My First Irish Kiss: Cork and Volunteering

.....To leave you hanging, I'm not going to talk about it until it comes up chronologically. This is a really long blog post, and I apologize for the faint-hearted (but ROCK ON FOR THE DEVOTED READERS)

So, we'll start off where we left off last time. Friday, I think I slept about 12 hours. Which I didn't realize that my body needed. If I'm not caught up on the jet lag yet, I think we're getting centimetres closer. Anyways, after running some chores around campus and catching up on some work, I jumped on the train from Heuston Station in west Dublin to Newbridge in county Kildaire.

All the signs were in Irish first, then English. Talk about fear

I finally arrived at the Newbridge train station about 1.5 hours after I left my room. Important thing to note for future trippers. When you google map a location to note the distance (i.e. your university to your volunteer station) it is not always as short as the image makes it up to be. But, this is life, I suppose. It's all about learning it the hard way. After walking into town and seeing the main strip up and down (ask people for directions so you don't make wrong turns), I arrived at the Kildaire Youth Theatre centre. It was sitting on top of a bar, and was comprised of about 4 small rooms and a studio where most of the action takes place. After entering, and walking up the long narrow stair set while passing by children in their early-mid teens, I was introduced to Peter Hussey, a lecturing professor at one of the NUI schools in Ireland. After he finished having a "hash session" with one of the girls wielding a guitar, we sat down and talked out what my history was with the field, what I was studying, etc...all the basic stuff.

He informed me that they were doing a residency program that really interested me because it involved faciliating discussions and devising performances. Apparently there are really high suicide rates among teenagers in Ireland right now. Surprisingly high numbers and they can't figure out what the deal is. So, what Peter does with Kildaire Youth theatre is make a cultural investment in the students to create a piece that creates discussion with the community. The parents come out and have the talk with the kids. This is probably what I'll be doing with my time there.

So, after about 30 minutes of chat, he had to prep for his 7 o clock group (which I was staying to see), and I had a chance to kick around with a few of the students. I was sitting in a room talking with a couple of the graduating high school students, who were informing me the way the university system here works with points while listening to a kid make some sweet music on guitar in the other room. He stepped in, and I was trying to get cool points, so this was the conversation we had.

"So, I heard you playing Mumford and Sons in there, it sounded pretty good."
"Yea, thanks......"
"Also, weren't you playing Slow Dancing in a Burning Room?"
*Eyes jump with amazement*
"WHAT? YOU KNOW WHO JOHN MAYER IS"
"Yea man, he's huge in the United States"

The kid ran from room to room telling everyone I knew (and had actually seen) who John Mayer was. Apparently, he's not as big in Europe. But this kid knew how to play every song by John Mayer. I couldn't believe it. But I digress, he gave me the names of a bunch of Irish bands to listen to. So we had a good conversation out of it.

Around 7 o clock, Peter took me into the big room with 7 17-year-old aspiring actors, and I watched them go through a normal viewpoints exercise. I was only planning on watching, but since they were a person short, I jumped in and helped out. Their entire night was planning on devising scenes for a performance they were bringing to an Edinburough festival. It was being writting by and up and coming playwright named Tom Swift, and they recorded parts they thought would be good to incorporate via film and sent it to him to write down. Peter took my idea of telling a story to a partner, followed by the partner relaying it back to the camera so there would be a sense of openness and detachment, which was really cool.

...Which brings me to how I got around to discussing drinking stories with 17 year olds. Since the drinking age here is 16, they have a lot more laid-back stance on it, and the scene we were devising was about alcohol. So...we shared....But the night was good craic, and I got my first Irish tea out of it. Hopefully I'll get to work on the residency project Peter was referring to. I didn't get back home until about 12, but I had to wake up at about 6 for....

Cork: The home of drinking wine 2 days after opening the bottle.

OUR TRIP TO CORK! So after a freezing, horribly cramped 4 hour bus ride, we got there at around 12, but couldn't go to Bru's Hostel and check in until 1, so we wandered the city centre and looked for a restaurant to eat lunch in.

How exciting! They have a Tennessean restaurant!

It was essentially a smaller version of city centre Dublin, with the river et all. Cork is slightly different because there are these rolling hills that surround the city. It's not as flat as most of the other places I've seen, and it was raining (oh wait, that's actually accurate). After catching a quick lunch with the group at a pizza place, I broke off from the group to buy warmer socks. One note: If you're going to be coming to a place in winter, bring warm socks. Plenty of them. And a good hat. I ended up wandering down this open market called the English Market that was right next door. They had some pretty grand offerings.

Yummy, no? It almost made me clear some room for lunch.

After making my way out of the market, I ran into a couple of political groups that were organizing. The first group was protesting the Isreali-Palestine occupation. They were ex-pats who had somehow found their way into Cork and were trying to get people to stop buying Israeli goods. I think they were somewhat happy to talk to an American, (even if he wasn't the MOST informed) because they seemed genuinely glad anyone was listening. Then I passed by the Occupy Cork movement going on in their equivalency of a town hall.

If you look carefully in the window, you can see me as a member of the movement

I didn't actually stop in, but I did get a chance to read some of their grievances. Interesting. The one in Dublin is outdoors, but it's surrounded by a wooden barricade. I'm going to have to get a photo at some point.

So, finally, this gets to the good part. After dumping our stuff off in the hostel, we tripped out to Blarney to see the famous Blarney Castle. It's a small town no larger than Carborro, and I think it's designed for tourism. Anyways, we finally arrived at the castle:

It was really old. And green. But mostly old.

And after exploring the small cave-like dungeon that made up the approach with a bit of amateur spelunking, we finally went up to the top of the castle, where I saw her.....

She was older, and apparently much more experienced than me. But I cautiously worked my way along the battlements towards her, where it happened. I don't know how. I mean, I was laying on my back, it was raining, and all of a sudden there she was..

I'm still waiting for the call back, but she gave me vibes that she was emotionally stolid.

My first Irish kiss was the Blarney stone. For those of you who don't know what it is, it's supposed to give you good luck and bless you with eloquence. Tons of famous people including Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill have been up and kissed it (apparently, by the transitive property, I've kissed WC. Not bad). So, you lay back on this plastic sheet, and a guy is paid to sit up there and slide you about two feet suspended 200 feet up in mid air to kiss the stone (talk about a romantic job). It was the most tourist-ey thing I've done thus far, and I'm proud to have done it. The rest of the time in Cork was basically spent just hanging around hostel and various pubs in the city, which gave me a chance to explore the Irish nightlife. But it wasn't anything out of the ordinary, so I won't go into details. We woke up this morning and took the 4 hour bus ride home with no problems. It was even warm this time! We drove past the rolling green hills filled with spray-painted sheep and furry cows. Yup. Just another normal day in the life of a Dubliner.

One last thing I thought of before I got off. One thing I've noticed about the experiences and adventures I've had in the last year is that the question "How was it?" comes up soooooo often. And while I realize it really is meant to be a polite gesture, it's incredibly hard to encompass a vivid sensory experience with that stimulus. I guess specificity in the questioning is something I'm really appreciative of. And I'm going to try to incorporate that more into real life. And not just theory like this.


Other side notes

• Finally got this whole "cooking" thing down. If only I had an oven to do actual baking in. #themostdomestic
• Time to get serious about work. I have a music paper about timbre on friday. cookies to the first person who wants to explain what it means.
• Working on a short one-act about transition right now. Talk about wasting free time. Yeesh.