To live there

New York is sweet.

After a mere three days in New Haven--one trip to the beach and 16 hours in the archives--we returned to the city of many monikers to have another go at it. Now that we're back in the have', everything we did in NYC has gotten muddled together in my mind and, rather unhelpfully, on our camera. Thus, there is no real narrative to be salvaged from what follows. Where there is one, I may have taken some artistic liberties in splicing together mornings and afternoons that never met, pasting orphaned events wherever I find room. I'm sure you don't mind.

The Columbia archives were beautiful, so much so that we forgot to take any pictures of the library or the campus. I assure you, though, the buildings were breathtaking--take a look at someone else's rendering here.


We stayed in three different hotels in four days. I wish it was because we were on the run from the authorities or something equally illicit, but alas it's only because we kept extending our length of stay and grabbing the best hotel deal we could find. The first two nights were spent at the Belnord Hotel. One travel review described it as "laughably small", and I can't think of a better descriptor for this:







Brian's fingertips are about a foot away from the wall on either side, and the room is a square. The bathroom door was about two feet wide, to the point that we weren't even certain we had a bathroom when we first arrived. I found it by opening what appeared to be the closet. Inside, one could brush one's teeth on the toilet and spit into the sink without getting up. One could. If one was so inclined. In any case, no complaints here. The room was cheap, the location was terrific and things were spotlessly clean and reasonably comfortable. We weren't in New York to hang around in a hotel room anyway.


We discovered a great deli / cafe called Zabar's down the street from us, and had our breakfast (bagel and cream cheese, where the bagel to cream cheese ratio is roughly 1:1) and delicious coffee each morning before the archives. Patrons sit at a big, communal table and listen to each other's conversations. At least, that's what we did.


After working--which only took a day and a half--we shopped and gawked up and down Broadway and 5th Avenue. We saw lots of this:





And this:







We saw about one quarter of Central Park. It was both astonishing and depressing: astonishing for all of the expected reasons (lush, bustling, alive in every sense, HUGE) and depressing because all I wanted to do was rollerblade for hours there, but then I'd have to live there, and to do that I'd have to win the lottery or exploit other people and we don't buy lottery tickets and we haven't figured out how best to exploit other people without feeling guilty.

After the first two days, we gave in and started riding the subway if we needed to traverse an area we'd already seen. We really like subways. We really don't understand why it's $2 to ride the subway in New York and $3 to ride the bus in Ottawa.

We also like the fact that the Times Square area has been taken over by pedestrians and lawn chairs. A few sections of the main thoroughfares are closed to cars and (affronted) cabdrivers, and are instead lined with rubber lawn chairs for people to use as they see fit. You can read about it here, or just have a look at our picture and make up your own news story.

We did a lot of vintage shopping (not to be confused with vintage buying), and the best to be had was in Williamsburg (or "Billyburg"), the "hipster capital of the world" according to my dear brother.

We also went to the UN Plaza to check it out. Surprise! We didn't pay to get in. We just milled around the free parts and complained to ourselves about the fact that it costs money to see the UN. Are you tired of us yet? The old "we were too cheap" theme must be getting a bit boring by now, but perhaps these neato pictures of the UN building will buy us some more of your patience:

We checked out the super-trendy Meatpacking District one evening, and as luck would have it our visit followed the much-anticipated opening of High Line Park, an elevated railway-turned-greenspace.

We walked the romantic, lit-up garden paths, tummies grumbling, and descended into the Meatpacking District for dinner. Finding the choices in that area too expensive, too hoity-toity and frankly too packed (it's really trendy), we walked a bit further to Wilfie & Nell's, a new pub recently reviewed in New York Magazine, and were rewarded for doing so. I had a grilled cheese sandwich with some far-out cheese I can't remember the name of and some grainy mustard, Brian had a plate of pork sliders, and we shared a plate of pickles and a basket of dark, handcut fries with malt vinegar. I wish I could eat that food again, and if I could, I'd share it with you. I wouldn't share the Brooklyn Reserve beer we fell in love with, especially now that we found out it's only available in bars, on tap.

We went to a stand-up comedy open mic one evening. We got picked on the whole time. New Yorkers associate one thing in particular with Nova Scotia: Salmon. That is, the salmon they slap on top of bagel lox.

Friday night was turning into a bit of a bust when things took a sudden twist. We'd spent part of the day in Williamsburg, but it was getting a bit rainy and dull, and we were losing energy. We ate a rather early dinner at a pizza place boasting a "best pizza in NYC" article from City Search in its front window, and headed back to our hotel room with half-baked plans to see a movie. While checking movie times, we peeked at the prices and schedules of broadway plays. The 39 Steps was playing in an hour, and there was a little notice that said the theatre offered Student Rush tickets for $26 two hours before the show. We got spiffed up and raced out the door and around the block. The ticket guy explained that students had to show up two hours prior to the show and that the student rush tickets were gone; we'd have to pay $114 like everyone else. But in the end, I worked my magic and snagged us two cheap seats. The play was a riot, and I don't even really like plays.

