Eiskafe

Something I forgot to expect about Berlin is that, due to its hugeness, it's harder to wander vaguely in search of [a cheap cafe; an internet cafe; a bakery] than it is in many European capitals. In Dublin, when I was hungry, I could pass and evaluate literally dozens of cafes and restaurants before choosing one; here in Berlin, I might walk for 20 minutes without seeing a single food establishment, despite being on a huge, heavily-trafficked street. There are of course still areas where cafes cluster, but if you're not actually in one of those, it can be a hungry walk. What there are a lot of are places that sell ice cream. Maybe Germans want to hold on to the idea that it is still summer, or maybe tourists get hot while walking around between sights, but for whatever reason there are about 10 times as many ice-cream-selling establishments in Berlin than an any other European city that I've been to. You can tell when a place sells ice cream because there will be a waist-high fiberglass ice cream cone outside, or a giant chalkboard shaped like a banana split. One place on a corner had four fiberglass cones: two normal ones, one that was somehow the size and shape of a table, and one that was "melted" into a sort of chair shape. Ice cream is reasonably cheap here, so it would be nice to have such availability of it, if it weren't 10°C and rainy.

The bakeries here, once found, are every bit as wonderful as I remembered. I've eaten 5 pretzels in my 27 hours in the city so far, and once I'm settled in my apartment, I have some very delicious plans that mostly involve buying fresh bread in the mornings. Produce is also very cheap here, or maybe it is everywhere and I've never noticed it before, but this occurred to me as I bought some vegetables for the delicious curry that Jesse would later cook for Jane and me. Jane seems to have a very sweet arrangement in her apartment, one that goes approximately like this:

[as Jesse comes home from a long day of work, Jane is sitting in silk pants and a gold-thread dressing gown, sipping a mug of chai, and druming her manicured, ringed fingers on the table. Jesse is wet and tired from giving a 5 hour tour in the rain.]
Jane: Jesse! You're late!
Jesse: I'm sorry, ma'am.
Jane: Don't stand there apologizing; cook me dinner and apologize while slicing the onions.
Jesse [crying softly - because of the onions?]: Yes, ma'am.
[Jesse proceeds to cook a delicious curry, as mentioned before. He doesn't use any salt or water; both of those ingredients are provided by his tears. ]
Jane: Now begone with you. My guest [me!] and I want to eat in peace. I shall ring this bell when there is washing-up to do.
[Jesse puts on an apron and head scarf and heads off to clean the bathroom.]

So yeah, it's pretty sweet. I would totally just stay and live with Jane and Jesse if I could, but I've seen the look in his eyes when he sharpens the knives.

Terror!

I got to Berlin today, and have been wandering about since. I was banking on my German all coming back to me when I got here, and so far I've been successful in talking to people, even with my biggest hurdle: getting a new phone SIM card and plan. I am now reachable by phone again; it's free for me to receive calls and texts, and ranges from reasonably expensive to ridiculously so for me to text and call. So expect more text messages from me than you're used to, and call me if you can:
+49 160 950 30 333

On my way to the phone store I bought and ate two pretzels, and on my way from the store to Alexanderplatz I bought and ate one more. I might get another on my way back. I've missed pretzels. The indoor mall at the edge of Alexanderplatz took away my appetite for a good while though, on account of it currently hosting an exhibit of 10 000 barbie dolls. Or maybe it's 1000, but anwyay it was truly the most frightening thing I've seen so far on my trip. Barbies of all types and from all decades are in cases wherever I want to walk, and posters loom up whenever I think I've escaped the display cases. The display should be gone in two days though, so by the time Jeremy gets here it may be safe to show him around the area. I've just been sitting here, asking myself why anyone would let so many Barbie dolls amass in one enclosed space, but I just can't see how or why the Germans would do something like that.


(Something I forgot earlier, probably because I was trying to block it out of my consciousness, is that the internet cafe I was using was attached to a Dunkin Donuts. I've seen a couple Dunkin Donuts stores so far in Berlin, which makes absolutely no sense to me, what with the delicious and not expensive baked goods available on literally every corner. )

Is That Fenway Park?

