#16

This will be, mostly silent loved ones and people who were shanghaied on to the list and remained too polite to tell me they want off, one of the last times you’ll hear from me. I leave here June 6th to return, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to the place of my naissance.
Not specifically Medical City Hospital, but, you know… Dallas….and stuff….

I suppose when we left each other, brave soldiers, I was between Wales and France.

The parents got here, to Dublin. I amused them as best I could with my colorful antics and as a reward they took me to Paris. Which was nice, especially the “eating real food” parts. My skills as a translator were put to the limit, but I was able to correctly pronounce several key phrases including “where is the bathroom,” “I want that,” and “how much for the prostitute with one leg.”

Combien pour de prostitutee avec un jambe seulement.

I stayed at a place called the Peace and Love Hostel, run by a grumpy hippy who, when she learned my parents wouldn’t be staying with me, immediately accused them of staying in the Ritz Carlton and then ignored a very pretty Polish-sounding girl because she didn’t speak much English and, probably, was really pretty. I stayed in a four bunk-bed room that was through another four bunk-bed room, which was just fine. The problem was my four bunk-bed room was right on top of the bar, which was raucous until somewhere around 3 am, near as I could tell.
It’s funny the difference a day makes. Hostels are extremely variable experiences in that large amounts of people come and go every night and that’s what determines how the hostel is that night. The first night I was there, Friday night, I crawled into bed at 12:30 and everybody was already fast asleep. Although, how, with the pounding Pink Floyd down below, I’m not entirely sure.

The second night I got back around 1 am to find every body still awake. I got into bed because I had a 9 am flight and because I was alone, and they asked me “Bro! Why are you goin’ to bed so early!” I explained, and they said “ah, wicked. Sorry bro, we’ll go into the other room.” They did, very kindly but seemed to come back in every hour or so to either fall down, climb in and out of the bed above me or, at around 5:30 am (these times are all approximate) noisily eat a sandwich. I woke up at 6:30 and put my stuff together. Sandwich-eating girl, finally in bed, rolls over and says “oh my god, what time is it.” I tell her. She says “oh great.” And goes back to peaceful sleep. I remind myself forcefully that I do not approve of violence towards women.

Thence to Barcelona, where there was almost a mutiny.

My parents have this thing with eating in alleys. The idea is that alleys are more authentic than, say, plazas, which admittedly are rather obvious, all OUT there and easy to find and everything. You can tell the alley restaurants agree with this summation as they’ve raised their prices accordingly. Usually that’s fine, as I eat much better with them than with myself, but there’s thing where my dad doesn’t really get hungry. At this point I was extremely hungry, and even my mother was hungry enough to forgo, for the moment, her taste for alleys.

For the record, it doesn’t have to be in an alley so long as the tables are so close together that you feel like asking the family sitting next to you for Christmas presents, if you see what I mean. Although there is a certain intimacy bred among strangers when they have to reveal to each other their bathroom-related needs in order to be allowed up. Also, I’m mostly kidding. Happy Mother’s Day, mom…

Anyway, we did have a delicious meal which lasted us till mornin’.

The next day was my birthday.

Barcelona is a BEAUTIFUL city. It is light, airy, dotted with modern art installations and unique architecture. Unfortunately, as we went around on one of those hop on and hop off buses and when, SPECIFICALLY, we hopped off to see the most unique of all the architectures, the amazing La Sagrada Familia the sky opened up to near doomsday proportions just for the five minutes we were in line outside.

I spent most of the rest of my birthday damp, which was fine. The real problem was when we got BACK on the hop on, hop off, we ensconced ourselves into a corner…a middle-aged eastern European woman suddenly appeared and said to my father “that is my seat. I sit there.” The problem was that my father was, at this point, so damp, that the woman would probably be drowned if she got her seat back. She couldn’t muster any other English, but spent the whole rest of the bus…which was actually by far the longest hop on hop off bus experience of my life…glaring us. Quite impressive.

But the sun came out when we climbed the hill and it was a lovely walk and we celebrated the big day with a chocolate covered waffle. As a birthday miracle, though the tiny plastic fork I was given to deal with the chocolate waffle cracked in the center it held for the duration of the snack. Somehow, it held on.

I went on to Madrid, while they went to the South of France.

