristic, and frankly, at odds in practice with the spirit of yoga – so I had to seek out a place that uses heat with non-Bikram classes. I wanted the heat because I had been sitting in my cold, draughty, office all day, my fingers were turning blue, and I needed to finally stop wearing my coat and scarf. I quickly found The Elbow Room on the internet. It’s located in an area called Stoneybatter, which is just above Smithfield, which is less than a 15 minute walk from my flat.


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As an aside – Dublin has names for many of its areas, and it always makes me think that I will have to travel to a suburb to get there. Then I find out it’s a stone’s throw from … well, wherever I happen to be at that moment. Dublin is really not that big.

Anyway, off I trotted to Stoneybatter, yoga mat and hot-yoga mat-towel under arm, and my bag full of yoga clothes, new underwear, another towel for the shower, and face cream (the only product I feel I really must have after a shower). For anyone who has never done a hot yoga class, it’s really really sweaty. You basically come out looking like you went for a swim in your clothes, and dropped your towel in the water to boot.

The Elbow Room is easy to miss if you’re not paying attention, because it’s in a little courtyard on the north side of Brunswick St. North, just east of Blackhall. The sign is inside the walls of the courtyard, so you have to go right up to it to see it. The reception area is very nice, and there are magazines and cushioned benches to sit on while you wait for the previous class to empty. It also has change rooms and a couple of showers with free toiletries. And you can book and pay for your class online, which means you don’t have to bring your wallet. So far, so good.

I went into the room to get set up, but it wasn’t very warm. I thought perhaps I was in the wrong room (they have two). I went out to ask the guy at reception, and he told me that indeed I was in the right room, but it’s hard to get it very hot, you know, depending on how cold it is outside (it was probably about 15 degrees outside at that point, which is really not far from the warmest temperature that Dublin reaches). So I went back inside, wishing I had worn yoga pants and not my favourite blue Lululemon hot yoga shorts. I think the temperature reached, maximum, about 25 degrees, which is considerably cooler than the high 30s or even 40s that I’ve had in places at home. In fact, one day at my sister’s studio in Mississauga, Leewi Yoga, the instructor confessed after the class that it had accidentally reached 50 degrees! It’s not that I needed to be baked like a little Irish potato, it’s just that, as I said, I had been freezing all day and was hoping for something to replicate the tropics. I almost wanted to ask for a blankey.

However, the class was good, and the slower pace of it helped to bring me back to some of the basics. I’ve been pretty addicted to the power side of things for the last couple of months, but not every class needs to test the outer limits of one’s breath and physical stamina. As I suspected, my alignment was off in a few cases, and Aidan helped to correct an errant butt here, a lose leg there, and a tight shoulder…everywhere. And this is totally silly and immature to say, but it was kind of funny listening to someone say all the yoga words with an Irish accent. Maybe it’s because I find many Irish accents have an earthy quality to them, and yoga language is a bit more on the airy side. Anyhow, I’d like to go back, but I was really disappointed by the lukewarm temperature. I don’t think I will practice hot yoga all the time, but when I crave it, then I want it to be actually hot, because the heat helps to bring about a very deep peaceful (read: exhausted and perhaps delirious) feeling by the end of class. Yoga is also very expensive (like everything!) here, and that might be prohibitive. This class was 17 Euros, which, if you do the conversion, is about $27 CDN. I keep telling myself to STOP CONVERTING.

Dogs are meant to poop outside

I was meeting a new friend for dinner tonight in the Temple Bar area (I know I know it is touristy, give me a break, I've only been here for a few days!), and decided to go for a little walk first. My intention is to walk around as much as I can, so if I find a great flat, I can confidently decide in an instant whether or not I would like living in that neighbourhood. Dublin's not really that big, if you plan to stay within 2km of the absolute centre (which I guess I would poinpoint as the O'Connell Bridge, but maybe living here will change that attitude).

My mission was to find some soap - just a nice bar of soap made from, you know, pure ingredients, essential oils - the usual. It takes a while to find a Kensington Market-like space when you are in a new city, but I hold out no hopes for finding anything as cheap and down-home as Sugar and Spice.

