29 April 2007

What an adventurous past few days I’ve had! Wow! I’ll catch you up, but today, I’m writing from Navan, which is a lovely little city situated on the Boyne river pretty much in the north central part of Ireland (what McDowell described as the Iowa of Ireland). I really enjoy the hotel where we’re staying because a) they didn’t serve the vegetarians pasta (I’ve had nothing but overcooked pasta in one bland sauce or another for dinner for the past two weeks. Uggggg…The Irish do not do justice to Italian cuisine) b) our hotel room is various shades of red with polka dots and big modern red and gold flowers c)our bedroom overlooks a cathedral d) the hotel is really old and quirky e)the window to room area ratio is just right, plus the windows open all the way and e)the beds are extremely comfortable. I’ll forgive the fact that we didn’t have hot water this morning. A little hypothermia in the morning wakes you right up. It’s lovely that this hotel doesn’t require a four minute walk from lobby to room and isn’t an old mental institution.

I suppose I’ll start from where Ieft off journaling. The first day after I left off, Dr. Mann was sick and we weren’t able to secure a classroom space, so we just had McDowell’s class in the stairwell and it was pretty boring because it was more material that we covered in my medieval lit class of last term. In the afternoon, I headed out to explore Sligo on my own. I found a nice little bakery and coffee shop and did some writing there and then just looked around until I found an art supply store. I bought some charcoal and chalk and a sketch pad, and for the first time since junior high, I went outside and sketched. It was glorious! It felt so good, and I think my eye has improved. Also, Mark, Beamer, Carsen, Gina, Ryan, and I made plans to go surfing for Friday. Thus I started getting excited.

Actually, out of order, the day before that, Tuesday, the class went to Knocknarea, which is a cairn (BIG man made pile of stones) on top of a mountain. The cairn on top of Knocknarea is said to be Mabdh’s tomb (or Maeve’s tomb in the anglicized version). Queen Mabdh is pretty interesting because she is supposed to be both a stone age or bronze age warrior queen (yup… I said both. The archeologists place her in the stone age (about 3000-5000 years ago) while the historians date her to be a bronze age queen) AND she’s supposed to be also the queen of the Sidhe or faerie folk. Both. Plus, the tales of her suggest that she was a saucy minx and the very first feminist. I like her. But I digress. So, we visited her tomb, where she is supposed to be buried standing up with a spear, facing her enemies in Ulster, under the huge cairn that is about a hundred feet in diameter and about fifty feet tall. What is especially cool is that this cairn is so old and visible from everywhere in the surrounding area that all the later stone age tombs are oriented towards it, so all the other passage tombs and court tombs faced Knocknarea. The climb up the mountain itself wasn’t too bad. After climbing Mangerton, everything else seems like a piece of cake. When we arrived at the top, we found that people had taken a lot of stones off the cairn and spelled out their names and various messages on the ground surrounding Mabdh’s Tomb. It offended our sensibilities as burgeoning archeologists/historians/folklorists, especially offending Dr. McDowell, so we were all encouraged to bring a rock or two back to the cairn.

I misunderstood and thought he meant that I should bring a rock up to the top of the tomb, so I picked up a hunk of pink granite from the middle of the “f” of “Fatima” and started up the really tall cairn. As I was making my way over, a little old Irishman passed me and said “Ah, looks like you have a really big wish there!” I smiled not knowing what he was talking about and straining under the weight of a really big chunk of stone, and he continued walking past saying: “Trust me, he’s not the right one!” I kept going up the cairn with my little boulder thinking mubling angry thoughts about little old men thinking that I would waste a wish on meeting the man of my dreams when I could wish about more important things like peace or environmental stewardship. That’s the problem with little old Irishmen: they think that if you’re young, female, and unmarried that your first priority in life ought to be finding a husband, and they’re not afraid to say it. They’re old and flirtatious and chatty. In a way, they’re kind of the last of an older way of thinking, so it’s a little sad, but I’ll be happy to return to a place where I can go to grad school and be successful and indepent without being considered unusual, though it does make me feel like I’m going to wind up a lonely old cat woman. What I don’t like is being considered just a pretty face who’s going to make some man very happy someday. Why can’t some man make me very happy someday? Or even better, why can’t we both make each other happy in a mutually supportive relationship that takes into consideration both of our equally important careers and ambitions?

But, I digress once more. I made my wish at the top, took a picture, and then headed down to do some more cairn re-building. I found this cute heart that someone had made out of stones from Mabdh’s tomb, and decided that I’d break another heart in the interest of monument preservation (if I had a dime for every time that’s happened…) So I made it my personal task to disassemble the heart rock by little bouldery rock. There is nothing more theraputic post-breakup than chucking rocks from a useless heart on the ground onto a great big pile of rocks that is a 3500 year old monument. Turning something broken and useless into productivity and healing, quite physically manifested. Plus, you get to throw rocks.

Anyway, I was summoned away from my righting the wrongs of my romantic ambitions by McDowell when he got pretty much the whole group together to form assembely lines of rock putting-awayness. It was a very physically demanding half-hour, but together, we managed to clear about a sixth of the mountaintop of the names and “hi!’s” and smiley faces besmuding the landscape. It was an amazing experience, working together and passing rocks. We sang songs too, in the true chain gang fashion. Though, we tended towards “Build me up, Buttercup” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” (including guitar solos) and the Beatles rather than spirituals or labor songs. It felt so good too, to put the rocks back where they belonged on the cairn. After that, we went to Strandhill to play on the beach, which, coincidentally, was the beach where we were going to go surfing. We popped down to the surfschool to confirm our reservations for Friday, chatted with the instructor, and the joined the rest of our friends on the beach. While leaping and dancing down the beach, I tripped over my feet and fell into the water, fully clothed. It was at that moment I truly understood why we needed wetsuits for surfing. The beach was lovely though, and the waves looked promising.

