Adventures in Germany: Wernigerode
(Okay, maybe not an entry every day. No internet at home for another week or so.)Soon after Kelly arrived in Berlin we took a train (three trains, to be accurate) south-west to Wernigerode in the Harz mountains. It's a lovely little town full of half-timbered houses built at odd angles, and there was an terrifically festive street fair our first night at which we caught our first glimpse of a half-meter bratwurst. I told Kelly she should get one, you know, for the experience, but I think it would have taken her a week to finish the whole thing.
We wanted to try the coffee at Café Wien (Café Vienna), but we never did get there. Below: Krummelsches Haus, built in 1674, which features allegorical reliefs of various nations on its facade.
Here's a close-up of one panel. Lonely Planet thinks this naked lady (representing America, "reasonably enough") is riding an armadillo, though it looks more like a crocodile.
But Wernigerode's primary attraction is its castle on a hill wreathed in evergreens. I tried taking several shots at a distance, but I'll show you this one instead.
I don't want to tell you too much about this place, marvelous as it is, because I'm actually going to set a small part of my novel here. I'll just say there seemed to be gargoyles, demons, and other creepy things nearly everywhere we looked:
Adventures in Berlin, part 1
I flew into Berlin a few days before Kelly did, so that I could do some research-y things in the city before we took the train (er, trains) to the lovely little town of Wernigerode in the Harz mountains (about a 3-hour journey south-west of Berlin). Here are a few more random photos from the first few days...Wernigerode tomorrow!
Found outside a random flower shop.
The courtyard outside the German Resistance Memorial Center. It was in this courtyard that Claus von Stauffenberg and others involved in the plot to kill Hitler were summarily executed. (More information on the July 20th plot at Wikipedia.)
And on a much lighter note...
A giraffe made all of legos at the Sony Center, near Potsdamer Platz.Back from Berlin
Huzzah! It was a great trip--I got plenty of inspiration for the book, and Kelly and I had a lot of fun. Seanan said he felt like he'd been looking at 'Present at a Hanging' since December, so I think I will treat him (and you) to a blog post full o' pics every day for...well, for awhile. I took hundreds, you know.But for now, here's a random assortment. (I seem to have misplaced my laptop adapter and the battery's running low...)
The 13th-century Marienkirche against the GDR-era TV Tower.
Durty graffiti at the East Side Gallery (a 1.3km stretch of the Berlin Wall painted by an international group of artists in 1989-1990).
(Found on a bridge inside the Tiergarten.)
A view from inside the Schloss Wernigerode, in the Harz mountains.Romantic Germany
Lately I've been preoccupied with the new novel and spending QT with the fambly before I head back to Galway (tomorrow, weeeeeee!) Thrift-shopping has become an increasingly frequent family activity, and look what ten-dollar treasure I found at the Moorestown Friends' Thrift Shop yesterday:
It was originally $20, but all books were half price this weekend, and my mom got it for me as an early birthday present. (Thanks, Ma!)
Just look at the dedication!:
I guess this makes me a bonafide book nerd, but I love when a book has initial letters, the more ornate the better.
I may have neglected to mention that Kelly and I are heading to Germany in mid-September, which is part of why I was attracted to this fascinating old book. We're spending a few days in Berlin and a few days in the Harz mountains, about three hours' train ride west of the capital. The Grimms got most of their fairy tales from the villages of the Harz, and the region is steeped in witchy legends. Peeeeeerfect. One of the highlights will be a trip here.)And here:
The first castle is in Wernigerode, the second (the Kaiserhaus) in Goslar (2 hours west by train). Funny how I would've most likely overlooked Goslar and all its attractions were it not for this book:
You appreciate the half-timbered dwellings so much that your appetite is whetted for better ones. If you are persistent you find them at the head of the Markt-Strasse. Crescit indulgens! The taste grows upon you. Presently, unless you are very reserved or blasé, you give a cry of pleasure. You have discovered the Brusttuch, a crooked late-Gothic gildhouse named after an indispensible part of the local peasant's costume. It has an amazingly sharp, high ridge. Its lowest story is of picturesque rough stone; its second is half-timbered and filled with such homely, humorous carvings as riot along the streets of Brunswick. Among them are reliefs of convivial monkeys and of witches riding their broomsticks to the Brocken...