I found a great bar of lemongrass soap at Down to Earth on South Great Georges Street, and decided that was my new scent. Bright, lively, ready-for-anything. It was 4 Euros, and seeing this kind of soap at home is often 4 dollars, I figured this place was on the mark. I've decided not to convert currencies anymore - it's too painful. The numbers stay the same, even if the conversion speaks of highway robbery.

I left the chipper guy at the counter of the store, and continued walking south. Oddly, Dubliners call this 'walking UP the street,' which is confusing, seeing I have always associated 'UP' with walking north. But maybe I am too attached to maps, which place the north arrow at the top...

I had a few minutes before I had to turn around and head back to Temple Bar for my dinner date, so I popped into Penny Farthing Cycles Shop, thinking I might find out if they had any second hand bikes that were suitable. Air Canada was going to charge me $275 to bring the bike over - $225 for an extra 'bag', and $50 for the that 'bag' being sports equipment -- and I figured that it would cost the same to bring it back, which just made it not worth it.

So there I am in this (admittedly kind of grotty - I should have known) cycle shop. The fellow said they had very few used bikes, but then a woman on the phone placed her hand over the mouthpiece, and said "How 'bout that silver-and-grey Ladies' that just came in? It's not serviced yet, but it's a 16."

Well, I am short, so 16" would be perfect. I proceeded to the back of the shop to inspect the bike. There was a very large boxer moving around, but he seemed friendly enough, and didn't jump on my head (dogs for some reason like to come up and lick me on the face, no matter how far my face is from the ground). He pointed out the bike, but it was in a big stack, so I moved around back to inspect it. I was talking about derailleurs and the like - making myself out to be the knowledgeable cyclist that I am (or pretend to be), and I noticed this...smell.  I was thinking, phew, that doggy sure does smell! Then I realised, um, that is the smell of...poop. Dog poop. And yes, I was standing in it. Great big fluffy piles of it.

On the concrete floor of the shop.

INdoors.

The guy was like "oh no, I hope you didn't step in it." I looked down, and there were, like, TEN PILES of poop at my feet. Under my feet, actually. That is WAY MORE than a day's worth. WTF? Who DOES that? I mean, a warning would have been nice.

Let's just say that several toilet paper rolls and visits to a grotty bike-grease covered bathroom later, I was in St. Stephen's Green, not paying homage to Joyce and Bloom, but wiping my soles for dear life. I was a little late to meet my friend at Temple Bar, but... I had a pretty good excuse. And oh ya, the bike sucked.

Yamamori Noodles, yummm

Today my new colleague Lisa took me on a city centre walking tour that had three themes: cheap eats, cheap electronics (my request), and useful libraries/archives (isn't this everyone's perfect walking tour of a new city?) We had lunch at Yamamori on South Great Georges Street, but I see that they have two locations. The atmosphere was fresh and lively, but not swank and chi-chi as the cheese-oid music on their website might suggest. Around 1pm, we seemed to be the only people in the place, but by 3pm it was packed - a fact that I only realised when I noticed I was sort of yelling at her over my bowl of noodles.

Happy to find ramen on the menu, I ordered the seafood version. (Ramen is hard to come by in Toronto, and the one new place that features it in TO -- Kenzo Ramen on Dundas St. -- proved to be a bit disappointing when I went there a few months ago with my friend Phil). Anyhoo, in expensive Dublin, I was expecting that for 10 Euros I would get a tiny bowl with canned salad shrimp and pollocky fish balls. Moments later, a massive steaming bowl of fresh seafood, veggies, and noodles arrived. The broth was a silky miso-garlic combination (I couldn't taste the oyster sauce that was listed on the menu), the prawns tasted like lobster, and overall, it was very good. I even had to leave some behind, but that might be blamed on the jet-lag. Thanks, Lisa!

P.S. Speaking of foods tasting differently, the cottage cheese here is DEElicious! It tastes...cheesier.