It will always be true, and it will always be exasperatingly amusing, that tourists, when placed into an enclosed environment with more of their own, will say very, very stupid things, and think that they are clever or knowledgable, or in general not total tools. When my sister, my mother, and I flew to the East Coast for me to look at some college campuses among other activities and side trips, Jackie and I ended up sitting behind two of the most touristey tourists in the lower 48 states. In the middle of a long stream of banal conversation about the Boston Marathon and various bus tours of the city, we started our descent into the Boston area. The flight attendents had announced that we were about a half hour from landing, and the plane was low enough to see various towns and suburbs on the flightpath. As we flew over a high school and its surrounding sports fields, one tourist turned to the other and asked, "is that Fenway Park!?" The man by the window replied, knowingly, "yes, I think it is," as the little league stadium slipped behind the plane. Neither tourist seemed to notice, 20 minutes later when we were actually over Boston, the brightly-lit major league stadium that was in fact Fenway Park.

This type of self-assured, and utterly wrong, tourist is far more amusing but far more irritating than the type that asks directions to and questions about everything. My tour of the Kilmanhaim Gaol (there's no way I spelled that name right, incidentally) started out in a 10 foot square open area between the jail buiding itself and the visitors center annex. Immediately upon stepping out of the annex, a tang-haired british woman leaned to her Annie-permed traveling companion and said in a stage whisper, "This must be the exercise yard." That both women held very full bags from the gift shop at the Guinness Storehouse only partly excuses the ridiculousness of the statement; the smallest of the actual exercise yards we saw later was about 15 times as big as the courtyard between the jail and the annex, and what's more, the real exercize yards are actually within the prison.

Later on the same tour, when the tour guide pushed a button to automatically raise the projection screen that some slides had been displayed on, a man said, not quietly, "And we have liftoff!" Now maybe he had never seen a screen of any type go up before, and thought the slowly raising piece of canvas was exciting. But that was definitely the dumbest thing I heard on my entire trip.

Swans, Books, and Dutchmen

Something I realized in Galway, but forgot to mention, probably through some subconscious defense mechanism, is that swans are truly terrible, frightening animals. I think they got some sort of good rap through all the myths in which adorable children are turned into swans (evil queen Aoife), or born from swan eggs (Helen of Troy); or because of associations with graceful ballerinas. But in real life, swans are startlingly huge, dismayingly dirty, exceedingly unmelodious birds. The flocks in Galway bay, and there were hordes of them, were all paddling around with their enormous, slimy feet, eating some sort of muck off the bottom of the river. The sound they make is halfway between a honk and a groan, and I'm fairly sure that most of what they were honking/groaning about was a sort of plan to fall upon me and seize any food I might have in my bag. I left the docks area pretty quickly after that.

The other thing I've actually been noticing everywhere in Ireland, but especially in Galway, is that the Irish must really love literature. I'd been seeing bookshops on every corner in the bigger cities, and a lot of places that I thought must be old-timey bookshops, where they actually would bind books, and probably re-bind old books or something. These places were called 'bookmakers,' and I thought it was so cool that they were so prominent in Belfast and Galway. It took a week and a half to occur to me that 'bookmakers' is the full name of 'bookies,' and that the Irish don't love literature quite as much as they love betting on sports. I only remembered this after seeing that the inside of one of these bookbinding shops was plastered with lists of races, football schedules, and betting odds. It would have been nice if it had really been antique bookstores, though. Though then there would be a lot of idle greyhounds milling about the countryside, harassing sheep, and bored Irishmen with extra money to pour into Guinness, so I guess it all works out somehow.