We went back to Williamsburg on Saturday. That place is so annoyingly cool. Its main street was shut down for a street sale, part of the first annual Northside Festival, and it was busy with big people and baby people and four-legged people, on foot, on wheels and in various states of hygiene. It's cool because this is what a mall looks like:

It's cool because people take time to do stuff like this:

We did more--there was window shopping and afternoon pints in Brooklyn and Dragon Bowls in the East Village; there was real shopping in Greenwich and Chelsea; there was a LOT more walking; there were candied pecans at Max Brenner, the Chocolate Man; there were 4" thick, $14 sandwiches at Katz's deli; there were huge, chewy ginger cookies at Union Square Market; there was a guy playing a theremin somewhere near the ballet; there was cart food and huddling under scaffolding to get out of the rain. There was a sign that needed to be photographed and shared with all of you shvartz-heads:

Shvartz! The name of a bum/poo doctor! Somebody up there likes me. The weather was fantastic half of the time, and miserably drizzly the rest, but it hardly mattered except toward the end. We usually left our room at 9 and returned at midnight, falling into bed and sleeping like big, well-fed, money-spendin', city-lovin' babies.

That's all I can remember for now, but come back in a few days to see all of our pictures, sans story. Until then, here's the view from last night's hotel room:

Hardly made a dent

I don't even know how to start this post. I was told when I got to New York, my head was going to explode. It didn't, thank god, but it came close. We drove to Mamaroneck at 7am and hopped on the 8:26am train, which dumped us at Grand Central around 9:15. After failing to get Saturday Night Live tickets (they're not filming right now) and abandoning the worst, rock-hard pretzel from a cart, we grabbed breakfast at a little cafe (egg and sausage on a roll for B, Challah french toast for me--$8) and started walking. I can't tell you every little thing we did because there is just TOO much! 

For the most part, we just walked and walked and walked for TWELVE hours (hence the excruciating blisters we both have on the tender bottoms of our feet), and along the way we saw:

- 5th Ave.

- Rockefeller Plaza (i.e., 30 Rock)

- Greenwich Village (thumbs up)

- Statue of Liberty (from Battery Park)

- Financial District (and Ground Zero)

- Tribeca ('Triangle Below Canal'--thanks, friendly lady)

- Lower East Side (thumbs way up)

- Empire State Building (obviously we didn't go in; we just gawked at it from outside):

- Magnolia Bakery froim Sex & The City

- Little Italy (awesome):

Beyond this:

I ate my VERY FIRST CANNOLI! I have been dying to eat one of these but I always had a feeling I'd end up in New York one day. I found out where to get 'em best (Ferrara, apparently, although they were $3 and there were equally large ones for 99 cents just a few steps away) and indulged, sharing half with B only because I was already full of sandwich. Otherwise, sucka woulda been on his own.

We also shopped (of note: Fishs Eddy for dishes, Brooklyn Industries for neat clothes/bags etc., Joseph Hanna for leather goods), but I didn't buy anything! What's wrong with me? We rode the subway once toward the end of the night, and had some excellent beer and wood fired meat for dinner, and we made friends with one nice lady in Greenwich (who tipped us off to a street market) and a chatty Syrian fellow in a leather shop, who decided he "really liked us", and encouraged us to watch Bill Maher and come back to get Brian's leather satchel polished in three months. 

But in a whole day of walking and gawking, we hardly made a tooth-mark in the Big Apple. We still have about 7/8ths of the city left to explore, and even that's only a cursory pass through the main thoroughfares. They say you can live in NYC your whole life and never see everything, and we believe it now. Neither of us wanted to leave, and we woke up this morning wishing we were still there... and, of course, that there was a miracle remedy for blisters.

I'll post all of our photos later, on Picasa.

Here and there

It seems like it's been far more than 6 days since we left Ottawa in our rented Ford Focus, but alas, that's all the time that has passed. I haven't written anything yet because I've been waiting for something worth documenting--something I just can't wait to share--and as yet, it hasn't really happpened.

Well, OK, so we've had a bit of fun here and there, but I'm used to more fun than this (remember California? And the UK? It only took a matter of minutes in each place before crazy things started happening to us!). In any case, here's the Reader's Digest version of this first week of our trip, only you don't have to go to the doctor's office or your grandma's bathroom to read it. 

We got up early Saturday morning, picked up our car from Budget--a 4-door, black, Ford Focus with Satellite Radio (good) and all kinds of little things wrong with it (a.k.a. Ford)--and hit the road. Well, we almost hit the road, except that I brought the sleeve my passport usually travels in, only my passport was still mingling in a drawer with the underpants that didn't make the suitcase cut (wedgie-makers and ripped cotton numbers are for local use only). So, we turned around and I talked a blue streak until my passport was secured and we were going in the right direction on the 417. We crossed through Cornwall and got the full search from a surly young woman who kept calling Brian's dissertation a "paper" (to which Brian would softly retort 'It's a book. A book.'). We ate a packed lunch on the road--fresh French Baker croissants, procured that morning, stuffed with ham and provolone and washed down with Fresca--and arrived in Burlington, Vermont around 2:30pm. It was a really cute, lively town and it didn't take us long to decide we liked it, could live there if pressed, and were reminded a bit of Santa Cruz. 

