In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .
This is my first missive from Ireland and it cannot hope to be comprehensive. I’ll just confine myself to some facts and a bit of speculation and fill you in on my adventures as they happen. And since doing little things in Ireland, like driving a car or taking a shower, are adventures, you may get lots of letters.
Anyway. We flew in on Dec. 28th and I have to admit I was a bit tense on the plane. Post Sept.11, airline passengers are in a state of heightened awareness vis-à-vis their fellow passengers. We’re all ready to jump on anyone who pulls a box cutter or tries to set fire to his shoes. So flying has become an exercise in mass mutual suspicion: "Hey, that guy asked the flight attendant for a SECOND bag of peanuts! Get him!" But we made it without incident and arrived in Shannon airport in the east of Ireland around 9:30 pm.
Now came my second source of tension. See, I’m here on an exchange for six months, but the exchange is not exactly the most well-defined visitor status. I was worried that Immigration might give me trouble. All we needed was some red-haired custom's agent focussing his watery blues on me and sneering, "Go on and pull the other one then" before ripping up my passport and telling us to hop the next flight off his precious island.
The closer we got to the exit from the baggage area the more I began to tense up. Things were not helped by the huge coloured signs over the exit that force passengers to make one of three choices: there are different exits, it turns out, for people with EU passports; people without EU passports with something to declare; and people without EU passports with nothing to declare. We obviously fit into one of the latter categories, but which one? We do have to declare that I’m going to be working, though not being paid, for six months in this country. But perhaps the declaration aspect is solely for restricted goods being brought across the border. We did have a bottle of gin that we bought in the duty free. Is that what they want?
We stood there looking at the ominous signs for so long that a guard noticed us. Before I could say anything, Karen held up the duty free bag and asked him, "Do we have to declare this?" No, we’re told, we should just go through the "no declaration" chute. So off we went.
Now, I’m clutching passports, a letter from the university, proof of medical insurance, everything, as we proceed through this exit. We go a few feet when we realise that the three different exits chutes are each about five feet long and lead to the same room. There are no separate customs and immigrations officers in that room. There isn’t anyone. We walk a few more feet and then go out another door, just one, and we realise that we’re in the country. We’ve cleared customs. Immigration control in this airport, then, means that you choose a coloured door that leads you to the same room as all the other doors, and from that empty room you all walk out the same door into Ireland.
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t seem too efficient to me. This doesn’t seem like rigorous enforcement of national security. I’m going to guess that the reason the Americans haven’t found Osama Bin Laden is because he hopped a plane to Shannon airport, picked a coloured door, and walked undisturbed into a new life in the land of peat and Guinness. He’s Paddy O’Laden now, quaffing pints at the local with the lads. He’s on the dole. He may even be a choir boy at the local cathedral.
Waiting on the other side of this exercise in fascistic power was Tony, our cab driver. He’s a charming older man who drives a van that is entirely decorated to be a moving billboard for Becks Beer. So figure, I’m in the country for ten minutes, and then I’m bombing through the landscape in what looks like a beer bottle on wheels. Foreshadowing?
Now, the rest of the day was a blur, as were the next few thanks to jet lag, so let me switch now to some general observations about the country and its people…
What do the Irish like to do for fun? Well, if you believe the guidebooks, they like to sit in cosy pubs, nursing a pint, while fiddlers and dulcimer players noodle away at traditional airs in the corner. That may be true. .I don’t know. I haven’t experienced it yet because we live in a godforsaken suburb and the closest we come to a pub is watching East Enders. But if it is true it is a less popular activity than littering, building stone walls, and vandalism, the top three leisure pursuits of the Irish.
Let’s start with littering. Littering has been unfashionable and profoundly illegal in Canada and the States since the late 1960s when a series of government-initiated programs and ad campaigns drew people’s attention to the detritus lying by the highways and blowing around their public streets. There does not seem to have been a similar movement in Ireland. The famous Irish countryside and its quaint towns are awash in litter, and I don’t mean just a ciggy butt or two: newspapers, beer cans, beer bottles, diapers, wrappers, car mirrors, and parts of machines all comprise the litter you’ll find in the parks, throughout the countryside, on the lawns of even upscale houses, on the city walks, and on every street corner. I have come to the conclusion that this cannot be simple laziness or disregard. It’s too systematic. The Irish obviously appreciate and encourage litter.
