Inishowen Peninsula in Images

I don't have that much to say about the places I drove to in the Inishowen Peninsula, because they were just beautiful, and my blog posting would look something like this:

"Wow, this place was so stunning"

"Holy crap, this place blew me away"

"OMG, I can't believe how stunning this place is"

So, I will save you the drivel, and just post a bunch of pics of Ballyliffin, and Malin Head, and Five Fingers Strand, and... If you want to know where any given picture was taken, email me. The beauty and softness and silence of these places speak for themselves. You can click on the bottom right of the slideshow to make it full screen, or to change other options.

The Battle of the Boyne @ the Boyne Valley. Blah.

I promised this blog would not be very academic, and here is proof. This is what I have to say about my visit to the site of the Battle of the Boyne:

Newgrange, and the most remarkable individual I have ever met

A couple of weeks ago, I made a research trip to the Inishowen Peninsula, Co. Donegal. I was visiting the Doagh Famine Village, because I am interested in how the site -- which is a kind of hybrid theme park/historical recreation about the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s -- 'performs' a kind of Irish identity. And I'll save you from the rest. Anyhoo, I just finished writing the paper, so now I finally have time to write something about the rest of the trip, which was beautiful, and moving, and contained a number of surprises (aside from my lost wallet and damaged rental vehicle). I say unexpected, because I didn't realize that I would be passing so close to a number of important historical sites. I guess this year is going to be about this very thing -- breathing in experiences whenever and wherever I can. I have so much to write about this trip, but it already feels like it happened a long time ago, so I will try to make these postings short. For tonight, I'll talk about Newgrange.

I picked up the rental car early in the morning, and despite my pleas, Thrifty could only offer me a standard. Now, I had a standard for five years, and drove it around a lot for at least four of those years. The last year it was parked on the street, because I couldn't bare to give it up (but it was undriveable). I love driving standards. I love driving standards when I am driving on the right side of the road. And shifting with my right hand. But over here, these two things are the opposite: Left side of the road, left hand for shifting (and I still have a stiff finger on my left hand from a yoga mishap), but most importantly: the bulk of the car to the left side of the driver. I didn't realise that this would be the most difficult thing. Left side of road? No biggie. Left hand on the stick? No biggie (except it hurt). Bulk of car on left side of me? Not so good. I just couldn't get a proper sense of how close I could drive to the side of the road without hitting the bushes. Or the large diamond-shaped road sign that appeared out of nowhere and left a nice 18 inch present along the side of the car... Normally the proximity would not be a big deal, but the roads are EXTREMELY narrow in much of Ireland,  and the "highway" I took up to the Peninsula was not an exception. But anyway, I digress.

I was about 50km out of Dublin, taking my time getting north, and I saw a sign that said "Newgrange, 5km" and pointed to the right. I was shocked. I truly feel I wasn't meant to go to this place alone, but there I was, five kilometres from one of the world's most sacred and celebrated ancient sites, and I had finally figured out how to turn right. Off the highway I went, and found myself driving through the valley of the Boyne, which also happens to be one of Ireland's most important sites, but this time in the realm of political history. The Battle of the Boyne in 1690 is where King William of Orange (a Protestant) won the battle against King James (a Catholic). It's a big deal.

But Newgrange is a bigger deal. It is one of only three UNESCO world heritage sites in Ireland, and it is about a millennium older than Stonehenge. It's 600 years older than the pyramids in Egypt. It's older than Aristotle and Plato and Sophocles and Aeschylus!! But importantly, it is a site of great significance from a spiritual perspective, because it was both a tomb, and a kind of astronomical observatory. At the moment the sun rises over the horizon on the morning of winter solstice (Dec 21), the light beams through a very carefully constructed aperture to illuminate the inner chamber. Last year over 30,000 people entered a lottery for just 50 tickets to be in the chamber during the 17 minutes that it is illuminated by the first rays of solstice. The magnitude and precision of its construction is mind boggling, especially when you find out that the kerbstones that surround the tumulous weigh several tonnes each, and come from quite far away. And oh ya, Newgrange predates the invention of the wheel...

On a regular day, you have to join a tour to see the monument, but the whole process is quite relaxed, and I think I was there early enough in the day to be assured a spot. Once you pay for your ticket, you are bussed from the visitor centre to the site, and a guide gives a lot of background information about the mound, its meaning, its significance, etc. But the special moment comes when you get to enter the tumulous, and crouch along the pathway into the inner chamber. Once inside, our guide spent a good ten minutes arranging the 25 or so people on my tour in order of height. He was trying to make sure that everyone would have a good view, and for once, I felt blessed to be a shorty. I got to stand in front! He checked to see if anyone was claustrophobic, because he was about to turn out the lights.