We dropped our things at the hotel and headed downtown. We parked the car in a garage and were pulled by some force of nature into Ben & Jerry's, where I found oatmeal cookie dough ice cream, which is the supreme combination of two of my favourite foods in the whole world: oatmeal and ice cream. 

Cones in hand, we just walked around, shopped and explored until we were hungry again, and we stopped for a late dinner at American Flatbread Company. The meal was delicious--one flatbread (a pizza, really) was topped with pickled grapes, baby spinach, shallots, mild blue cheese, fennel, and pollen-infused honey. It was to die for, especially alongside a New Vermont sausage flatbread and paired with a half pint of beer brewed on the spot. 

We returned to the hotel and tried to go swimming, a must-do for me at every hotel... ever... but the pool was full of rowdy little boys, apparently there for a soccer tournament and whose parents had understandably dumped them in the water for some personal respite. We decided to come back in an hour, but once we holed up in the hotel room, I conked out at 8pm. As a result, I woke up at 5:30am. Bored, I hit up the gym, came back for Brian at 7, and we both took a dip in the pool and hot tub. Ready for the next leg of the trip, we packed up and went out for coffee.

We continued to Brattleboro (cute little artist town, but kinda boring if you're just passing through) for lunch, and drove through Springfield, Massachusetts just to check it out. It was SO depressing. It was just row upon row of old, empty factories, shitty houses and big, beautiful buildings that are now abandoned. This happens to so many cities in the U.S.--the local industries collapse, the city empties out, people move to the suburbs, and all the amazing buildings go to waste.Poor people stay in the city, the urban area's tax base is depleted, and the place can't even pay to have grass on the meridians or get the crosswalks freshly painted. It's just such a bummer. Both of us felt like we'd been punched in the face as we pulled back onto the highway. 

We kept going and hit New Haven around 5pm. Taylor, the guy whose apartment we're staying in, left us by 5:15. He had his car packed up and ready to go, so he just took off after doing that thing we all do before a trip, pacing around and clapping your hands and talking to yourself about things you might have forgotten and things you definitely have packed. He'd left us a bottle of wine. 

We were starving and couldn't deal with finding a nice restaurant (nor paying for one... it is us after all), so instead of settling in right away, we grabbed Subway around the corner. Once we were fed, we drove out to Trader Joe's (a supermarket we loved in California, but here it kinda sucks), and then to Shop Rite for groceries. It was... different. There is just SO much processed food in these stores! Some of it was exciting (like the peanut butter Puffins cereal I found) but some of it was disturbing (like the 10-ft-long deli case of different kinds of hotdogs). Much to my disappointment, fresh pitas are nowhere to be found. They do, however, have 1L containers of Fluff (the marshmallow miracle summoned from heaven just a little bit away in Massachussetts), and soda (not POP, you crazy Canucks) in flavours I can't even comprehend.

After that first night, things got a little boring. Brian went to the archives all day and I sat and transcribed interviews or worked on proposal stuff. To keep busy and active, I've been walking Brian to the archives in the morning and then going for a little jog, and twice I've walked over to East Rock Park and climbed to the summit. One way of doing this is up "Giant Steps", which are, literally, giant steps to the top. Another is scrambling up a winding trail. It's a very short hike, but the views are nice and it made for a good hour of recreation before work. 

For the rest of this week, that's pretty much what we did, except that on Thursday we started a new routine: I'll work in the mornings, meet Brian after lunch at the archives, and then help him research for the afternoon. I'm privy to his research enough that I can scan all of the old letters, memos and other documents for the information he needs. For the last little while I've been snooping in this guy's affairs: 

As a result, I've been thinking about his life constantly, imagining him riding the train, sitting around at Yale, using the same chairs and tables and door handles and lamps, walking on the same floor tiles, peering through the same windows and never imagining we'd have guys walking on the moon, restless leg syndrome, or reality TV. He would, however, have been alive to experience Marshmallow Fluff, and I'm amused by the thought of it getting stuck in his moustache.

Today, we took every form of transit imaginable.

We said “no” to another Ulster Fry this morning, opting instead for cereal, tea and toast to start the day. After lounging around in our room watching BBC, we packed up our things and walked to the bus station to start the first part of our journey home. Because our Belfast plans didn’t come together until late in the trip, and we had booked a series of return tickets rather than one-way trips, we took a very nonsensical, backtracking route, bussing from Belfast to Dublin, catching a plane from Dublin to Glasgow’s small airport, and taking a train from the small airport into Glasgow’s city centre. We stayed the night in Glasgow, in the same no-frills hostel we slept in on our first night in the UK. We got settled and went right back out into the shopping district, but by the time we got to it all the stores had closed. Just when we were feeling a little loose with our dough, we had nowhere to spend it. All was not lost, however—we found a chic little bar tucked away behind some of the high-end stores in Merchant City, and (lucky us!) they were having a 2-for-1 deal on pizzas. While the pies were pretty run-of-the-mill, the atmosphere was great and it was nice to have a sit-down, civilized meal on a trendy patio for about the same as we would have paid to hunch over a fast-food grease-fest on swivel-chairs and a melamine table. We were even able to pack up the pizza we couldn’t eat, and take it with us. We went to bed pretty early, mostly out of boredom, looking forward to the following day’s flight to Ottawa.