"Ah, that’s a lovely bit of litter, that is," says Seamus. "Not bad," replies Owen, "but we haven’t seen a real litter around the town since the passing of Tom O’Dougall. Now there was a lad with a hand to the litter, God measure him. I once saw him do an entire street corner with pack of butts and the Irish Times. A masterpiece, that was. No wonder the lassies went for him." "They did at that," says Seamus, "The Lothario of Litter we called him down at the local. They say he was the best litterer since the Independence. But come on, Owen, give us the song."
In ancient times the poets say that Ireland was clean
Her cities were immaculate, her countryside pristine
So God made Tom O’Dougall, to set the island right
A better man at littering has never seen the light.
(Chorus:)
He littered far he littered wide, he littered in between
He littered on the highway, he littered field and stream.
That’s mighty Tom O’Dougall, whose fame shall never pass,
As long as there is litter, as long as there is trash.
As a tiny baby, Tom threw his food about… etc.
Irish travel guides, not the ones we tourists buy but the ones designed for the Irish themselves, feature famous litter sites around the country. Couples will pile their children into their cars and go on litter tours on the weekend, dutifully propping their little ones in front of the Garbage of Galway, the Crap of Caniegh, or the Trash of Tralee for a photograph.
Another thing that the Irish love to do is build stone walls. They will build a stone wall around anything, at any time. There are stretches of Connemara that beggar the mind with their vistas of stone walls. And many of these walls are not surrounding anything. The land of Connemara is poor for farming. No plants will grow on much of it and it’s no place to rear an animal. The stone walls, then, surround other stones. To protect them from what? Yet other stones? Stone thieves? And some of these stone walls surround patches of stone that are the size of a mouse pad. The walls are thicker than the plot of stone that they ostensibly protect. The introduction of wooden fences would free up thousands of acres of land in this country that are now buried under stone walls.
This fetish for building stone walls may, in part, explain why the Irish were so susceptible to invasion from Normans, Vikings, and the English. Imagine in the tenth century:
Monk: Father! Father! The Vikings are coming up the river with swords and axes! What will we do?
Abbot: Quick! Let us build a stone wall around them.
You think I’m joking, but no. We took a trip to Clocmanoise, one of the ancient religious centres of the country. It was founded in the sixth century. Now this place is beautiful, really spectacular, but it’s not surprising that it’s a ruin. It was invaded and destroyed something like 50 times by various forces. After each invasion (except the last by the English) the monks rebuilt on the same sacred site. Now, when they rebuilt, did they include turrets, gun towers, moats, draw bridges, or catapults? No. They included stone walls. Their only concession to the invaders who came calling every second week was round towers. These are, essentially, really tall, round, stone walls with doors in them some eight feet off the ground. The idea was to scrabble up a ladder into that door when the Vikings showed up, then pull the ladder in after you. Not to worry, thought the monks, the stone walls will protect us. The Vikings will never make a ladder, or knock down the tower, or build a fire around us, or simply camp out and wait for us to starve to death. No sir, they’ll be so impressed by our stone walls they’ll run away.
There aren’t a lot of monks left.
As for vandalism, I was warned by one and all not to leave the car downtown over night. It would be reduced to rubble, apparently, but the morning. After digesting this news, I began to notice a three strange things. First, almost every building and fence in an Irish city centre is topped with barbed wire or some other anti-personnel barrier. Second, a lot of things seem broken. Fences are knocked over (but not stone walls), cans are tipped, little things are smashed.
The third thing needs a bit of explaining. The other morning I went for a morning walk west of this housing development, through the next housing development, and into fields and forest that have a series of pedestrian-friendly paths running through them. I rambled through the countryside, admiring the litter, until I came upon a strange object. Imagine a log, about six feet long and a foot and a half in diameter, made of concrete, covered in thick orange plastic, lying on its side on a cement platform. What the hell? Then I looked down the path and saw a series of these bizarre orange logs. Were these markers for the paths? A conceptual art piece? The remains of an ancient plastic-covered concrete log castle?