The entire monument has been beautifully preserved, and great pains have been taken to disturb it as little as possible. But, he explained to us, they have mounted two little light bulbs near the opening of the chamber that admits light, in order to simulate the experience of being there at solstice. As the lights went out, I held my breath. And then suddenly, the smallest stream of light crept along the floor into the chamber. I started crying. Like, a lot. I knew this was a simulation, but it felt remarkable and rare and sacred all at the same time. Thinking about the great wisdom and power of the people who made this place, I felt overwhelmed by a sense of human history. I felt overwhelmed by my own history. I felt...uh, overwhelmed in general.

I think I managed to get some beautiful photos, because the sky was so bright and clear. You can click on any of the blog's photos, by the way, if you want to see larger versions. Below is the entranceway to the tomb. The stairs have clearly been built for visitor access, but otherwise, every effort was made to restore it to what archaeologists believe it would have looked like 5000 years ago.

The picture below is a close up. You can see the spirals on the entrance kerbstone - they are also found on many of the other 96 stones that surround the mound, and on the walls inside. The inside walls also have graffiti, with the most recent scratchings of initials dating to the Victorian era.

Here is the view from the entrance, looking out to roughly where the sun rises:

And finally, the latest sparkling water I tried. It doesn't quite have the bubbles of the PC low sodium cans I'm so fond of, but it gave Ballygowen a run for its money. But I bought it, of course, because its label has Newgrange on it!

So, that's my little bit about Newgrange. I feel unsatisfied leaving it at this, but I can't really post my guts up all over this blog, now can I? The experience of being in a place like this is not best expressed through language, because its effect is much more internal. So, I'll stop writing now. G'night.

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death" -- Anais Nin

Everything in Perspective

I've been Dublin Theatre Festivalling all week, and while that is exciting in itself, it's also a great way to occupy my evenings, which are usually rather quiet. I saw DV8's To Be Straight With You last night up at the O'Reilly Theatre in Belvedere College.

Image source: voiceofdance.com

On a map, Belvedere College looks far away from me, but it's really only a 20-25 min walk, so I killed time after dinner so that I would leave around 7:15, take a very leisurely walk, calmly take my seat, and do that thing I'm not used to: be just a bit early. (Dinner, by the way, was composed of smoked salmon and pre-made carrot-parsnip-turnip mash, because my stove/cooker blew yesterday and I had to blindly buy things from the prepared section of the grocery store. I'm not so good with prepared foods).

So, 7:15 rolls around, I leave the flat, I return 30 seconds later for my umbrella (this little farce is standard practice - I'm still not in the habit of bringing it automatically), and when I step back outside again, the misty rain has stopped. I double check my wallet to make sure I have the ticket (and the wallet, LOL, because I 'lost' it on the way to London last weekend, but that is another story), and then I glimpse the ticket: Start time 7:30pm.

Check phone. Current time: 7:24. OK! Time to hail my first cab! I frantically run across the bridge to the north side, because the traffic flows east along the Quays on the north side, and I have to go a bit east before going north (these are directional indicators that don't mean anything here, but my brain is hardwired for Never Eat Shredded Wheat). I jump in, and the guy says "Hello Pet, where can I take you?" and I blurt out something about thinking the show started at eight but realizing it starts at 7:30, and he's like "Oh sure, I'll get you there in time." Which is vey nice of him to say, but his driving revealed otherwise, as he leisure wove his way up to the theatre.

Arrival. Check phone. Current time: 7:33. I go inside and there are about thirty people standing around chatting, and I'm thinking, boy, aren't they casual - shouldn't they be inside right now? Until I ask someone, and it turns out this is the group of late people. They finally let us in, but they did little to guide us to any available seats, so I ended up following a bunch of women who were hiking up their skirts to climb over the front rows to available seats farther back. I admit that it was fitting, as DV8 is a physical theatre company, so it sort of put us in the mood. The show was a kind of testimonial/doc theatre piece about politics and social dangers of being gay in the world, all supported by beautiful movement, but talking about it in any detail feels like work, so nah-uh. It appears that DV8 are travelling to TO for World Stage, so you can see it yourself if you're interested.

