The Merry Ploughboys Pub

Hey everyone! I apologize first off for not being consistant the last few days in updating, but you have to understand that when you are doing Dublin, sometime you can't keep up with the times. So! Where to begin today? From the beginning of course.

I went to my first Folklore class yesterday, which is probably going to be the class that challenges me the most. It seems to be an ethnographic way to approaching "lore" in Ireland and the traditional stories, but I don't know if the lecturer exactly knows how to explain it. She's a Chicago-born visual artist converted to a folklore studier....that doesn't have a ring. Folklorist? Regardless, she goes by "Chinese Oak Whispers" and kept pulling up obscure Irish examples that the majority of the US students had no idea about. But it's cool, cause I guess we're doing "Belief Journals" I mean, folkloristics? How cool is that?

Anyways, jumped from that class to my "Beckett in performance" class, which is probably going to be my most difficult/favorite class. It started off with some soft-focus exercises, and was in the same padded small room as my staging performance class. We spent the period talking about Beckett's rather depressing life, and how he was quoted as saying "I would rather live in Paris During WWII, than live in Dublin during peacetime."  He apparently didn't like the place? But he went to Trinity, not UCD. That might have had something to do with it. It was pretty cool, we started with Godot and we're moving onto Happy Days next week. (Sidenote, the first Dublin rain came down here. And when I say came down, I really mean it had a severe attraction to the ground and I think the drops all collectively aspired to be a pool. The wind on the 2nd floor of Newman facing the courtyard is absolutely horrifying) A bunch of the kids in that class are in Drama Society (affectionately known as Dramsoc). They sent me to the correct place where I found they're doing a 24-hour musical (SCRUBS!). I'm feeling like this is a good investment of my time, even if it means I don't get a lot of sleep and miss a class or two. I think it's a good way to get my foot in the door? So auditions are next tuesday. Time to get my pipes in order....oh, pipes you say?

You see what I did there?

That brings me to the entertainment of the evening. They packed about 80 international students onto a bus and took us to a place called the "Merry Ploughboys Pub" about 20 minutes away from campus. (I think it was south, but it was dark and we were going down roads that weren't wide enough for the bus and other cars, so relative direction wasn't exactly on my mind). We sat down at long tavern-like tables and they gave us a drink while this traditional Irish Band came out on stage.

They played traditional Irish pipes (the irish word is Uilleann) and the tin whistle.

These guys have apparently been doing it for 20 years or so, and they came on stage to play the traditional songs like "finnigan's wake" "the lonely fisherman" and "Whiskey in the jar." They even made it interactive! Calling people up on stage if they were clapping out of time or doing anything else inappropriate.

Like my friend Annija here, who was clapping too enthusiastically for their liking.

Being here and having listened to a couple of groups so far, I can start to see the trends emerging from Appalachian folk music back home. You can definitely see the influence from one to the other.
After the group got off stage, we were able to see some FIERCE irish dancing from a 5 person group attached to the pub. The male-based dancing seemed to be a lot louder and in your face while the female group seemed to have the grace.

But it was a fantastic night at the pub, and I think it was a quality use of time.

I don't have class on fridays, so after that, a couple of friends and I went out to downtown to see what we could see. Laura and I ended up singing the Carolina Alma Mater on the back of the Dublin Bus, (much to the amusement of the Irish students around us) and we were the only representative school to know it. Maybe it's a bigger thing in the south. Oh well, I'll leave you with this gem, and we'll call it a post.

Proof we're alive and doing well! And don't mind the guy on the left, he's just Australian.