Then it hit me. These were benches. Incredibly uncomfortable but vandal-proof benches. Even in the country side, vandalism is such a problem that old folks have a choice between perching on concrete logs or not sitting at all. A real bench would be reduced to, uh, litter in a matter of hours by roving bands of Viking invasion enthusiasts.
And what about Irish food? Well, let me tell you about a popular TV ad in Ireland. A good-looking dude comes in out of a rainy night from walking his dog. He’s wet, he’s cold, and he’s cranky. When the dog shakes water all over the hallway, he gets crankier. Now, because this is a TV commercial, we know what’s going to happen next, right? This dude will find some service or product waiting for him at home that will restore his emotional equilibrium.
Now, let’s think about this. If it was you, what would work? Being greeting by a scantily clad supermodel with an oral fixation? Finding someone has installed a big-screen TV in your living room along with a minifridge full of beer that is within reach of the recliner (but you don’t have to reach for a beer cause the scantily clad supermodel with an oral fixation will do that for you)? Something like that. But not here. Instead, the guy throws off his wet coat and heads into the kitchen. He makes toast, dumps a can of beans into a pot and heats them, them dumps the beans on the toast and sits down at the table. Before he starts scarfing, he dribbles a bunch of HP Sauce on top of the beans. As he lifts the first forkful towards his mouth, his face takes on a near orgasmic glow. He’s happy. As he begins eating, the advertising copy runs across the screen: "HP loves beans on toast." End of commercial.
Now, excuse me. Am I missing something here? Is there some arcane pleasure to be found in beans on toast that the Irish have been hiding from the rest of the world? Is it, in fact, the heroin of cuisine? Or are these people just a little too easy to please?
I shall find out, and report back to you.
Your man in Galway.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Ireland: drinking
In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .
At the end of my last letter I left you with a question, do the Irish drink? Offhand this seems as sensible as asking, "Do the French walk around wearing stupid berets and carrying baguettes under their arms?" Hello. Some things are self-evident. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Irish are coolie monsters of the first order. And yet I spent over a month in this country before seeing any evidence of this apparently uncontestable fact, and even then the evidence was indirect. Let me explain how I finally deduced that yes, indeed, the Irish do drink.
Think about how the average working day is structured. Most of us get up well before 8 and are in our offices by 9, leaving for home between 4 and 5. On the weekends we may sleep in a bit, but if you’re like me you’re just as likely to get up early on a bright Saturday morning so that you can do a bit of exercise, start on some big household chores, or nip off to the bakery to grab something nice for the family breakfast. In the evenings we kick back.
So the day is divided into morning, afternoon, and evening, with the productive hours being in the first two of those divisions.
Simple, right? The way things should be.
Not in Ireland. I noticed this on the second or third day we were here. I got up early and went for a walk. Even though it was a sparkling morning and a holiday, there was no one in sight. Not a soul. No joggers, no early shoppers, no cars, nothing. It was eerie. I felt like I had accidentally entered a Stephen King novel or a sci-fi movie about the last man on earth. Around noon I drove to the nearest supermarket just to see if there were, in fact, human beings in Ireland. It was open, but just barely. There were no customers and only a bare-bones staff. Odd. By four o’clock the same store was rocking and the streets were filled with people and cars. The rush continued, indeed increased, until well into the evening.
Okay, now let’s throw in another oddity. Most restaurants here advertise an all-day breakfast. Now you can find that in Canada too, but here it is the norm. And the Irish breakfast is something to see: a greasy fried egg, served with thick greasy bacon, several greasy sausages, greasy beans, greasy toast, greasy potatoes, and a side helping of grease. How anyone can even look at this meal is beyond me, but here you see people scarfing this artery-clogging menu all day long and they are especially eager, it seems, to order it some time after noon and to accompany it with a dozen cigarettes.
Put the two things together, the odd activity hours and the breakfast, and you come to a fact that has to be acknowledged if you are to understand Ireland: the working day is built around the hangover. Every morning of the week the majority of Irish people are hungover. And when you’re hungover, what do you want to do? Sleep in, and then suffer in silence until you have enough energy to eat a really greasy breakfast so you can feel human enough to go out drinking again and secure another hangover.