I have run across a lot of Dutch people here, so I wasn't surprised to hear two people in my hostel in Doolin speaking Dutch. The man, who was probably about 50 and would look exactly like Van Eyck if you put a frilly collar on him, busted out an Irish drum and started explaining how it is played. He mentioned that he would be playing at O'Connor's Pub that night with a trad group, but didn't explain why he, an obviously Dutch man form Amsterdam, had become a part of the Irish traditional music scene. The next morning I asked him, in Dutch, where he would be playing that night, and he answered me in Dutch as he was leaving the room. A little bit later, he came back into the room as it occured to him that we hadn't been talking in English, and we talked a little more in Dutch about how I knew the language and who else was playing at that pub that night. I got to the pub in time to order food, and for about the fourth time in the past two weeks, was told that the 'soup of the day' was 'vegetable.' I had kept asking, hoping that there might be some good Irish potato chowder or at least cream of mushroom, or anything not made entirely of my old enemy, the vegetable, but apparently in Irish, 'soup' means 'vegetables.' I ordered it this time, because I wasn't hungry enough for the expensive pub dinners, and it would almost definitely come with some delicious brown bread. And so I learned, a bit late in my trip, that Irish 'vegetable soup' is really a delicious dinner, almost certainly made with cream and with vegetables cut into such tiny pieces that I could swallow them without admitting to myself that I was eating something healthy. At some point after my soup (the trad had started between my first and second slices of bread), the Dutch man came over to me and, to the surprise of the Americans I had been talking to about Boston and California, told me in Dutch something about a stool being free in the front, and I should come sit there to see better. So I moved up to the table in front of the musicians, and watched their banjo/guitar/flute/drum stylings, and everything was toe-tappingly lovely until an old, very drunk Irishman came to the front to sing, and tried to talk to me while he was waiting his turn. After being disproportionately excited that I came from Boston, he tried to strike up a very confusing conversation with me before singing an equally rambling (and even more off-tune) song without accompaniment. I snuck away, since it was near closing time anyway, and walked the 10yards down the road to my hostel, where three other occupants of my room were, of course, snoring away contentedly.

Katherine in Ireland Part III (or, the other West Coast)

Galway was, at least in terms of the weather, like some sort of recap of my entire trip so far. In the course of a day, the weather cycled through the steady rain, cloudy but dry skies, showers, harder rain, and then fitful clearness of my first week in the North. Galway itself was nothing like the rest of my trip. First of all, there are no museums in Galway, transport or otherwise, so other than wander around and drink cofee, there wasn't much to do during the day. At night, of course, there's too much to do (basically every pub has live music, and I had apparently arrived in the middle of the Galway Oyster Festival, so there was more than usual; several theatres had at least one show up, and only a couple were the obvious tourist traps of 'traditional Irish dancing').

The second night in my hostel, a Scottish man introduced himself to me and interpreted my response ('nice to meet you') as a request for his life history. He was in Galway for a wedding, and was going to be seeing his family for the first time in 15 years. He didn't explain why, but I'm pretty sure it had to do with the decible level of his snoring, which woke up the other 5 of us in the dorm and literally made his bed shake. I seriously thought at some point that he was in physical danger of exploding, and I don't know if I wouldn't have been a little bit glad if that actually had happened. It has consistently amazed me, the amount of snoring that goes on in hostels. If I knew that I snored, I think I would at least make an effort to sleep on my side, or back, or whatever position minimized the snoring, or at least get one of those little nose tapes. And I won't give people the benefit of the doubt that they don't know they snore, because there's just no way. For example, a certain, nameless, sister of mine knows that she makes weird eating noises in her sleep, because she has been told by me on numerous family trips. But maybe, after 15 years of living alone on the island of Eigg, that man just had no idea he could cause tremors with his snores.

Apparently, Rachel is keeping tabs on me, because she ended up in Galway the same nights, something we figured out during my second day there, so we went together to the Crane bar, where there was a very nice trad session. The guy tending bar, by the way, was Will Payne. I'm not sure how he got to Ireland when he's supposed to be in school, or why he didn't say hi to me when I ordered drinks, but if it wasn't Will, it was a guy the same height, with the same hair color, haircut, face, and style of clothing.

The night before I saw a play by a local company. It was called 'Finnegan's Wake Me Up Before You Go Go,' and it wasn't as absolutely hilarious as it was touted to be, but was amusing. The black box theatre it played in was eerily like the Loeb Ex (I guess it's not surprising that two black, square rooms with seats and a stage would look alike, but... it seemed eerie at the time) but honestly I think most productions in the Loeb are better, at least in terms of set and lighting. So I partly watched the show and partly sat there wondering how it much better it would have been with Rebecca or Aoife directing. My conclusion was: considerably.