I love the florid descriptions in these old books! It'll be interesting to see how much (or little?) the place has changed in 99 years; it's a little eerie reading about these places as yet untouched by the Third Reich and all its horrors. (By the way, the V-2 factory was located in a subterranean factory in the Harz. Parts of it are open to the public, or so I hear, though I think we'd need a car to get there.)Anyway, expect a load of pictures here when I get back to Galway in late September...
Rabbit Island
From anywhere along the Salthill promenade you can see a rather dramatic headland in the distance to the west (very picturesque at sunset), and I'd been wanting to walk out there for years but never got around to it until recently. This headland is called Rabbit Island because it's an island (though barely) at very high tide; haven't seen any rabbits on it though. Here's a view from the prom, with the Blackrock diving platform in the middle distance:
And the next couple photos are on the approach to Rabbit Island. You walk to the end of the prom and then climb over the stone wall into the caravan park, and after that the way is pretty clear.
The view from midway up the hill:
And the view from one of the lookout/make-out spots along the cliff:
(The second time we came up here, last Saturday, we stumbled upon a couple in an advanced state of deshabille...on her part, at least. Durty, durty. This place is not all that secluded, especially in broad daylight.)
Tee hee!More scenes from Galway
I was stalking this swan and her cygnet along the canal for a week or two before I got the opportunity to take this shot, during which time the baby grew quite a bit.
And here are some flowers for Snookie--hydrangeas are her favorites (sorry, I haven't spotted any blue/purple ones).
Festival Season (reprise)
Sunday night the Macnas parade drew an estimated 70 to 80,000 people. Here's a clip from the website:
A spectacular night time event, "Apocolopolis" is the city that never sleeps, a non-stop party spinning, flashing, beeping and thriving under the agreeable King Du Washawanna and his lovely wife Queen Free. But a sinister threat lurks behind this hall of smoke and mirrors, as the circus comes to town, all pounding drums and flashing flames, led by the terrifying Colonel Chuckle and his hordes of Clownmandos.
It was really fun--felt like the Emerald City on acid, lots of demented clowns and ghouls on stilts and mutant sea creatures busting out of their cages and such. It was hard to get a decent photograph, but here are my best attempts.
(Felt like this thing was staring at me for about ten minutes before the parade started.)
Festival Season
July is a great time of year to be in Galway. The Film Fleadh is on right now, and the Arts Festival opens on the 14th. Last night Brendan and I went to Eyre Square to catch a free screening (actually, it was the world premiere) of Kíla: 'Once Upon A Time'. I hadn't heard of them before, though they've been a band for many years--made me wonder if I'd unwittingly been living under a rock. Before it started Brendan described Kíla as "psychadelic trad," which seemed pretty accurate to me. The funkiest part was when women in Rococo-style foufy white wigs and fancy garb were walking around the stage in stilts.I sat on the grass and knit while Brendan danced like he was at a rave, and some loser (bottle of Buckfast in hand, of course) came up to him and asked for drugs. The dreaded bohemians smoking weed in the crowd don't bother me somehow--it's the lads who drink to get drunk, piddling in doorways and generally making total nuisances of themselves, who make me angry. That Brendan might have been dancing out of sheer enjoyment of the music never would have occurred to a guy like that. At any rate, it was really fun for me to sit there and watch him. I wish I'd brought my camera so you could see how happy he was.So we walked through the city centre to get home, and the weekend revelers were out on Shop Street in full force, as usual. Like I said, I have very low tolerance when it comes to public intoxication, but every so often you come upon a truly entertaining drunk. Last night there was an overweight man dancing in the street outside Neachtain's without a shirt on, shimmying up to passersby while singing "Woo hoo, woo hoo hoo" (click here for clarification). And when I say "shimmying up," I mean he was jiggling his man-boobies in random women's faces. This was all mildly amusing, but what really clinched it for me was when one (sober) woman he accosted in this fashion replied (with facetious delight), "What a treat!"Gosh, I love Galway.