A further piece of inductive evidence that allowed me to conclude that the Irish drink is young men’s fashion. Irish men between the ages of 18 and 25 find it dashing to wear a black eye at least once a month. Bank tellers, postal workers, butchers, and yoga instructors all sport a shiner every couple of weeks. They purchase these snappy accessories from their drunken friends in bars. No one mentions them; no one notices them except to admire them: "Hey, Liam, nice eye there lad. Wish I had one."
Now, casually giving someone a black eye might be considered a form of human vandalism. And, as you will recall from an earlier letter, the Irish do love their vandalism. If Ireland ever hosts the summer Olympics it will, no doubt, be a demonstration sport. But my diligent research has determined that the Irish do not go out and break things every day. No. They get drunk every evening and then break things. Indeed all Irish crime, as far as I can tell, is attributable to drunkenness. The local community paper contains a page of "Court notices," criminal cases that are being tried that week. In last week’s issue there were six cases. In five of them the defendants were described as "very drunk" at the time the crime was committed. And what were those crimes? In one case, a "very drunk" man was chasing some youth around Galway’s central square while swinging a shovel and screaming that he was going to cut off their heads. In another case a group of "very drunk" lads decided, in the middle of their drinking, that they missed their buddies who had been arrested the night before for (can you believe it?) public drunkenness. So these yobos stumbled down to the police department and demanded to see their friends. When the police refused to cooperative, the lads broke a window in the police station. Presto! They got to see their friends. And in one other case, a "very drunk" man was kicked out of an Irish house party for being too drunk (!!) so he went into the driveway and head-butted a van.
Not only is all crime Ireland attributable to drink, so is all illness and injury. A few weeks ago Max, our youngest, was complaining of stomach problems. It turns out he was horrendously constipated. How could that happen with the healthful Irish diet? Maybe he got a bad cream-eggs-n-chips combo. Anyway, we were so worried we took him to the hospital. An interesting experience. At 11pm on a Wednesday, every person checking into the emergency ward and every person waiting for someone who had checked in was massively drunk. I’m not talking a little buzzed, here: I mean polluted. Tanked. Stinko. The staff were, not surprisingly, pretty unsympathetic: "Here comes another drunk who fell down some stairs; here’s a drunk who set fire to his pants; here’s a guy who stared a fight with a post box and lost. Let’s have some tea."
The combination of hangovers, drinking, and drunken barbarity means that the Irish day can be divided into three sections. What we would call morning and early afternoon is simply hangover time. During this period people move as little as possible. Clerks in stores are surly or asleep.. The streets are near empty. From about 4 in the afternoon until around 11pm is happy hour. This is the time when people have started to drink and are, therefore, no longer hungover, or are eager to start drinking and are therefore experiencing a burst of energy. At four o’clock the streets are filled with people rushing to get drinks or complete some chore so they can get to their drinks. The pubs start to fill up and will reach maximum capacity around 11pm. Eyes sparkle, conversation flows faster than Guinness, musicians begin to play, cigarettes are inhaled, and life is good. Now, after 11 is the hour of the louts. At this point the lads who have drunk too much begin to a) vandalize things b) injure themselves and go the hospital c) decorate their friends’ eyes d) swing shovels about and threaten to decapitate youths e) try to visit their friends at the police station f) head-butt vans.
To recap: Canadians have morning, afternoon, and evening. The Irish have hangover time, happy hour, and the hour of the louts.
My theory helps explain the apparent lethargy and inefficiency one sees in day-to-day Irish life. Let me give you an example. One Monday Karen and I pulled into the parking lot at the university to be confronted with a burned-out car. Now I mean completely gutted: the windows had shattered out, the interior was charred, pieces of trim had melted. It must have been one hell of a hot fire in that little car. The wreck was neatly parked. So here we have this wreck sitting in the university parking lot, in front of the university’s most famous building, and does anyone notice it? Does anyone stop to look at it? No. They all walk by as if it wasn’t there. Okay. Maybe they’ve seen burned-out cars before, but surely this car belonged to someone. Shouldn’t the police be notified? Or the insurance company? At the very least wouldn’t the university want this eyesore off its property? Apparently not. It’s been there for three weeks and shows no signs of being disturbed, much less moved.