And here we are, two busses and one plane later, trying to survive the week until our internet gets hooked up at home. For now, we’ll be hitting up Bridgehead once a day to check our email and have a coffee, thereby satisfying two of our worst vices in one sitting. We hope you enjoyed following us on our journey and we can’t wait to see all of you soon. By the way, Tim Hortons has hopped over the Atlantic and is now clogging arteries and rotting guts over here with their sludgy, burnt "coffee" and mass-baked lard-blobs. Sorry, Dad :)

xoxo

Brian and Karen

Today, we learned that brick walls with barbed wire are still brick walls with barbed wire, no matter what you call 'em.

My first thought this morning, waking up with a dry mouth, a slight headache and my makeup all over my face, was kill me. My second, immediate thought was wait. Let me eat breakfast, then kill me. You see, Kate’s is known for the “heart attack on a plate” the owner serves guests for breakfast. A full “Ulster Fry”, consisting of sausages, bacon and egg, fried tomato, soda bread, toast, and coffee or tea, waited for us when we awoke, and it was just the antidote for the previous night’s indiscretion.

We hauled ourselves away from the table and set out on the town, doing a bit of window shopping before hopping on one of those big, red, open-topped tour buses and doing a big loop around the city. Overall, it was pretty informative, and for the price we paid, we couldn’t complain. The route went through the Falls and Shankhill neighbourhoods, two of most infamous districts from Belfast’s ‘Troubles’. The two areas are separated by “peace lines”—hulking, concrete walls lined with barbed wire—and are home to the political murals for which Belfast is well-known. The curbs in front of some of the houses are still painted to indicate whether the family living in each is Protestant or Catholic, and politico-religious slogans, flags and symbols are everywhere, letting interlopers like us know exactly where we were.

Some of the buildings still bear the scars of bullets, rockets and serious vandalism, and every street, every corner, every building has a story to tell (like the statue of justice, above, who had her scales stolen). Walking around in these neighbourhoods, as we did later, on our own, we passed people the same age as us who had likely seen so much bloodshed, hatred and struggle by the time they were in their early teens. While this generation is purportedly more open-minded than their parents, and many are less invested in upholding the divisions wedged between the unionists and nationalists of previous generations, there are undeniable numbers of young people who believe very deeply in carrying on the fight. We can’t even begin to understand the complexity of these tensions, but walking through the city and talking to some of its people opened our eyes to a situation we knew nothing about before.

After getting off the bus, we grabbed a pretty early dinner at Subway again, if only for the sake of knowing that what we ordered would look and taste exactly like we expected it to. We walked back to our room and hung around for a bit until we got bored, and then went back out for a walk around the neighbourhoods we’d driven through earlier in the big, tacky bus. We felt safe and not unwelcome as we walked, and we were comfortable enough to snap a few pictures along the way. The tensions run deep, but we got the sense that they weren’t about to erupt into violence any time soon. Still feeling a little nauseous from our Guinnessessessesses the previous night, we grabbed a bag of Jelly Babies and gobbled them down on our way back to the B & B.

Today, I go overboard describing the food we ate.

We woke around 7:30am and, since our supply of cereal and toast had run out, headed into the city centre for breakfast and coffee at a café that was ironically (for us, at least) set on appearing quintessentially American (New York references, pictures of Sinatra, “American-Style Bagels” and so on). Our first choice, a French café next door to this one, was, naturally, not terribly concerned about opening when it said it would. How very French indeed.

We got to the bus station with only a half hour wait before the next bus to Belfast, and after a 3-hour drive, arrived in Belfast, where we are now. We grabbed lunch at Subway (cheap + vegetables), and checked into our room at Kate’s B & B, near Queen’s University. It was exactly what we expected—cozy, cluttered, un-fussy and friendly. Unexpectedly, however, our room turned out to have three beds in it (one twin and two singles), a loveseat, a few chairs, a TV and a shower and sink. (Seeing the superfluous beds, Brian kept fretting that someone else would be sharing our room with us, and tensed up every time we heard footsteps near our door. He’s since relaxed a bit, and has accepted the fact that we’ve simply ended up in a room normally reserved for families.)

After dropping our stuff off, we embarked on a rambling walk around Belfast. We went into the city centre and around the University, and picked up two tickets for a bus tour the following day. When dinner time hit, and the hunger pangs started, we made our way toward a restaurant our travel guide touted as affordable, popular and tasty. It might have been popular, but the other two adjectives don’t reflect our experience there—the service was inattentive (and we’re really not fussy, and usually very understanding of servers given Brian’s experience in that line of work), and the food ranged from tolerable to inedible.