I tried making friends in the lobby (Hello! (said like Carm), I was at the theatre, for a show about homosexuals, so you think I'd have a lot of people to talk to), but that didn't work, so off I trotted home, down O'Connell street, past a million Spars and Centras and Londises, past the Spire, along the Quays. I've been experiencing an acute bout of loneliness the last couple of days - it's the beginning of flu season so perhaps I've caught an emotional strain - and moments like the walk home are particularly hard, because as I leave the theatre (or cinema, or talk, or resto), the illusion of belonging created in that space slowly fades away, and I remember that I am going home to my cool pad -- my cool, empty pad. Cue the violins.

I decided to walk over the Ha' Penny Bride, 'cause is sure is purty, and it's lit up quite nicely at night, with the period lanterns at the top of the arches reflecting brightly off the shiny white paint below. This bridge is always really busy, with people stopping to take photos, or pausing to look down the Liffey in either direction. And there are often a number of people sitting in sleeping bags, trying to gather some change, and, I think, stay safely out of the dark and pissed-filled back alleys of the city. I think I have some kind of internalized bougey middle class guilt, because everytime I see someone who appears homeless, I feel terrible. But most of the time, I do nothing about it. And then I feel more terrible, and I really have no idea what the whole thing is about, but aside from giving people change every now and then, I do not interact. I want to interact, but I don't. And I don't like myself in these moments. But being in a new place, and in a remarkably new and porous headspace in general, all I could think is - cripes, if I am feeling low and lonely, how must these people feel? Talk about isolation. I walked by one young woman who was huddled in what looked like a damp sleeping bag, and I looked down and smiled, but I kept going. I got down onto the sidewalk, and just stopped. What was my fear? I felt like I wanted to connect, but there is something in me that tells me to shut off that feeling - to preserve something. Feck it, I went into the convenience store (not sure which one, but certainly a SparCentraLondis variety), bought two bags of chips with markedly different flavours, and headed back to the bridge. As I approached her, I felt I had to make as if this wasn't planned - I just happened to be walking by with two bags of chips, and I happened to think about offering her one. What is this BS? Why the performance? I don't know.

So I kind of paused, held out both, she scanned the labels, and chose the plain one (good choice, the salt and vinegar ones nearly took the roof off my mouth). I crouched down, and we ate the chips, chatting casually about nothing, the way one does with strangers on a bridge in the middle of a city. Except I was probably saying dumb and obvious things like "do you have somewhere to go," etc. But here is the thing that killed me. I pulled 5 Euro out of my pocket and handed it to her, and she looked at me with a perplexed face and said "Are you sure?" And all I could say was, "Yes, yes, I am sure," thinking how little 5 Euros really was to me, and absolutely taken aback by her question. I don't know why she asked me that. Was it, "Are you sure you can spare this, because it's so much more than the 20 cent coins I usually get," or was it "Are you sure you really want to give this to me - is it worth it?" Or something else that I haven't thought of. But I was really moved by the impulse, and so so so glad that I finally stopped to chat. I eventually got up and wished her well, and as I walked home, my head was ajumble with thoughts of my theatre-going and her bridge-living. My funky leather jacket and her damp sleeping bad. My loneliness, and whatever it is she must be feeling. It's never going to make any sense to me, so I came home and did some research, and I just sent off my application to volunteer with Simon Community. It's about frigging time.

Houseplants, walking, and other cultural idiosyncrasies

Moving to a new country has revealed to me how deeply we are shaped by our home culture. I knew about the food, the social rituals, the idiosyncrasies of language, and many other things that a different culture has to offer, but there are little things - tiny things - that amaze me, or frustrate me, or just baffle me.

For instance, I can't seem to walk properly on the sidewalk. I don't mean that I've been imbibing too much Guinness, but that there is something about the way people move in public spaces that I just can't figure out. I keep almost bumping into people, or having to slow down suddenly because someone in front of me has stopped. I cannot figure out what is going on. At first, I thought "Aha! I'm walking on the right side of the sidewalk, and I suppose people naturally gravitate to the left side here, in order to do as all good pedestrians are trained to do: act like traffic. So I tried consciously shifting, but it didn't really make a difference. Then I tried altering my pace. Perhaps I was walking too quickly? A little bit too much NYC in my North American mobility patterns? Didn't really work either. It's clear that I am just not picking up the cues. People send off cues unconsciously, and I am not picking up the signal when it comes to walking. I have decided to stop thinking about it, and perhaps my body will figure it out on its own.