Similarly, a few days after we arrived in Ireland a stop light at a major intersection near Max’s school went out. A month later, has it been repaired? No sir, nor does there seem to be any rush to do so.
Also, near the house we’re in there is a construction site. They are supposed to be building a new road. This road is, as far as I can figure, about 20 feet long. Not a major project. Every morning people arrive at the site and a few desultory noises are heard, but the road is not getting an inch longer.
And finally, a water main has burst under a road beside the supermarket where we do most of our shopping. This is a busy road and the burst pipe has created all sorts of problems. There’s a big hole in the middle of one lane and water is gushing out all over the road at an impressive rate. Some A-Type personality has put a traffic cone beside the hole so motorists don’t drive into it, but has the pipe been fixed? No sir. It’s been flooding the street for a week now.
Why all this indolence? It’s obvious: because work hours coincide with hangover time. The university groundskeeper probably sees the burned-out car ever day and realizes he should do something about it, but Jaysus Mother and Joseph, doesn’t his head hurt? A few too many pints last night so can’t you let a man just suffer in peace? The car will no go anywhere. Leave it be till tomorrow.
By four o’clock, when he is just feeling human enough to make a phone call and get the car towed, it’s quitting time and the pubs are beckoning. The same goes for the guys who repair the stop lights and build the roads. They show up to work dutifully each morning, then stand around moaning and comparing headaches until quitting time. If you wanted to make this country work you would start the workday at 4 o’clock. Tell everyone they couldn’t leave for the pub until the job was done and you’d see the most productive workforce in Europe. The Germans wouldn’t know what hit them. The car would be gone by 4:10. The stoplights fixed by 4:15, the road finished before 5, and the pipe plugged before dark.
Okay, but what about those famous Irish pubs where all this drinking takes place? What are they really like? I’m going to let you in on a sad secret. We were here for over a month before we got to see the inside of an Irish pub. How can that be? Because we live in a suburb. This suburb is so bizarre that I will dedicate an entire letter to describing it later, but for now let me explain that there is nothing around this house except more suburb. No stores, no shops, no library, no post office, and certainly no pubs. Back home in West Vancouver there is a Legion Hall at the end of my street. In other words, at home I can walk a few feet to a bar. Here, in Ireland, home of institutionalized alcoholism, I need to take a bus to get a drink. Go figure.
Anyway, this past weekend we decided to do it. We rented the kids a video ("Here boys, it’s, uh, something with animals. Uh, Reservoir Dogs. I think it’s Disney…") and took a bus downtown. Saturday evening, happy hour, the city center was absolutely jumping. We bypassed the tourist trap pubs to hit the recommended Roisin Dubh.
Now let’s stop there for a minute. What the hell does Roisin Dubh mean? I’ve got no idea. It’s Irish, one of the most perplexing languages ever spoken by man. Figure, I’m no linguist, but in my lifetime I have studied some languages: I’ve had classes in Latin, French, German, and Japanese. I was raised by people who spoke Lithuanian, a close cousin of Sanskrit. I’ve been close with people who speak Italian, Greek, Portuguese, and Cantonese. So I can at least recognize most of the Indo-European, and some Oriental, languages and even, in a pinch, figure out a word or two of them from various cognates. But Irish? No goddam way. A bizarre, consonant-rich language with a lilting rhythm, it sounds like someone trying to sing while gagging and spitting. It sounds like the Muppets’ Swedish Chef choking to death on an artichoke heart. And in written form it is only slightly more decipherable than Arabic. To give you a small example, the first time I was in an Irish restaurant I went to the washroom. What I found was a door marked "Mna." Mna? Must mean Man, right? Some Irish guy, in a hangover, slapped the letters on the door in the wrong order. Why Man instead of Men? Well, maybe it’s a really small bathroom. Anyway, I swung open the door and faced a surprised Mrs. Mna. That’s right, mna means women, while fir (pronounced feer) means men. Could you have guessed that?