Now, those of you who know us well know that we’ll eat just about anything. Did it fall on the floor? We’ve got it, don’t worry. Is it past its best-before date? That’s just a guideline anyway—smell it, and if it’s not too funky, we’ll take care of it. Stale, bland, broken, unidentifiable, discarded, half-eaten, whatever. If you know us, you also know that we clean our plates, especially at restaurants. We even pocket the packets of butter sometimes, especially while on vacation. But at this restaurant, I left half of my entrée, and Brian abandoned ship with a handful of fries and a chunk of burger still on his plate. At the risk of sounding like a couple of restaurant critics, we’ll describe the meals for you.

I should explain that the “jacket” potato (baked potato, for you regular folk) was a common menu item across Scotland and Ireland. Restaurants tended to serve them with a few different kinds of toppings—cheeses, veggies, chilli, and so on—and we even found a place in Edinburgh that served nothing but baked potatoes with every combination of toppings imaginable. I’d been meaning to try one, so I chose the “Prawn Marie-Rose” jacket potato at this particular spot. I was imagining fresh, sautéed prawns in a buttery, creamy sauce on top of a big, steaming potato. What I got was a big, steaming potato indeed, but it was topped with a huge, sloppy glob of cold shrimp (the tiny kind you get in a can), which were swimming in a thick, sickening sauce I can only describe as mayonnaise mixed with lard and cream. The “house salad” keeping my potato-from-hell company was an innocent bed of lettuce, topped with a mushy mixture of shredded cabbage, carrot, and that awful lardy-mayo sauce again.

Brian’s burger was equally puzzling. It had no condiments, in contrast to my meal, which was nothing but condiments. The thick, beef patty, which would have been a perfect candidate for grilling, was obviously deep-fried, so it had a thick, chewy “skin” on the outside, and a greasy, soft centre. His fries were so soaked in oil he had a hard time containing the mess.

The saving grace was the Cheesy Garlic Soda Bread we started with (it’s hard to screw up bread, cheese and garlic), but even that made us feel kind of guilty—it would take a lot of Sweatin’ to the Oldies with Richard Simmons to undo the damage done by that dish alone. To top it all off, the chatty girls overseeing the place undercharged us by 4 pounds (fantastic, really), and then short-changed us by 1 pound as if to claim the tip they knew they wouldn’t be getting. Oh well. We came out of it feeling a little queasy and angry at our guide book, but the 3 pound “discount” softened the blow.

Feeling let down and betrayed—alone in this new place, still hungry, on the verge of severe indigestion and anticipating an urgent trip to the bathroom—we were prime targets for the 2-pound pints at the Empire Pub’s happy hour. We drowned our sorrows (quickly, as we only had a half-hour before the prices went up) in a second “meal” of Guinness, and after chugging two each, the memory of our disappointing dinner was almost erased. We chatted up two girls sitting next to us (one Canadian, one Irish, both teaching English to Italians… in Ireland… follow?) and ended up getting pretty tanked with them. We staggered back to our room, had a snack, and fell asleep.

Today, we went where the locals told us to go.

Sunday, as planned, we went to Dun Laoghaire for a taste of the Irish coast—the East one, to be precise. We disembarked the train by the town’s waterfront, and set off on a long walk along the coastline. Dun Laoghaire is pretty—there were lots of boats and ships in the water, and plenty of spots for sitting or dipping your feet. The buildings around the water were strangely Mediterranean-looking, some even reminiscent of the ones we saw in Malibu or other posh parts along the California coast last summer. A few minutes from where the train stops, we came upon a traveling fair that was in the process of setting up. Seems innocent enough, right? A good place to take the kids? Well, sure it was—if you’re morally OK with Pam Anderson, wrapped (loosely, I might add) in the American flag, airbrushed in a sultry pose on the side of the ticket booth. The creepiness continued with a bumper-car-style ride with the most random American celebrities airbrushed around the canopy of it—Tina Turner, Nikki Taylor (memba her?), and a handful of semi-recognizable has-beens.

We kept walking, not really knowing where we were going, but confident that if we stuck to the water’s edge we’d end up in the towns described to us by Brian’s colleagues. We passed a tower that housed James Joyce for a while, and “the bathing place” where he, and countless other men over the years, took to swimming nude in the Irish Sea. It was only about 15 degrees and intermittently cloudy when we went by, but there were enough old men strutting around in Speedos around there to play “there’s your boyfriend” for eternity.

We continued on through Dalkey and Killiney (where Bono lives, apparently—but we didn’t see him), a walk that turned out to be entirely uphill and, after a while, not terribly interesting. We found a small café at the top of the hill, and we were starving. We had to settle for a pastry to tide us over, and after a small rest while we snacked, we headed back down the hill into Dalkey, where we planned to catch the train up to Howth since we still had a whole afternoon. After chatting with a man on the platform, we decided to go instead to Malahide, on the advice that we’d probably find it more interesting. People, it seems, do not want us to see Howth. Fair enough.