Back in Carrick
When we were in Carrick-on-Suir back in March, Brendan took me to a beautiful spot called Millvale a couple miles outside town. The road is winding and wooded, and you hop over a stone wall and come down a steep embankment to find this:
This bridge was destroyed during the Civil War (in 1922 or 1923), and was later reconstructed.
It's so peaceful down here--all you can hear is rushing water, and the occasional car passing up above. There are bits of rubbish amid the undergrowth, even a few rusted car parts, but I think most of it was thrown over the wall. I can't imagine somebody coming down here to listen to the river and the wind in the trees, and then leaving their empty cans behind. We were lucky the weather held as long as it did.
And on our way to Millvale, we found loads of foxglove growing on the side of the road:
The weather has been cool and very capricious lately--sunny, overcast, and raining buckets all within the span of minutes. Funny how the wildflowers remind you it's actually July.
Moon Ireland photo essay on Amazon.com!
Thanks to the Moon Handbooks marketing gurus, there's now an Amazon.com "storefront" with photo essays from lots of Moon authors, including yours truly.This feature "went live" a month and a half ago, but after the initial rush of excitement I completely forgot to blog about it. Most of the photos were already on the gallery page of my website, but it's still pretty cool to see them on Amazon!
Inishbofin
Brendan and I just got back from two nights on Inishbofin, a small (6km long by 3.5km wide) island a half-hour ferry ride off the coast of Connemara (not far from Clifden).
There isn't really anything in the way of tourist attractions, so Inishbofin doesn't see as many visitors as, say, Inis Mór (the largest Aran island). We came hoping for long peaceful walks and a bit of swimming, and we got both.
Above: the main road out to "East End Village," with a view of little Inis Laighean (uninhabited except by birds and occasionally sheep, which are brought over by boat) and the Twelve Bens of Connemara in the distance.
On our Monday evening walk to the northern shore, we passed this shed full of fleeces. There are plenty of sheep on the island, many of which had been sheared recently.
Inis Laighean again, with a view over the island's graveyard and the ruins of St. Colman's Abbey.
A closer view of Inis Laighean. On Tuesday morning we swam out to it, over a lot of long hair-like seaweed that got tangled around our limbs until we started swimming on our backs. It was a little creepy, that sensation of slender slippery vines winding around my neck and arms. The water was only waist-deep at most though. We got to the far shore and frolicked over much of the island. I never thought I would be walking barefoot on sheep turds in a wet bathing suit and telling you it was one of the most glorious things I've ever done, but here you have it. It was so exhilarating. The weather changed every few minutes--sometimes it was warm and sunny and then the clouds would gather and it would drizzle a bit. The island itself was interesting too--hilly and rocky and covered in strange squishy mosses and heather and tiny wildflowers.Later that day, when we had lunch at this great little café nearby (called The Galley), we told the owner we'd swum out to it and she seemed pretty horrified. She told us we were crazy. We had just assumed loads of people swam out to it, but she said she hadn't ever heard of anyone swimming it, only walking out at low tide (when there was no water at all) and then getting stranded on the far side. She showed us how to get to the ruins of Cromwell's barracks, on an island overlooking the harbor, but when we got to the place where we were meant to take off our shoes and socks and wade across, the water was too deep (we weren't wearing our bathing suits anymore, otherwise we'd have done it). Here's a view of Port Island, where the barracks are--see those three little mounds on the horizon line?
Anyway, if you ever go to Inishbofin, swim out to Inis Laighean and romp around a bit. The views are amazing, and if you don't like the idea of tramping on sheep poo in your bare feet you can always pack a pair of water shoes.