Anyway, Roisin Dubh is Irish for something, maybe "happy hour," or "hangover cure," or "black eyes guaranteed." Whatever, it’s a low, dark, wooden trimmed, eccentric space of nooks, shelves, semi-private rooms, cigarette smoke, and spilled drinks. The clientele is eclectic in age and style, though leaning towards the bohemian. Everyone is drinking Guinness, everyone is smoking, everyone is talking. God, can these people talk. They just open their mouths and go. It’s astounding. We claimed some stools and I went to the bar for pints. Now, we all know that Guinness is not unlike alcoholic porridge and that it takes a while to pour, but I didn’t realize how long until I saw a pro do it. He fills the pint glass to within an inch of the top, then puts it aside and goes about some other business. Fifteen minutes later the drink has settled enough that it can now be topped up and he finishes pouring. So getting a beer at an Irish bar is not a speedy process. Bring a book. But if the barkeep rushes it, and the head on the drink is not just right, the clientele will tear a strip off him and refuse to accept the drink. So precise is the art of putting Guinness into a glass that when we asked our neighbors for the name of a good pub or two, they would always follow their recommendations with the supreme compliment, "They pour a good pint." An odd concept for a Canadian to get his mind around. What would be a bad pint in Canada? Why are you pouring the damn thing anyway? Break the neck off the bottle and I’ll pour it straight down my throat while straining the broken glass through my teeth. I’m thirsty over here.
Now, we had come to the Roisin Dubh because it was famous for its traditional music. There was supposed to be a set at 6pm. But that’s 6pm Irish time, which means anytime between 4:30 and 8pm. We didn’t see any sort of musical activity until around 7 when it became apparent that a group of people who were sitting at one of the tables was the band. "Band" is perhaps not the right term because the musical organization is much more informal than that word implies. It was a, uh, free-form collective. As far as I can figure out, musicians promise to show up at the table sometime between 4:30 and 8 (that is, 6) on a given day. When enough have wandered in, they will begin to pull out their instruments and play a tune or two. As the evening progresses, more musicians will wander in and join the table until quitting time. So, depending on when you show up at the pub, you might see a duet or a small orchestra. The night we were there the band went from two to seven over a couple of hours.
Traditional Irish instruments include, as far as I can see, the mandolin, the banjo, and the bazouki. Huh? Why not castanets or alpen horns? Throw in an accordion and a fiddle and you’ve got all your basics covered. One musician will begin to pick out a melody on one of these traditional Irish instruments, then everyone will join in and they’ll play the thing for fifteen minutes. Then they’ll do it again with an identical sounding melody. "The Old Dun Cow" leads into "The Ballad of Tom O’Dougal" which leads into "The Mad Buck Goat." A song ends when one of the musicians gets too tired to play any more. And so it goes all night. It’s more than a bit repetitive. Bu that’s fine for the drunks that are trying to focus their eyes on the action. Irish-traditional-music-enthusiast drunks are a sentimental lot. Play the same melody a dozen times in a row and each time they’ll nod in recognition ("Ah, that’s ‘Lead Me No More to Tubber, For My Heart Has Fled to Gort’"), their eyes will swell with tears, and they’ll be sniffling wrecks when the tune finally ends. Start the exact same song again ("Ah, that’s ‘I Lost My Side Mirror in Ballinasloe’") and fresh tears will leak into Guinness foam.
Karen and I felt a bit out of place. But then a young man came up and started talking to me. Turns out he was one of my students. A minute later a colleague and his wife walked in. Ten minutes later we were deep into our third Guinness, blabbing like Irishmen with our friends, and begging the band to play "A Breakfast of Grease by the Cliffs of Moher."
It was a great night.