We rolled into Malahide around four o’clock, and found a quaint little town with a marina and a nice, well-trod park by the water. Still running on pastry-fuel alone, we were wasting away. We managed to summon the energy to haul our skeletal, gaunt bodies to a take-away fish and chip place recommended to us by a shop owner in the town. We handed over 5 pounds each and, in return, received a greasy paper bag filled with a piece of smoked, deep-fried cod suitable for doing bicep curls with, and a packet of deliciously soggy, thick-cut French fries doused with vinegar and salt. We took our fatty finds down to the park, planted ourselves in the grass, and dined-a-deux in the afternoon sun.

Five pounds heavier, we waddled back to the train and made our way back to the campus for our final night in Dublin.

Yesterday, We Got Home!

But we're not about to sit down for a whole blog-forsaken hour (or more, for blog's sakes) blogging you up to date. We'll get around to it, though, just hold your bloggin' horses. We have a LOT to tell you about: our two days in Belfast, and the two-day odyssey that brought us back to Ottawa, among other things.

For now, just know that we're home safe and sound, and we couldn't be happier (well, maybe if we were at our REAL home in Nova Scotia, and all of you Ottawa-ites were there too, having a backyard barbecue with my Ma's spinach salad and Brian's Ma's potato salad, my Dad and David manning the grill... *drool*). Whew, that got out of hand really quickly! The point is, check back soon if you want to know how our dynamic duo fares in their journey to Northern Ireland and back to the nation's capital!

Yesterday, We Made Up for Friday's Shortcomings

Our Friday night was supposed to be really good. We had plans to meet up with a few students in the city centre, for dinner and drinks. We all convened at the mammoth spire jutting up from one of the main streets in town, and Brian and I made arrangements with the group that we'd catch up with them at one of the small Chinese restaurants down the street after we returned a few items to the grocery store, which we weren't going to have time to eat before leaving Dublin (we're cheap, remember?). A nice plan, but after ducking into every freakin' Chinese restaurant looking for our group (unnerving for other diners, we're sure), we couldn't find them.


We ended up walking around looking for a pub to have a pity-pint in, but somehow we ended up at home, in bed, drinking Guinness from tiny breakfast cups and eating Hunky Dorys. So, in addition to being cheap, we're also quite cool. In any case, it wasn't the end of the world, and Brian was up at a reasonable hour the next morning to prepare for the Clinton Institute's symposium (CI pictured below) where all of the summer school folks get a chance to share their papers with the rest.


Now, UCD is a very windy campus. It's not the kind of place you want to go out walking in a flowy skirt if you prefer to keep your lady parts to yourself. It's also not the ideal place to stretch out and read a book by the fountain if you prefer to decide when to turn the pages as opposed to having them turned for you. If you try to do both in a single afternoon, you find yourself in the situation I was in yesterday. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I stuck it out for an hour and a half before finally giving in and coming back to the room.

The evening was great, though. The summer school people kindly welcomed me at their BBQ after the symposium, so I got a chance to clear up any misconceptions about Brian having a hermit wife. They fed us a delicious meal of hot dogs (way more sausage-like than the crap we get in Canada), chicken, the tastiest sweet corn off of the grill, salads, and herbed new potatoes, followed by a plateful of fresh strawberries, real whipped cream and meringue nests. The booze was flowing, as were the conversations, and despite the chill in the air as night settled in, everyone was having a good time. Thanks to the gift of storytelling these Irish students have, we had a few hearty (and hurty) belly-laughs--the most reliable marker of a good night. The party moved inside the Clinton Institute when it got too cold and damp in the garden, and we stayed until close to midnight before joining the slow trickle of people back to the residences.

It's Sunday morning now, and we're preparing for a day-trip to Dun Laoghaire (pronounced "dun leary") and a few of the conjoining towns, instead of the jaunt up to Howth as we'd planned. The locals thought we'd have a better time in the other towns, so we're taking their advice. We'll let you know how it pans out later tonight!

Yesterday, We Succumbed to the City

That's right, folks. We let our hair down, opened our wallets (a crack), and said, "Take us, Dublin".

It kinda started Wednesday night. Brian's summer school was hosting a "traditional Irish Music and Pub night" in the city, and after finding out I'd have to pay 20 Euro just to come along, I opted out. We are going to be one cheap old couple, that's for sure. Pity our kids and grandkids--they can anticipate many Christmases and birthdays in the future where they receive an inexplicable, obvious re-gift, like a stained doily or a Women's Weekly magazine from 1984. Anyway, the pub night. I felt very ashamed once Brian left for it--why didn't we just pay the money? I had talked about going and seeing a movie by myself while Brian was out, and although I felt pretty crappy about being such a tightwad, I forced myself to go. I'm glad I did. I saw Mamma Mia--my first time going to a movie alone, and in a new city at that--and it put me in a chipper mood. I don't even like musicals, but this was canceled out by a) Abba, b) the Greek island setting and c) Meryl Streep (rolling around, jumping, doing the splits, and other things normally reserved for people half her age--amazing).

Just after boarding the bus home, a body moved from the back and slid into the seat beside me, and it was Brian! Purely by coincidence, we'd gotten on the same bus. We shared stories about our evening apart, and it turns out I didn't miss much at the pub night. What the 20 Euro charge was for is still a mystery. It didn't buy food, drinks, or cover into the venues. It may have paid for the "traditional music" played by two guys, one of whom clearly had a Manchester accent and was therefore far from "traditionally Irish".