I was in London this past weekend visiting friends (more on that in a future entry), and SF asked me how I was doing in Dublin. He lives in London, but has spent chunks of time in other places (including Toronto), and said to me "Everything is completely different, isn't it?" And I said - "You are SO right!" I had never really thought of it that way before, and just thought that maybe I was getting dumber by the minute. We see the obvious differences quite quickly, but the more subtle differences -- such as the humour and unmarked references to celebrities or local politicians -- just glide right over my head at times. I'll stop thinking about it, and maybe my mind will figure it out on its own.

But onto more serious differences: shopping and consumption. There are certain things that I found very easy to find at home, and clearly I took them for granted. In Dublin, I have searched and searched for such things, and only with great effort have I come upon them. Like a bathmat made of simple terrycloth towel material. Like one of those Japanese scrubby towels used for vigorous exfoliation, which I used to pick up for two bucks at the Korean stores on Bloor. Like pretty tea towels, made of absorbent material. Like Toms of Maine or JASON toothpaste that doesn't cost 8 Euros. Like HOUSEPLANTS.

I love houseplants. We had so many of them in Kingston that going out of town always made us scramble for botanical care-givers. Parting with my plants was harder than parting with my clothes, or my small bottles of Aveda products taken from hotelrooms, or the ginger I had lovingly cut into cubes, dried, and saved for a days when all the fresh stuff was lying flavourless at the bottom of the teapot. My consolation of course is that houseplants are easy to come by. Every corner store, grocery store, florist, and even some hardware stores in Ontario have them, so it wouldn't be a problem in Dublin, where many indoor plants in Toronto could live happily outdoors. But I was wrong. I have been here for over a month, and have kept my eyes peeled on every shopping venture. Marks & Spencer (which has yummy and healthy prepared foods, by the way), had a few sickly day lilies next to their cut flowers, and one florist had some limp looking heather, but there was not a schefflera or philodendron in sight.

And then I remembered that Dublin just got an IKEA. Woohoo! Multinational mega-chain comes to the rescue! I tried - I really did - to go local. At least I took the bus. The trip back to the city, on the 13A bus, is like a nature peep show. If you sit in the front row of the top deck as Sophie taught me in London - you can see the Wicklow mountains beyond the city as the bus weaves back and forth through different neighbourhoods. It always amazes me when I see mountains in the distance. They look close enough to walk to, but I think it would take a good day.

Anyway, here's a picture of some of my new plants. The basil was from M&S, and I think it was meant to be eaten, but I just separated the roots and put it in a bigger pot. It was very unhappy for a while, spitting brown leaves at my floor, but it is perking up. The peace lily on the TV was left beside the dumpsters in the courtyard this morning, so I figured that was a 'good garbage' sign. There is also an ivy in the bedroom, but I'm feeling too lazy to upload two photos, because I am at least 6 or 7 blog posts behind...

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.


View Larger Map

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.

From one green place to another

I'm off to the Inishowen Peninsula on a short research trip, so more beautiful photos of green places will be arriving on the blog next week. But it's been a busy week getting down to work and planning out what I will see at the Dublin Theatre Festival, which starts next week, and coincidentally (for me) boasts Quebec's Robert Lepage as one of the big-name headliners...

But I realise I haven't posted on the blog in a while. I have so many quirky things to report, but they are going to have to wait. Until I return, here are some more photos of the hike at Howth - I went again last weekend, and had a beautiful sunny day, so I decided to do the longer walk, which should have been a 10km loop. But I got a bit lost on the way, and didn't loop back towards Howth when I should have, so I ended up at Sutton Cross, which is the town one DART stop closer to Dublin. It was a really long hike, and while I think the cliff walk before you get to the lighthouse is more awe-inspiring, the part after the lighthouse has its own charm.

Here's another, clearer pic of the walk up to the lighthouse. But the time you see this, you're most of the way there:

And here is a view once you've come around Howth head. Not as stunning, right?

My favourite part about the backend of the hike is that it brings you to this beach, which includes a rather treacherous set of stairs/rocky path combo to bring you down. I saw a family there with kids and a stroller, and I have no idea how they got it down... 

And here is what the rock formations look like at beach level. I stepped into the water, and it was surprisingly mild - I expected to get the freezing-pain feeling in my feet that I first experienced as a child at Cape Cod, but I was able to stay in it for a while. On a warmer day (haha, as if), I might even attempt a swim.

I paused for a little camera-timer action because I love this heather-strewn landscape. A friend pointed out that this is my 'Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man' pose, which wasn't the intention. It was actually a test shot to see if I was standing in the frame...

See you shortly. And don't be afraid to use the comment function below - I have no idea if anyone is actually reading this thing.