By the way, this question of the flexibility of Irish time applies only to human beings. Irish dogs are very punctual. I discovered this by first noticing all the small dogs that were walking around the cities and suburbs. Short-legged mutts, all well fed and usually collared, walk purposely all over the place in Ireland without a master in sight. People ignore these dogs as they go about their business and the dogs return the favor. If you do pay attention to an individual dog, it inevitably turns out to be submissive and friendly, but once you’re finished patting it, the dog will hop up and continue on its way, usually walking a bit faster for having wasted those precious seconds with you. Now, I figured this was my imagination. Dogs don’t have appointments. I was wrong. Figure, there’s one of these small dogs who hangs out just inside the university cafeteria. He lies on the entrance mat, or walks slowly between the tables, totally ignored by the students and staff. He’s there every day except Mondays. And, I noticed after a week or so, he’s never there before 11. Obviously he shows up just as the lunch hour is beginning hoping to cage a fry-n-cream-egg or two. But exactly how punctual Mr. Mutt is became apparent when I left his building yesterday morning. I walked out the doors at two minutes to 11. There, just rounding the corner of the library, came the dog at a measured pace. I stopped and watched him. He made his way between the lounging, smoking, cell-phone nattering students, a four-legged bundle of serious purpose, and went down the stairs to the cafeteria just as the clock struck 11.
If that dog ran this country, things would get done.
But perhaps not all the problems of Ireland can be attributed to the Irish fondness for drink. There is another reason that things don’t get done here: the Irish don’t complain. We were told that by our neighbors. See, we were over having a drink with the people on the other half of our duplex. Nice folk. We asked them about the barking dog. Immediately behind their walled-in yard is the walled-in yard of the people from one street down. These people have a psychotic German shepherd that they turn out into their completely cemented backyard to bark all day long, every day until about 11pm. Every goddam day. Everyone in the estate knows and hates this dog. Everyone in the estate has lost sleep, or has had a child lose sleep, because of this dog. The people who have the other side of the duplex with the dog owners have a baby that has probably never slept. So we asked our neighbors about it. "Hey," I asked innocently, "Has anyone ever asked the dog owners to silence their mutt?" After a moment of shocked silence our neighbors said, "Oh no, no, no, no, no. Couldn’t do that. No no no. We Irish aren’t complainers." Okay. "How long has this dog been barking," I asked. "Oh, about five years," was the answer.
Hello? If this was Canada, after the first week we would be over there politely pointing out that the dog was keeping our children awake. After the second week, we’d be back having a less polite discussion. End of week three, the police are called. End of week four, these inconsiderate yahoos find Fido has somehow lost his head. Here, five years without anyone saying a word. The people who share the duplex with the dog owners have put their house up for sale rather than complain. No joke. They haven’t had any offers.
So perhaps traffic lights don’t get fixed and water mains are allowed to gush onto road because, well, no one has thought it polite to mention these minor inconveniences to the municipality.
Mum: Dear, the potato waffles have caught on fire and it’s spread to the curry beans. I’m afraid the kitchen is all aflame.
Da: Oh my. Well, perhaps we better call the fire department.
Mum: Oh no no no no. We can’t be phoning them every time our house burns down, now can we? They’ll think we’re a bunch of whiners. Next thing you’ll want to call the police when people break into the house and beat us. Or the ambulance when you have a heart attack. What will the neighbors think? The fire will burn itself out when it runs out of fuel. It’s not a big house.
Da: You’re probably right. There’s no water anyway with the water main burst.
Mum: Now don’t start moaning about that again.
In the next installment: I meet the President of Ireland.
At the end of my last letter I left you with a question, do the Irish drink? Offhand this seems as sensible as asking, "Do the French walk around wearing stupid berets and carrying baguettes under their arms?" Hello. Some things are self-evident. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Irish are coolie monsters of the first order. And yet I spent over a month in this country before seeing any evidence of this apparently uncontestable fact, and even then the evidence was indirect. Let me explain how I finally deduced that yes, indeed, the Irish do drink.
Think about how the average working day is structured. Most of us get up well before 8 and are in our offices by 9, leaving for home between 4 and 5. On the weekends we may sleep in a bit, but if you’re like me you’re just as likely to get up early on a bright Saturday morning so that you can do a bit of exercise, start on some big household chores, or nip off to the bakery to grab something nice for the family breakfast. In the evenings we kick back.
So the day is divided into morning, afternoon, and evening, with the productive hours being in the first two of those divisions.