I left Galway yesterday morning for Doolin, the tiny village in the Burren that somehow manages to stretch out along about a kilometer of road. When I got to my hostel (in the Upper Village), there was only a teenage girl around, and she told me to find her mother in the B&B next door (the same owners run it). When I found the mother, she seemed very annoyed that I had come to ask for a room, and took me back to the hostel where she found a second girl and had her check me in. I was going to bike up to the Cliffs of Moher, as the hostel rented bikes, so I wandered around a bit looking for someone who looked like a bike rental type. A woman who had appeared in the front room said that 'Matty' was over at the B&B, but he might be busy because his son was getting married that afternoon. I had seen a lot of nicely dressed people in the B&B the first time I'd been over there, and as Matty was the hostel owner's husband, that explained why she seemed so harried when I'd seen her. I never found Matty, but a teenager half in a tuxedo told me that he wasn't renting bikes that day. So I walked up to the Cliffs of Moher.

It's only about 5 or 6km from Doolin to the cliffs, but it's all uphill, and by the time I was halfway there it had started to rain. I had my raincoat on though, and my boots are more or less waterproof, so I kept walking. It kept raining, and more so, and after a couple more kilometers my pants were soaked through, and dripping into my shoes. I stopped for a little while in an old, half-ruined house to get out of the rain, then kept on up the road. It had been windy the whole way, but I didn't think about the fact that the place where I was going, the higest point in the area, would probably have considerably stronger winds at the top of it. So I couldn't actually face the view of the cliffs directly, once I'd actually gotten there, because rain was blowing into my face at about 400mph, possibly 450mph. I saw a lot of grey ocean though, and I was warm from the climb, though wetter than it's generally possible to be. Although the visitors center at the cliffs closes at 5:30, the only bus that goes back along the coast (after the 3pm one, which I was too late to get anyway) was at 7:15, so I got to walk back, too. It dried up a bit though, and it was downhill, and back in my hostel there was a peat fire waiting for me, so I could dry my boots and pants.

Also in the hostel were three German kids, who I ended up going to a pub with, a man from Amsterdam who ended up playing trad (drums, bones, and flute) at the same pub, and two Americans who were hitchhiking around Europe with no money except what they made playing music on street corners. The Dutch man promised that the best spoons player in Ireland would be playing at the pub that night, and he was very good, as far as I can tell, though he didn't seem to be able to play any other type of cutlery.

This morning, I again tried to get a bike. I waited around in the front room of the hostel until about 11am, when finally the owner turned up, and then waited another half hour for her husband to get up and get out a bike. It had sprinkled a little, but was supposed to be a nice day, so I set out with a map of the Burren and a bike that usually did succeed at changing gears when I wanted it to. After many hills, amazing views, and a tiny bit of rain, I got to the coastal road and realized I was very hungry and kind of tired. There didn't seem to be any significant towns on my map of that area, but outside one building along the road was a sign that said 'Restaurant: Soups and Sandwiches; Coffee and Tea,' so I stopped and went in. I walked into the kitchen of a house, where an old Irish woman with copious whiskers was sitting next to a peat stove, and she asked me what I wanted to eat. I 'ordered' two scones and some tea, and sat down at the kitchen table. Apparently, 'Birdie' runs this 'restaurant' during the summer months, so I was one of her last customers. The scones were, frankly, some of the most horrible baked goods I've ever eaten, but there was a lot of butter and black currant jam, and the tea was really good. Birdie and I talked while I ate, and after I told her I came from California, by way of Boston, she decided that I had 'lost my accent.' She apparently thought I talked more like an Irish person than an American, though I'm really not sure why. I guess I didn't drop 'dude' and 'woah!' a lot during the conversation, but as it was about cuckoo clocks, the weather, and the local produce, that's hardly surprising. But apparently, I don't have a California accent. Also, apparently, Americans do not boil the water for their tea long enough, and on the West Coast of Ireland they often get the tail end of American storms. Birdie asked me why they had 'gone straight from Katrina to Rita,' by which she meant why had the names not gone alphabetically. I explained that a lot of the storms that they name don't ever make it to land, but she didn't seem to understand, and asked again why after Katrina they hadn't used a man's name. I explained a couple more times and eventually she seemed to understand. I had really a lot of tea (the very boiled water really did make good tea) and choked down the scones. At first, I thought of telling next year's Let's Go: Ireland team to see about adding this place to the book, because it was a very cool experience, having tea and chatting in an Irish person's kitchen. But the horrible microwaved scones and the difficulty of getting to the place, not to mention the total lack of anything else to do nearby (except bike, obviously), are probably too big of deterrents.