I say it again mates, hostels are all about timing. Either you meet some neat people right away or you never meet them at all. Because if you meet them quick you can get on the same schedule, otherwise you’re always leaving when they’re coming back and so on.
I sit down between two Canadians and a girl from N’awlins, currently at school in England, writing a paper on Stravinsky. She informs me that the problem with her paper is that as she’s studying abroad for a semester, the first semester was the one with all the information and this current semester is the one with all the application, so she’s more or less in trouble. Also, as I refrain from pointing out at this point, she’s trying to get work done in the social area of a hostel.
The first night, we have a grand party in that kitchen. Sean and I buy a mini-keg which, despite our poor tapping skills, has its applications. A large group slowly forms, centered around our beer-dispensing luminary. It plans to go out. At some point, most of the party traipses downstairs leaving me and Stravinsky girl, heretofore referred to as Elaine (a stage name, I presume), to wait for Canadian Angela to go to the bathroom.

SOMETHING GOES HORRIBLY WRONG. As near as I can reconstruct it in the admittedly groggy morning, while Elaine and I waited in the kitchen they locked the kitchen door which Angela had just passed through. Hence, she couldn’t return directly. We waited 15 minutes and assumed everybody had left, so left ourselves. Apparently, however, the whole large group had NOT left but was searching the halls for the two of us. They didn’t find us, ‘cause we left. Basically.

So Elaine and I have a couple more beers, then we hang out in the bathroom so as not to wake anybody up. Don’t ask me, I don’t know which bathroom it was.

De next morning I am wakened by a pained groan. The kind of groan that says “I went to a club last night, actually, thank you for asking. And yes, I did have quite a few more beers. And no, I don’t think I’ll be moving for quite some time, if possible. It was, of course, Sean, on the bunk above me who had, with the large group, had quite a longer night than I had. Fair play to him though, I was gone enough I didn’t hear the other five people in the room come in…
After a lot of water and advil, Sean, Angela, Elaine and a darling Irish girl named Michelle (clearly, therefore, not from Dublin…that she’s darling, not that she’s named Michelle) head off to Toledo and I roam the streets of Madrid alone. I find the Prado WITH THE WORLD’S LARGEST AND LEAST CONVENIENT TOURIST MAP, which is fantastic of course, and then try to make it to the museo archaeologico but get poured again and decide to take a delicious nap.

When I wake up, the gang has gathered in the kitchen. We switch to wine and go out dancing. It was a fun night, ‘twas, but unfortunately at the end of the night (which is somehow around 4:30 am, I have no idea how time got to there, but time will always be a mystery to me. How it flees when you have work to do, how it stays when you are so bored you’re contemplating death) we discover someone has made off with Elaine’s jacket which very unfortunately had her camera in it. To console her, Sean and Michelle go buy a pizza in the only mini market I have ever seen with a line and a limit on the number of people allowed inside. We retire again to the bathroom to eat the pizza.

I reach out to pat Elaine on the shoulder, consolingly, and miss, knocking her half-eaten slice on to the bathroom floor.

Glad I could help, Elaine.

The next day I make it to the museo archaelogique which has the advantage of being free on Sundays and the disadvantage of being almost entirely closed. So we saw several nice rocks and pots, and could almost make out through various kinds of locked gratings mummies and other things in the darkness which are apparently pay-per-view.

After a nice lunch it’s back to dirty ol’ Dublin to meet my parents and quietly panic about having only a month to write a whole dissertation.

You know what’s funny, looking back on that hostel experience, everybody else appeared to be Dutch. I mean just tons and tons of Dutch people there. As I reported to Miss Brittany Groot by email earlier, I can only assume the purpose was some kind of military reconnaissance, and I wish them well with that.

Came back to Dublin, there to meet my parents again. Went up Belfast and the Giant’s Causeway. Quite pretty up there. Almost escaped without a whiff of that Northern Ireland business until, just as we were about to leave, entering a royalist part of the same, came across an enormous wall mural featuring a masked gunman with the sign “welcome to the real Belfast.”
So that’s nice. I’ve decided to spend the following paragraph talking about Ireland’s complicated history, briefly, for anyone who’s interested. This is what we call a disclaimer, so you can skip the paragraph if you choose. I’m not an expert anyway, this is just what I’ve been able to put together.