Cúirt, finally
Cúirt (roughly pronounced "corch") is Galway's international literary festival. It's a really exciting time to be here. Sometimes there are famous authors you can't wait to see and sometimes you discover the work of a new writer, and even if you don't attend a single reading there's still lots of craic to be had at the pub afterwards. It is very much a literary festival though--hugely 'prestigious' to the point where the festival committee won't ask any writer who's garnered 'too much' commercial success. Some folks are pretentious (more the hobnobbers than the writers themselves), but the rest of us feel free to make fun of them.This year the speaker I was most excited about was Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama. I couldn't believe tickets for this event were only €6! And let me tell you, she is AMAZING. Not only is she incredibly smart and articulate--you'd expect that from a Pulitzer winner, right?--but she is also unbelievably humble. Everything she said impressed me. She read a short excerpt from her new book, Chasing the Flame, but she spent most of the hour beforehand giving us clear and thorough background information without aid of a single notecard.There was a Q&A afterwards and naturally people asked plenty of asinine questions, all of which she answered with grace and humor. One guy asked, "If Obama is elected, how long do you think it will be before there's an attempt made on his life?" There was a general hmmph of disdain from the rest of the theater as Ms. Power answered (paraphrasing here), "The concise answer to that is, I don't know."As for the Pulitzer, she very candidly told one audience member that she believes the reason she won is that the judges probably felt like they were "doing something" positive just by giving the award and thus raising people's awareness that genocide is still happening. A Problem from Hell was rejected by something like twenty-two publishers.I have a copy of A Problem from Hell, but I probably wouldn't have asked her to sign it even if I had brought it with me. Whenever I meet an author, even if it's an author I haven't read yet (and thus, haven't had the chance to become speechless with awe over), I always manage to say something stupid. (This goes for musicians, too, which is part of why I didn't stick around after the Elbow show even though I'd brought one of their CDs with me.) I've gotten to the point where I'd rather just avoid any opportunity to put my foot in my mouth.Galway is a great city for festivals in general--the Arts festival program is being launched tonight. Loads of plays, concerts, and art the last two weeks of July!
More on travel-writing (this is a long one)
This morning my sister pointed me to a very interesting feature article on a confessional memoir by a Lonely Planet researcher called Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? People are asking questions about how thoroughly (and ethically) the guidebooks they use are actually researched, and rightly so. Apparently this writer accepted lots of freebies and engaged in plenty of drugs and sex along the way, and while it's safe to say most guidebook writers are far more responsible than this guy was, there is a great deal of truth in some of the things he's saying. This, for example (from the WaPo article, not the memoir itself), is 100% true:[Kohnstamm] says he's being criticized because he revealed guidebooks' dirty little secret: Authors can't get to every place they're expected to review because publishers don't give them enough time or money to do the job properly. So, he says, he was forced to do a "mosaic job," relying in some cases on information from local contacts, fellow travelers and the Internet.Even the most responsible guidebook writer has to resort to these tactics. I worked really hard on Moon Ireland, but I still had to rely on secondhand information far more often than I was comfortable with. I'll elaborate.First of all, here's the number 1 rule of guidebook-writing: don't expect to make any money. You will subsist and that is all. Number 2: taking freebies is unacceptable. I had to accept comps everywhere I went while I was researching Hanging Out in Ireland back in college, because they gave us all of $3500 to research half the country (originally the fee was going to be $2500, but my co-writer held out for more money. Thank goodness for Tom, who was older than I was and far more sensible). My editors encouraged us to accept freebies because otherwise we'd run out of money after two weeks and we were there for five to seven (only five, in my case--can you imagine covering half of Ireland in five weeks? They told me I'd have to do some fudging. Yes, my own editors told me to cut corners.) This was a shoestring guide on a shoestring budget.Even putting that question of ethics aside, accepting a free meal, room, or tour will not give you an accurate idea of the level of service a typical tourist will receive. You don't want to say "yeah, this place is great!", when the owner is actually not a nice person at all, but was only kissing your butt because you're a guidebook writer.How do I know this? I've admitted I accepted freebies from hostels and restaurants every place I went for Hanging Out, but that's not how I know. In May 2006 I visited--or attempted to visit--a very upscale B&B (with its own gardens open to the public) off the Ring of Kerry, and was shooed away by the owner, who is hands down the meanest person I have ever encountered in Ireland (though incidentally, she is not Irish). There had been a storm