So I've ended up filling the time in Galway and Doolin better than I thought I would. I got much wetter than I should have, but have met some massively interesting people. Two of the German kids had gone to school in Canada for quite a long time, and the third had just started college in Galway, and they explained to me all about what's going on with the German political situation. They also tried to suggest travel tips in Germany, until I finally told them that I've actually written a book on that subject. Then we just talked about beer.

One weird thing about beer here, actually: somehow, Carlsberg is the official beer of the Irish soccer team. And they have Stella on tap here a lot more often than I would have expected. Also, I saw Germans last night ordering pints of Budweiser, which was truly shocking. And a Texan man was absolutely mystified by Euro coins, which I don't really understand, seeing as how he's had to be in the country for at least a couple days, beacuse Doolin's not quick to get to. But it is pretty tricky to figure out that the coin with the giant '2' on it is worth more than the one with the '1.' Or, something.

I'm going to stop sitting now, since my bike seat wasn't the greatest, and roads here are bumpy. Then I'll probably go hear more trad at another pub, because trad basically never gets old. It's a kind of music that simultaneously always sounds familiar, but never comes out the same. And it makes the accordian sound good, which is a feat in itself.

Katherine in Ireland Part II (or, it only rained some of the time and there was hiking)

I have learned some new general things about Ireland, which are: whatever is in the soil here, it makes hydrangeas have very, very bright colors... instead of light pink or blue they are all dark magenta or vivid purple; pretty much every thing or place can and will at some point be described to one as 'wee'; people really hate when you give them £20 notes, and sometimes give you discounts to avoid such.

and now for the adventures. Cave Hill Nature Park, just north of Belfast, was designed pretty much for the sole purpose of making me relive painful childhood memories, literally. The paths are well kept and easy to hike, but they're generally not very wide, and every one of them is lined with stinging nettles, as if they know exactly where to grow in order to attack the maximum number of people. But with my extensive nettle experience, I knew that I should neither brush past them nor use their stalks to help pull myself uphill, so I showed them.

That same Cave Hill Park, north of Belfast, is reached by taking a city bus up the Antrim Road. It's called the Antrim Road because it eventually leads to Antrim, just as the Bangor road leads to Bangor, and Dublin Road leads more or less in the direction of Dublin. So I got off the bus at Cave Hill Road, proud of my ability to figure things out without asking someone where to stop. After about a half hour walking up Cave Hill Road, I began to be more tired than proud (as it leads up towards a mountain, CHR is pretty steep), but then finally I made it to an entrance sign for the park. It had been graffitied quite a lot, so I coudn't really read the map, but there was only one path, so I started out on it. After a little ways a path went off to the side, and I decided to take the road less traveled, literally, and walked up the path until it became a thicket. I enjoyed the fruits of my labor, literally, by eating the blackberries in the thicket, and eventually found the visitor's center, which is right on the Antrim road, a couple of stops farther than Cave Hill Road. So I hiked up the route that I originally meant to take, past old caves in the cliffs and up to a hillside where I could see across Belfast and out to the Isle of Man, and then hiked back down to catch a bus back to town. This all took much longer than it sounds. But it was at least partly sunny, which was amazing sine the forecast said it would rain all week, so it was a nice day in the end.