It started in the late 12th century. Henry II was king of England and Ireland was five provinces ruled by a succession of Irish high kings…anyway, one of the provincial kings, Diarmuid of Leinster has an affair with another king’s wife and gets kicked out of his kingdom. As wasn’t that unusual he runs off to England and asks an English earl, Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow, to come help him get back his kingdom. As a reward Diarmuid said Strongbow could marry his daughter. Strongbow wins back the province but suddenly Diarmuid dies leaving Strongbow, married to Diarmuid’s daughter, the king of Leinster. King Henry’s like ohhh no, that can’t happen. So he conquers Ireland.

No one cares very much for a long time. Finally in the 16th century, Ireland’s like screw this (even though as near as I can tell the English weren’t doing much) and rebels. They get crushed. This is in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who really starts enforcing British rule in Ireland, much more so than previously. She’s a protestant, thanks to her dad King Henry VIII. When a couple kings down the road Catholic agitation started against the protestants, the Irish, being 90% Catholic, were quite excited. They figured they’d get some rights back. But when William and Mary were invited over by the English to rule instead of the Catholic King James II, Ireland got by far the worst of it, lost major battles, and the catholics were not allowed to own land for approximately two hundred years. William won his big battle in 1690 it wasn’t until the late 1800s that Daniel O’Connell succeeded in getting Catholics the right to own any kind of land. Then, just as he was preparing to get more concessions from the British, the potato famine hit and everybody had more important things to worry about. Then, after the famine, came Charles Stuart Parnell, the so-called uncrowned King of Ireland who came so close to getting Home Rule until it came out that he’d been having an affair and dear old Catholic Ireland DESTROYED him for it. He died shortly thereafter and they all felt bad about it, but it was a bit late one feels. Sometimes you feel like Ireland and England spent a lot of time arguing over which one of them would get to shoot Ireland in the foot.

It was Queen Elizabeth, incidentally, who began the program of “plantations,” sending over a lot of protestants to live in one place together. Dublin and the North were the two biggest protestant areas.

Enter the 20th century. Britain says, look dawgs, we need your help in this world I, but we PROMISE that if you help us we’ll let you have home rule after as a reward. This is where things get way complicated. Ireland goes ahead with it. A LOT of Irish troops die in World War I, which lasted 1914-1918. But in 1916, Patrick Pearse and a bunch of guys are like, you know, we don’t want to wait. This is called the Post Office Rebellion, or the Easter Rebellion. They seize the general Post Office on O’Connell street and declare an Irish republic. The crazy thing is, they know they have no chance, but there’s this old Irish idea of blood sacrifice…if they die, it will inspire other people to seize the country.

People remain really conflicted about this business. There was no good reason to suspect the English wouldn’t keep faith, except that they hated the British. The Post Office Rebellion was followed by violence which resulted in a treaty with the British…this gave them some things, but not, most people, felt, enough. So Ireland immediately launched into a 20 year Civil war which finally resulted in its partition into North (officially still part of Britain) and the Republic of Ireland. That violence of course continued until the mid-90s in the North and is certainly not entirely dead. As Yeats put it in his poem Easter 1916:

What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night, but death
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead

So no one’s really sure whether the Easter 1916 guys should be considered heroes…,no one was really sure at the time, and less so today…and all of the figures of the early Republic are tainted in some way by their role in the violence which may well (or perhaps may not) have been entirely needless.

In the North today, there are six provinces. It’s 40 % Catholic and 45 % Protestant, which explains the violence. Two of the Provinces, Tyrone and Fermanagh, are by far majority Catholic, Londonderry (which Catholics call simply “Derry”, cause of the London thing) is majority Catholic with a strong minority Protestant, Antrim and Downe are Protestant and Armagh is pretty divided. Each province, however, has catholic and protestant districts. And Dublin, being at the time of British rule the locus of it in Ireland, has a very equivocal position indeed. It’s in the south, but it was quite British…yet it was also the site of the Easter Rebellion and so on.

And so we on, boats against the current, blah blah. I thought somebody might be interested. And if they weren’t, I hope they’ve scrolled down…


Well, well. A RATHER long one today. Sorry cats, but you know where the delete button is.

Anyway, you’ll probably hear from me ‘bout once more, maybe twice, and I look forward to hearing about the Dutch takeover from Spain.

Love to those who have been judged and found worthy,
Andrew