the night before, and the garden was closed because of damages. There was a huge sign saying so, but the gate to the house was open. I drove through the gate and was met on the road by this nasty woman, who demanded I get off her property even when I tried to explain that I was writing for a guidebook and was interested in the B&B. I don't think she even heard what I was saying, she just kept snarling that the B&B was fully booked and to get out immediately. Let me impress upon you (as if I haven't already): this woman's behavior was HORRIBLE and I would discourage anyone from staying at that B&B no matter how luxurious it might be. So imagine my disgust when I opened Lucinda O'Sullivan's guide to Irish B&Bs and noticed she'd written about just how lovely and kind the proprietor is. Someday I'm going to write Lucinda O'Sullivan and tell her how disappointed I am in her book. (If anyone is interested in knowing which B&B I am talking about, please feel free to email me. I just don't want to mention it by name and get a pile of angry emails over it.)Out of necessity, I was doing much of my research during low season, when many B&Bs and restaurants were closed, only open weekends, or whatever. Say I stopped on a weekday night in February at a certain B&B, and the proprietor heartily recommended a restaurant in town. I got to the restaurant and found it was only open on weekends until after Easter. So instead, I had pub grub for dinner--adequate, nothing to write home about--and both the pub ('steaks, seafood, and paninis, gets the job done') and the restaurant ('run by an Irishman and his French wife, Continental cuisine, much loved by locals') would get write-ups. Other times I could only budget one night in a certain town, but I might need to write up five accommodations. How could I possibly do this without spending five nights in this town? I couldn't, of course. I might just stop by and have a chat with the proprietor (which would usually turn into a two-hour gab because the lady would be very eager to impress me, so I didn't do this too often because it would eat into my sightseeing time too much--see, I couldn't stop by and ask to take a look around without telling them I was writing a guidebook); or, more often, I might hear of a good B&B from other travelers, or other guidebooks, or Trip Advisor, and do as much internet research as I could to be reasonably certain the accommodation was worth recommending. Then I pledged to visit the place and stay there myself for the second edition. That was the absolute best I could do under the time and financial constraints. I'm not happy about it, but at least I know that, since I'm the sole author of Moon Ireland, I can make sure all the info in the new edition is gathered firsthand. I'm going to go through the whole book before the revision process starts and highlight every pub, restaurant, and B&B I need to visit, and then I'm going to do it. This is a big part of why I think the Moon guides are so great--they're written by only one person, or a team of two, and I believe that higher level of personal responsibility ultimately leads to a more reliable guidebook. Lonely Planet is generally my go-to guide for other locations, but it does bug me sometimes that they don't delete/update write-ups of accommodations and restaurants that have closed (or moved to another location) years ago.According to this WaPo article, Moon researchers get above-average advances, and I believe it. Even though I lost money doing this guidebook (for Ireland is the second-most expensive country in Europe), I couldn't have reasonably expected any more than they gave me--after all, guidebooks have an awfully short shelf life. Mine has been out one year, and already I've found several restaurants that have closed in Galway City alone. It's not an old guidebook, but it's already out of date (come to think of it, these books are out of date even before they're published). When I'm in the travel section at Borders looking to plan my next vacation, I always look at the pub dates on the guidebooks I have to choose from. If I were a tourist looking for an Ireland guidebook, I might pick up a 2008 edition of some other guidebook instead of Moon Ireland. (Even so, the 2008 guidebooks are the product of research done in 2006 or early 2007.) What I'm trying to say is, I don't even think I'm going to earn out on the advance Avalon gave me. The pay is tight because the operation doesn't float if they pay you a liveable wage.Tourists should keep all this in mind. But know this: we travel writers may not be perfect, but we're travelers just like you, so we understand how important a reliable guidebook is in making your vacation a happy one.
a recipe for Chai tea
Rural Cavan seems like the last place you'd expect to find a Tibetan Buddhist retreat, doesn't it? Jampa Ling is located in a Georgian mansion outside the village of Bawnboy, not too far from the Northern border, and my two days there were a highlight of my spring '06 research trip for Moon Ireland. Some folks pay for room and board and others volunteer their time (and some work and make a donation), and there are regular prayer-times and some of the most delicious homecooked vegetarian food I've ever had. I met a lovely guy named David who made chai for us all, and was kind enough to provide me with the recipe. Once you've made chai from scratch you'll never want to go back to teabags.Ideally you'd have a mortar and pestle to crush the ginger and cardamom seeds, as well as a strainer. Quantities of most ingredients are to taste.