The next morning I got up early to catch the Antrim Coaster (named after the county, not the town; not actually a 'coaster' per se, but instead a rather old bus) up the coast to the Glens of Antrim. The rain started as we left, and got harder as we drove, so my plan of hiking up in the Glens was not looking so promising. The owner of the Ballyeamon Camping Barn (not actually a barn, but instead a big house kind of thing) picked me up in Cushendall, and I went on some errands with her on her way back to the barn, meeting an Egyptian baker and learning a lot about Irish recycling, which I will not repeat because it's as interesting as it sounds. Liz, the owner, is a professional storyteller, and has been basically all over the world to tell stories, so she usually hires a 'barn minder' to take care of the place when she's away, in exchange for free room and board. Liz went on about one of her barn minders who was from Amherst, as if I might know her somehow, but I didn't. But on a wall in the barn was a picture of Julia Bozer (from Harvard) and her boyfriend (at the time? still? i don't know) Walt. Apparently Walt was a barn minder last year, and Julia came to visit him. So that was weird. Then Liz drove me to the foot of the Glenariffe Forest Park, the 'Queen of the Glens,' and I hiked up past waterfalls and ferns and more different kinds of moss than I really think need to exist. The rain, which was lighter by that point, actually made it a better hike, because the waterfalls were aparently better than they have been all summer, and I would have gotten wet from the spray anyway. After Liz dropped me off, I didn't see any other human person for the rest of the afternoon until I hiked out of the top of the glen and crossed some fields to get back to the barn. And even then most of the living things I saw were sheep - sheep that, given the fact that they were all 50ft. away from me and they must see humans every day, very much overreacted to my presence, in the form of jumping up really spastically and running across the field in a huge group. Am not sure if I am just inherently frightening to sheep, or if they fear blue rain jackets, or if they just at that time noticed how full of their poop the path was, and decided to get away from it.

But anyway, I got dry and went into town for dinner and some trad at a pub, and the next morning set out for Ballintoy, where I dropped my bags off and caught another bus on to Giant's Causeway, pretty much the main purpose of me coming to the north. And it was definitely worth it, if only to hear people explaining to other people what they thought basalt was. The National Trust maintains a path from Giant's Causeway back along the coast to Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, which is just past Ballintoy, and since it was early afternoon, I thought I'd walk back. The signpost said it was 10 miles to Carrick-a-Rede, and I figured it'd be 9 miles to Ballintoy, and I'd be back in 3 hours. The path is along cliff tops, and has view after spectacular view, but it also has many more steep parts than you would think, and stiles every few hundred yards to climb over, and apparently, 10 miles is much farther than I really can concieve of, me not being very good with estimating things like distance. And about 2/3 of the way the path gets very boggy and hard to follow, so I had the bright idea of branching off to follow the very infrequently trafficked road, not really thinking of how much less give asphalt has than grass. So I was pretty tired when I finally reached my hostel. On my walk I learned: cows are either just as scared of me as sheep, or seem to want to attack me; September is apparently stile-rebuilding-time, so half the stiles were half made; the Spanish Armada came around the north coast of Ireland, which was a pretty poor idea considering more than half the ships are now at the bottom of north coast coves. But you can't see any wreckage, so you might as well not learn about that on a windy clifftop; even when it's sunny for a while, with the ridiculously strong winds on the Causeway Coast, there will be clouds and probably rain within a half hour, after which the cycle will probably repeat.

Today was easy compared to the past few. I hiked over to Carrick-a-Rede and went across the rope bridge, which is some amount of feet above the water and spans some distance between the little island and the larger island. There was a camera crew there, filming some sort of tourist video, so I had to wait to cross the bridge while they did about 15 takes of this man walking across the bridge jauntily, then doing this sort of misstep off the side of the plank, and catching himself on the rope handrail. There's mesh between the plank and the handrail though, so it's not as if he was going to fall. Later, when I was crossing back to the big island, they were doing takes of the same man crossing in front of a lady, and freaking her out by making the bridge sway. Then the lady would get a very scared look on her face and hang on tight on the middle of the bridge, and refuse to cross. So I'm not really sure how this is going to be useful for drawing tourists, but then I'm not a filmmaker. I caught a bus to Coleraine, which seems not a very nice place, and then a train to Derry/Londonderry, which all the people call Derry and all the transit literature calls Londonderry. I go to Galway tomorrow, so there'll be less hiking and more music probably in my next email.

as always, send me your address and i'll send you a postcard. only not until i'm back in the Republic, because when I bought stamps I didn't think about the fact that you can't send things from Northern Ireland with a stamp that says 'Eire' on it. so, patience everyone.