After sleeping soggily on the bus home, I had enough energy to play an amazing game of bridge and some more poker! I remain terrible at poker, though I did bluff everyone out of their hands on one round. Note to self: Abstain vigorously from strip poker if ever invited to play. We did play a game of hearts too, and let me tell my hearts playing friends back home that they better watch out because I count cards now because of bridge. Yeah, that’s right Andrew. You’re not the only card counter anymore.

Thursday we went to Yeats land: Drumcliffe, the church where he is buried, Benn Bulben, the cliff he wanted to be buried under and wrote about, and Parkes Castle (14th century norman castle, reconstructed) situated on the lake where resides the Lake Isle of Inisfree, the subject of one of Yeats’ most-loved poems. The lake tour via ferry boat was pleasant because of the sunshine, unpleasant because of the tour leader’s incessant touristy banter, but it is a gorgeous lake. The whole day, I kept thinking about surfing on Friday. Thursday night brought more bridge and poker, and I actually got third place out of six people.

Finally, the sun dawned on Friday morning and I was out of bed like a kid on Christmas! The sun was shining, and the clouds were dissapating, even at half six. The surf report looked excellent. In the morning we had a gallery visit to see some works of Jack Yeats (W.B’s little brother) also from the Sligo area, but I didn’t enjoy it very much because I was too busy daydreaming about surfing. After the gallery visit, a gaggle of us trekked over to the pizza parlor in town to take advantage of Four Star Pizza’s five euro “Lunch Special”. It was amazing, and definitely NOT pasta or granola bars, so I was happy. After that we had to book it down to the bus station to catch our bus out to Strandhill. It turns out that pretty much everyone in our class and the McDowell’s were planning to go out with us and have a little beach party. Unfortunately, that meant that my certain un-friend was coming with us, but I think she’s finally received the hint that I don’t like her and her unnerving demeanor, plus I would be surfing, what could bother me? Once we all arrived at Strandhill (luckily, some of our surf party that had to go back to the hotel caught a cab out to the beach without incident), we checked in with Paul and Paul, our surf instructors from New Zealand. The one Paul looked like a baby giraffe with his sun-bleached shaggy hair and ridiculously long eyelashes. The other Paul looked like an ancient Mariner. Their accents were absolutely amazing to hear, though, because they had a little bit of an Irish lilt, but the Australian-isms like “mate”, plus the surfer drawl. So, any given sentence would sound something like this: “Right, so you’re going to grab your board, mates, and head nose up into the surf, eh?”

We paid up and headed to the back room to get our wetsuits and boots (we didn’t need hoods or gloves because the water was about 15 degrees celcius.) Mark, Ryan, Carsen, Beamer, and Gina all got their suits without incident. Paul would just look at them, and pull a perfectly fitting suit off the rack. Impressive given that Ryan is 6’5’’ or something really tall like that. But I managed to trip him up. For some reason or another, everyone thinks that I’m much tinier than I actually am. I managed to squeeze into my wetsuit, which wasn’t too tight, but it was about four inches too short on the arms and the legs. I felt kind of goofy when I saw that everyone else’s fit, so I asked Paul if I needed a different size. He asked why, and so I pointed to my exposed legs to which he replied: “Well, shite, you’ve got some long legs, eh?” and got me a new wetsuit that was less tight and actually a little too long on the arms. Putting on a wetsuit is an ordeal and a half, especially because my second wetsuit was brand new. So, it was kind of like putting on panty hose over your entire body made out of quarter inch thick neoprene. But I was happy that it fit and it would keep me warm and toasty in the Atlantic.

After suiting up, we headed down to the beach, feeling like we were going on a lunar mission or something. We set up camp on the beach and got our surfboards: big foam numbers that would hurt less if we got smacked in the face with them. We set up in a semi-circle and proceeded to run through the steps for surfing on land. Which was pretty funny, truth be told, practicing paddling in the sand. I felt kind of like a very very warm sea turtle trying to make it back to the ocean unsucessfully. Paul instructed us how to hold the board, how not to hold the board (to avoid breaking fingers… his pinky looked something like this: ___/\___. No joke.), how to paddle, how to push yourself up and balance. Then, we took to the waves, with our friends snapping pictures like paparazzi. It was the most amazing fun! I love surfing! I even stood all the way up about three times. Beamer did the best out of all of us because he goes waterskiing every summer. It was incredibly hard work, with the hardest part being wading out against the current, like the going uphill when sledding. But it was worth it, soooo worth it. Once you get out far enough, you flip your board around to face the beach, hop on and hook your toes over the back edge, and start paddling to orient yourself in the direction of the wave and then paddle like crazy once it approaches you. Then all of the sudden, you feel this catch of the surfboard on the wave and you’re off! It’s up to you to push yourself up and slip your feet under you. That’s the hardest part, getting your feet under yourself. Once your feet are set, you stand up and balance and feel completely amazing because YOU ARE SURFING! WOOOOOOOO!!! Then, if you’re Steph, you tumble off your board or flip over or get smacked in the face with it or some other cool move. But it was completely justified, because YOU WERE JUST SURFING!!! YEEEEAAAAAHHHH!!!

In other words…. It was a blast. I don’t think I’ve been as sore as I am since I went up Mangerton in Killarney, but it was definitely worth all the stiffness and bruises. I think this was possibly my favorite adventure yet. And there’s nothing a little advil and 11 hours of sleep won’t cure. Yesterday was a long day on the bus and another cool stone circle, so I’ll just sign off here and leave you with this sentiment: YEEEEAAAAAHH SURFING!! WOOOOOOO!!!