Cleansing Chai Tea3 sticks of cinnamon3 whole clovesginger, crushedcardamom seeds, broken openfennelnatural sweetener (raw sugar or agave)non-dairy milk (optional)Add spices to water in a saucepan and slow-boil for twenty minutes or more. If you're going to add milk afterwards, let the tea come to a boil two or three times before straining so that the flavor holds up against the milk. Pour mixture through strainer into teacups and add sugar to sweeten.
(Note: this recipe was veganized on August 19, 2013.)
Two Days in Dublin
Brendan and I went to Dublin for a couple of days to see Elbow at Vicar Street Monday night. The concert was fantastic. I've heard it said more than once that the true test of a band's talent is if they sound even better live than they do on the album, and this was definitely the case. I'll write more about Elbow later though. Here is another little photo essay from the last couple days.
(You know how much I usually deplore this sort of couple-y smugness, but I think the artistic value of this shot makes it worth including.)
Brendan and Diarmuid after lunch at The Bank on Dame Street. Probably the best gastropub in Dublin--food, service, and original nouveau decor all awesome.
Shitmonkey: the only toy Diarmuid and his brother Donnacha ever had, apart from a Lego set.
And here are some shots taken from the balcony at the Elbow concert:
more about Waterford
Towards the end of our holiday weekend in Carrick-on-Suir Brendan and I went to Tramore for the afternoon, and I snapped this photo (he's a teapot, see?) before my camera battery died. I wish I had gotten a shot of the ferris wheel, which we later rode for €3 each (and I think we only went around three times, but it was still worth it).As you can see, Tramore is on the Waterford coast, eight miles south-west of Waterford City. I didn't write it up in the Moon guidebook because I was initially put off by the rather tacky seaside amusements--a large arcade and an amusement park with enough rides to keep the kiddies entertained the whole day through. Tramore feels like the Irish version of Coney Island. While you're on vacation, I thought, why go to a place that feels so much like an American carnival? You get enough hot dogs and spinning teacup rides at home, right? But that's exactly why I enjoyed myself so much, when I actually took the time to see Tramore properly. The sea views were lovely, and being able to look out over the ocean from the top of the ferris wheel made us a really nice memory. I have learned this lesson several times since publishing Moon Ireland: ultimately I'm not doing my readers any great service by making snap judgments. They might be missing out on something cool because I never took the time to investigate it in the first place. I may know Ireland pretty well, but there's so much I haven't seen or experienced yet. I'm looking forward to working on the second edition.
Mahon Falls, take 2
I finally signed up for a YouTube account so I could upload the video I mentioned in my last post. (The quality is much better when I play it on Quicktime. Boo.)
Holiday weekend #2
Let me tell you something about Waterford: if you go down there only to visit the crystal factory, you really ought to be nettle-whipped. The mountains, country roads, and sea views are so, so lovely! (And much of that crystal is now so, so produced in Turkey.)Ponies in a pasture on the River Suir, just outside the town of Carrick-on-Suir (just before the one on the right tried to chomp on Brendan's arm):
(Carrick-on-Suir is technically in Tipperary, but people have Waterford tags on their cars and root for Waterford sports teams, and the 'Welcome to Waterford' sign is within spitting distance of Brendan's house. Hence my initial confusion over which county Brendan is actually from! Tipperary is also a county of beautiful mountain and pastoral views--see the post before last.)Until this past weekend, Ardmore was my hands-down favorite place in County Waterford, but check out my pics of Mahon Falls in the Comeragh Mountains:
(I also took a panoramic video, but I think it's too large to upload. Drat!) It was awfully cold and blustery up there, but those storm-clouds in the second photo held off until we were back in the car. There were all these grizzled sheep moseying up and down the sheerest mountain-faces, the waterfall was awesome, and there weren't too many other people. After our walk to the falls we kept driving, and the road was spanned by the most complete rainbow I've ever seen.
You could actually see where the rainbow ended on both sides.Here are some close-ups of the Harry Clarke windows at the Church of Saints Quan and Broghan, Clonea:
I'm not sure which saint this is, but here's a detail from the bottom of the same window:
Actually, there seems to be some uncertainty as to whether the later windows were done by Harry Clarke or Evie Hone. A Google search gave me no answers, and I've left my Harry Clarke book at home. I must look it up at the library. Anyways, from the earlier set (signed J.J. Clarke & Sons), here is St. Brendan the Navigator, along with a picture of a certain name- and beardsake:
...looking slightly less holy.After we visited the church in Clonea, we went to Mothel holy well where the locals walk through the stream seven times on pattern days.