Thursday morning, like all of the mornings before it, was spent on campus. UCD, if you're curious, looks like any North American University--sprawling, with lots of buildings straight out of an engineering student's sketchbook... if they were drawn while drinking Absinthe... and without any regard for the people who would have to navigate their way through and around them. It does have a really nice fountain though, in front of the library.


Brian skipped Thursday evening's speaker (the evening sessions are not mandatory), so after having lunch here at the residences, we got on the bus into the city centre, with the intention of seeing a film (The Visitor--might be on DVD in Canada) at the Irish Film Institute. When we got off the bus downtown, though, the streets were abuzz with shoppers, tourists and the odd local, and we were sucked in.

We found a few cool shops we'd never seen before, grabbed a cup of coffee to walk around with, and sat for a while on the steps of the tourist information centre, drinking our Americanos and hashing out a few ideas Brian had been mulling over for the next day's seminar. In the course of our walk, we actually parted with a few Euro, buying a decoration for our new apartment, a box of notecards that were designed precisely with me in mind (if you're reading this, you'll probably get one at some point, and you'll know what I'm talking about), and a glamorous, oversized ring to rival the one on my left hand (at a fraction of the price, and without the meaning). Check it out:

After a while, we started feeling peckish and found our way to one of the restaurants that had been recommended to me by the receptionist at the salon where I got my new head-suit. Her idea of cheap, it turns out, is not in line with mine. The entrees were each around 14 Euro, and none of them were tempting enough to make us want to spend that much. We politely left the restaurant before ordering anything, and hoofed it to another place the salon girl had mentioned, and which we had passed earlier that day and approved of the prices. We each got a savoury pie for 9 Euro, Brian's filled with Guinness-braised Beef Shin (I know, shins!?) and Mushrooms, and mine with Lamb Moussaka, Roasted Aubergine and Minted Potatoes. They were to die for, but they were pretty small for our North American-grown gullets. Besides, we'd spied a Häagen Dazs
on our way to dinner and our internal compasses were pointed that way ever since. We treated ourselves to a sundae at one of their courtyard tables, and people-watched while we indulged.


Today will be pretty uneventful, but we'll have something to share with you by Saturday night.

Today, we did nothing you'd want to hear about.

Seriously. I haven't even got a picture to upload. We worked all morning--Brian says I've got Catholic guilt and a Protestant work ethic (how appropriate, given our location), and the two combined lead to intense guilt about not working, a frightening focus while doing work, and pure elation upon completing a task. I think he's right, because today felt good.

Afterward, I went into town while Brian continued working, got tired of shopping almost immediately (it's just the same stores only I'm paying through the teeth on conversion), and got myself a snazzy new haircut just for kicks. When I say "snazzy new haircut", what I mean is, the same friggin' haircut I always end up with, no matter what I ask for. My hair is a one-trick pony. So much for my daydream scenario where Canadian women swoon and fall at my feet back in Ottawa, begging for the address of my stylist, at which time I toss my locks over my shoulder and say, "I had it done in Dublin, darlings."

Anyway, Brian's in a lecture until 10pm, and I'm just biding my time--working a little--until he gets back. He's definitely got a cold, poor bugger.

Today, we went to jail... Er, gaol.

I'm sitting here in a rather swanky dorm room (comparatively speaking, of course, with reference to the dumps we've been inhabiting lately) at University College Dublin, and Brian's out at the kick-off session to his week-long intensive summer school. Tonight's attraction: Stanley Fish. Jealous?

So, it's been a while since the last post, and for that reason, I'll bring you up to speed. As planned, our last full day in Edinburgh was spent drinking coffee in the morning and catching up on a little school-related reading. After dropping the laptop and books back at the hostel (pictured below--f.y.i., it's right at the bottom of the steps to Edinburgh Castle... did I say that already?), we met up with our free tour of the city.
About fifty bajillion other tourists had the same tour in mind, so we were split up into three groups of about 25 people each. Brian and I were lucky enough to have Andy, a "canoe-faced" young guy (his words) from Oklahoma with a puzzling Oxfordian-sounding accent, as our guide. He was quite funny, very knowledgeable and warm enough that both of us left with slight platonic crushes on him. The tour took us through many of the places we'd already been, but it helped us understand a bit more about the city, why it looks and feels the way it does today, and what kinds of social narratives are playing out on top of its physical, geographical features.


Near the beginning, we were taken back to Greyfriar's Kirkyard and told a few creepy stories--for example, about the way bodies used to be kept above ground for a few days in "mortsafes" to ensure the people were dead (sometimes, as in the case of Maggie Dickson, they weren't!). We also heard the story of Greyfriar's Bobby (statue below), the now-famous Skye terrier who waited by his dead owner's grave every day for fourteen years before eventually dying on it. Now, people from all over, along with some local kids, come to put sticks on Bobby's little grave. The groundskeeper picks them all up and scatters them around the graveyard at the end of each week, so the whole shebang can start anew.