Katherine in Ireland Part I (or, it rained a lot and was cold)

for some reason, and there's really no good excuse for this, I didn't consider the idea of rain when planning my trip. let's gloss over the dumness of that, and just get to the part where my requesting a window seat on my flight from Heathrow to Dublin was really, really pointless. because not only was it absolutely cloudy, but i slept that entire 50 minutes. the bus ride from the airport marked the first of many times i've asked random people what was going on: a businessman from Chicago explained what stop I'd want to leave the bus at so as not to end up somewhere far away and confusing with my two backpacks and two suitcases. i should mention at this point that three of those bags are filled with my winter clothes and a comforter that i'm going to need in Berlin. I should also mention that i'd advise against tacking a 2-week backpacking trip on to the front of moving to a foreign city for two months. but anyway.

i met up with rachel (hi rachel!!) at a cafe that Let's Go very rightly recommends, and i think, totally freaked her out by not being able to stop talking, after spending my 12 hours of traveling only saying things like "two weeks" and "for vacation" and "no i don't have bird flu." rachel took most of my baggage back to her place for me (rachel is awesome!) and i saw dublin in the rain. it was nice, and very clean, but probably because of the rain. i saw the book of kells, which was calligrariffic, and had my first of three so far bacon-tomato-cheese panini. i'm pretty sure the irish did not invent the panini (panino?), but i haven't NOT seen it offered in any place i've been so far, and therefore have not not ordered it to this point. in the national portrait gallery i saw lots of pictures of old men in wigs, and a bunch of leading ladies of London society whose descriptions made it pretty clear, as Rachel and I realized, that they had the wealthy heiress gig all figured out centuries before Paris Hilton came on the scene.

I bussed up to Belfast yesterday, and wandered around a little bit without seeing much significant. This morning I took a Black Cab tour, which was both fun and sad, not unexpectedly. The Peace Wall between the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods has been helpful, I guess, in reducing the violence, but it really just reminded me of the early stages of the 'Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier' in Berlin. Not that it's going toward that in Belfast, but it's a much more depressing and complicated deal than I really realized. On the way to the Shankill neighborhood, our driver pointed out the place where a car had been burnt last night, and where a bus shelter had been burnt - there was a crew rebuilding it as we drove by. (Don't worry, Mom - I'm staying safe, only going out with groups after dark, and I'm nowhere near West Belfast. And Black Cab drivers have agreements with the community that their tour groups won't be targeted, because even political paramilitary realize that it's stupid to scare away tourism).

I keep getting excessive amounts of help from charming locals... a lady who works on Lagan Weir basically planned out the timetables I'd need to take a trip out to the Folk and Transport museums (much cooler than they sound... the latter has a Delorean and locomotives that you can get in and pull levers and all that, as well as a huge Titanic exhibit, and the former had demonstrations of roof-thatching and blacksmithing and wood turning. And luckily, I am interested in dorky things like that.), and at both museums people offered to call up the bus companies to make sure I would make the bus back to town. I seriously had to insist that they not do that the second time. Near the transport museum is a miniature railroad, with this tiny bench that you sit on, and an engine that comes up to maybe calf-height. The ticket seller, upon hearing my accent, insisted that Boston was basically the same as Philly, and told me a story about a concert he went to when he was 5 (?) in Philly, and hated. He made me guess who played the concert... I was unable to come up with the correct answer, which was Elvis. This was 1971, i guess, so understandable maybe that the concert wasn't the greatest. But the mini railroad was fun, and I got to pet a cat that lived in the ticket booth. Oh, and irish kids love trains, apparently.

the kids here are all pretty adorable, with their tiny accents and total lack of shyness. dogs here are also excessively attractive... I don't know why, but all the dogs I've seen so far, and there have been many, are very good looking dogs. The only exception to the small creatures on this island being cute was the baby held by the woman sitting in front of me on the mini train. it kept looking back at me, and the only way I can describe it is like a tiny, angry Verne Troyer. and it's not like i could make a quick escape from it if it lunged at me or something, because i mean, i was on a train. albeit a train going 5mph on a 8'' gauge track.

so in conclusion, i would recommend the irish dogs, panini, and folk museums. i would not recommend the weather, political violence, and frightening babies. unless the baby was a tourist too, in which case it's not really Ireland's fault.

oh, and basically everone here thinks the proper response to "i'm from boston" is to rail on Bush. not that I disagree with them. but the backpacker and irish tour industry demographics are definitely united against the american government. i wouldn't be scared of that either.

and now i've hogged this computer for much too long, so you probably won't hear from me in a while. as i said to some of you, if you email me your address, i'll send a postcard. and as per ansel's suggestion, it will be appropriate to you as a person.