(The well is at the roots of that tree. Notice the sign--apparently the water used to be known for its purity, but it's now contaminated.) There's a small dolmen in the field beyond.
Getting well off the tourist track feels great, doesn't it?
Couldn't Ask for Better Neighbors
I'm back in Tipperary this weekend, at Brendan's parents' house in Carrick-on-Suir for Easter. Here is a view from their backyard:
Now, living right beside a graveyard might creep some people out--but the way I see it, there are bodies buried everywhere. These are just the ones that are marked.Last night we were walking into town (so I could sample the spudballs, a local delicacy; alas, there were no more to be had at Fats Quann's takeaway), and as we were passing the graveyard Brendan pointed out the eerie blue lights inside--the same solar-powered lights you can get for your front walk, which charge all day and illuminate the sidewalk at night. If there were any honest-to-God orbs floating about you'd hardly have noticed them.You expect this kind of elaborate grave-tending in a predominantly Catholic country, but I still wonder at the time and expense behind all those rotting wreaths, water-logged flower-globes, sentimental plaques (which often include a photograph of the deceased) and battery-operated candles. It seems like a significant part of Irish culture--something that, unlike the rural custom of forming a digging party when a neighbor passes on, won't be dying out any time soon.(Blame Seanan for the offaly bad pun.)
holiday weekend in Tipperary
Seeing as I can't stand drunken rowdies and all the noise, stench, broken glass, and damage to public property they leave in their wake, I make a point of getting far away from city pubs on St. Paddy's Day. This year, my friend Seanan was kind enough to invite me and several other friends down to Tipperary for the holiday weekend, and we had a couple of nice long walks in the Silvermines and around Lough Derg (on the Clare side, just north of Killaloe). Seanan also cooked the most amazing dinner ever and we were all very jolly.I didn't bring a camera on this recent Silvermines walk, but here are a couple of photos from the first walk back in October:
Looks utterly peaceful, right? Well...our walk this past weekend was downright creepy. Seanan's mom dropped the four of us (Seanan, me, Charlene, and Clare) off and would meet us back in the parking lot in two hours. Maybe 45 minutes into our walk, we came upon an SUV on the road (which was barricaded at the entrance--these roads were meant to be vehicle-free, for the most part). Two young men emerged from the brush with an empty wheelbarrow, and while we were still a good bit off they put the wheelbarrow into the back and drove off. We were unnerved by this--what could they have dumped out here?--and after poking around in the brush and finding no corpses or broken-down washing machines we decided to turn around so we wouldn't run into those shady dudes again (and we had to turn around eventually anyway). We were joking that they might come back and kill us all for being witnesses...and then we heard the SUV
approaching again! It was so quiet we could hear it coming from a ways off, and I decided to jump into the brush and hide behind a tree. I got made fun of afterwards, of course, and it was pointed out that if they had been intending to gun us down surely they'd have noticed there were only three out of four on the road.But that wasn't even the creepy part. On our way down the hill to meet Seanan's mom, we leaned over a stone bridge perched maybe twenty feet over a little stream, and what do you suppose we saw? A dead dog. It was huge and black and its fur was slick with rainwater. We couldn't see its head or rear because they were covered by one of 
those industrial-strength garbage bags. Why in God's name didn't its owner give it a proper burial? It led us to wonder if the poor black dog had met its end by unnatural means. I wanted to call someone--at home you'd call the public works people and someone would come by in a yellow truck to pick it up--but Seanan said it was unlikely anyone would do anything about it. The whole situation was odd, and vaguely sinister. I've seen plenty of dead animals before--sheep carcasses on the beach, having fallen off the cliff above; and all the bodies of birds, seals, and lizards forever proving Darwin right on the Galapagos--but in those cases there wasn't anything more troubling than 'survival of the fittest' at work. Somebody put that dead dog in the stream. It was premeditated. It freaked me out.Other than that--hey! We had a lovely weekend.