After the kirkyard, our amorphous blob of a tour group moved from sight to sight, checking out Robbie Burns' house (below), Princes Street Gardens, the Grassmarket area (mostly pubs and shops) and a lot of other things we would have overlooked if left to our own devices. Just like on the highland tour of Skye, the stories were the best part.


Since the tour didn't take us up to the Castle, we decided to take ourselves there once the group dispersed. Looking up from the Princes Street Gardens (formerly the canal where Edinburgh's citizens used to collectively "drop the kids off at the pool", so to speak--read: this is where all the crap went in the 1700s), we could see a path leading up the steep, grassy hill between the us (in the lowest part of the city) and the castle (the highest part). We climbed all the way to the top, only to find out that one can't actually access the Castle from that angle--it was fenced off. We had to climb back down again and approach it from the street. All was not lost, however, as we were able to snap a few pictures of the New Town from way up high. Then, when we reached the castle, we found our way to the little plaque indicating the 12 X 12 area on the castle grounds that is legally Nova Scotia. Needless to say, we're satisfied and we no longer need to come home in September. PSYCH!

Having ended up just across the street from our hostel, we called it a night, under-cooked two store-bought, refrigerated, personal pizzas, and holed up in our room for the rest of the evening, packing and preparing for the next day's travel.

Worried that we might be cutting it too close otherwise, we woke up at 5am, scarfed a few crumpets for breakfast, and hiked down to the bus station. We caught a 6am Citylink to Glasgow, and from there, we hopped on another bus at 7am to Prestwick airport, the hub of Ryanair. If you're unfamiliar with this airline, I suggest you check out their website to get a feel for how kitschy, cheap, and flagrantly funded by advertising they are. That said, we arrived on time, had no problems before, during or after the flight, and aren't too nervous about our return trip with them in a week. The flight from Glasgow to Dublin was only 30 minutes (during which time the airline managed to squeeze in a mind-boggling number of sales-pitches for beer, food, on-board shopping, and so on), and upon landing, we took an hour-long bus ride through the city centre and out to UCD, where we are now. We were famished by the time we arrived here, and scoured the campus for something--anything--to eat. We found a hot food counter in a convenience store and tossed back two panini without tasting them (probably best), and dropped our things off at the residences. We set off again immediately in search of groceries to feed ourselves while we're here, came back, watched Hancock online whilst eating crackers in bed (it's a tradition hearkening back to our Vegas trip), and went to bed.

We woke up this morning feeling like a million bucks--a full night's sleep, a clean, quiet room, a bed that's more than egg-carton foam on plywood (seriously, that's what we slept on at Castle Rock), and ENSUITE bathrooms really go a long way. Stoked abouty the beautiful weather, we got on a bus and set about exploring the city centre, through the posh shops we can't even afford a sideways glance at (below), along the historic, hipster-infested Temple Bar area, and through St. Stephen's Green, a park that, quite frankly, is no prettier or more inviting than Public Gardens in Halifax (SSG is pictured below--you be the judge).



None of the shops were open when we first rolled into the city, so we continued walking along the Liffey, stopping for a cappucino, and carrying on through the brewery district to Kilmainham Gaol, a prison built in 1792, one of the first to take up Jeremy Bentham's "panopticon", used to house political prisoners, other purported "criminals" and even children who'd stolen diapers, played hopscotch when they weren't supposed to, or, like many adults of the day, helped themselves to someone else's food during the famine. The prison fell into disrepair in the early 1900s, until it was restored by a group of volunteers to its present state as a museum and educational tour. Being there was beyond words. The older wing, where prisoners were often crammed into overcrowded cells meant for one person each, was chilling and moving--the halls were dank, musty and cold; the walls were scrawled with writing, some of it legitimately that of prisoners, some of it from other tourists.


The newer wing of the jail--the panoptic part--was equally stunning. The structure itself was breathtaking, and the idea of constant, thorough surveillance and the philosophy supporting it were so cool to think about.


The tour ended in the execution yard, and we were told about the final few prisoners to inhabit the gaol, and a handful of the ones who died there. Needless to say, it was a pretty moving experience... well, unless you were that freaking guy who kept laughing at everything. He must have been nervous or uncomfortable, but come on... really?

We were pretty pooped by the end of the tour--and, as luck would have it, Brian's developing a bit of a cold--so we walked slowly back into the city centre, ducked into a few shops along the way (i.e., I found myself tugged in by a supernatural force called 'shopping', and Brian reluctantly followed or loitered outside), and caught a bus back to the university. We had an exquisite meal of spaghetti from a can and a gourmet salad made of lettuce that had frozen in the too-cold refrigerator, discounted cherry tomatoes and a price-busted cucumber, slathered in that most mysterious of European and British condiments, "Salad Cream".

All of the pictures we've taken thus far (all 500 of em) are now viewable online--just click the icons below. We'll let you know what happens tomorrow, after it happens, of course. Tomorrow.

Scotland - Part 1

Scotland Part 2 + Dublin Part 1