Simple, right? The way things should be.
Not in Ireland. I noticed this on the second or third day we were here. I got up early and went for a walk. Even though it was a sparkling morning and a holiday, there was no one in sight. Not a soul. No joggers, no early shoppers, no cars, nothing. It was eerie. I felt like I had accidentally entered a Stephen King novel or a sci-fi movie about the last man on earth. Around noon I drove to the nearest supermarket just to see if there were, in fact, human beings in Ireland. It was open, but just barely. There were no customers and only a bare-bones staff. Odd. By four o’clock the same store was rocking and the streets were filled with people and cars. The rush continued, indeed increased, until well into the evening.
Okay, now let’s throw in another oddity. Most restaurants here advertise an all-day breakfast. Now you can find that in Canada too, but here it is the norm. And the Irish breakfast is something to see: a greasy fried egg, served with thick greasy bacon, several greasy sausages, greasy beans, greasy toast, greasy potatoes, and a side helping of grease. How anyone can even look at this meal is beyond me, but here you see people scarfing this artery-clogging menu all day long and they are especially eager, it seems, to order it some time after noon and to accompany it with a dozen cigarettes.
Put the two things together, the odd activity hours and the breakfast, and you come to a fact that has to be acknowledged if you are to understand Ireland: the working day is built around the hangover. Every morning of the week the majority of Irish people are hungover. And when you’re hungover, what do you want to do? Sleep in, and then suffer in silence until you have enough energy to eat a really greasy breakfast so you can feel human enough to go out drinking again and secure another hangover.
A further piece of inductive evidence that allowed me to conclude that the Irish drink is young men’s fashion. Irish men between the ages of 18 and 25 find it dashing to wear a black eye at least once a month. Bank tellers, postal workers, butchers, and yoga instructors all sport a shiner every couple of weeks. They purchase these snappy accessories from their drunken friends in bars. No one mentions them; no one notices them except to admire them: "Hey, Liam, nice eye there lad. Wish I had one."
Now, casually giving someone a black eye might be considered a form of human vandalism. And, as you will recall from an earlier letter, the Irish do love their vandalism. If Ireland ever hosts the summer Olympics it will, no doubt, be a demonstration sport. But my diligent research has determined that the Irish do not go out and break things every day. No. They get drunk every evening and then break things. Indeed all Irish crime, as far as I can tell, is attributable to drunkenness. The local community paper contains a page of "Court notices," criminal cases that are being tried that week. In last week’s issue there were six cases. In five of them the defendants were described as "very drunk" at the time the crime was committed. And what were those crimes? In one case, a "very drunk" man was chasing some youth around Galway’s central square while swinging a shovel and screaming that he was going to cut off their heads. In another case a group of "very drunk" lads decided, in the middle of their drinking, that they missed their buddies who had been arrested the night before for (can you believe it?) public drunkenness. So these yobos stumbled down to the police department and demanded to see their friends. When the police refused to cooperative, the lads broke a window in the police station. Presto! They got to see their friends. And in one other case, a "very drunk" man was kicked out of an Irish house party for being too drunk (!!) so he went into the driveway and head-butted a van.
Not only is all crime Ireland attributable to drink, so is all illness and injury. A few weeks ago Max, our youngest, was complaining of stomach problems. It turns out he was horrendously constipated. How could that happen with the healthful Irish diet? Maybe he got a bad cream-eggs-n-chips combo. Anyway, we were so worried we took him to the hospital. An interesting experience. At 11pm on a Wednesday, every person checking into the emergency ward and every person waiting for someone who had checked in was massively drunk. I’m not talking a little buzzed, here: I mean polluted. Tanked. Stinko. The staff were, not surprisingly, pretty unsympathetic: "Here comes another drunk who fell down some stairs; here’s a drunk who set fire to his pants; here’s a guy who stared a fight with a post box and lost. Let’s have some tea."
The combination of hangovers, drinking, and drunken barbarity means that the Irish day can be divided into three sections. What we would call morning and early afternoon is simply hangover time. During this period people move as little as possible. Clerks in stores are surly or asleep.. The streets are near empty. From about 4 in the afternoon until around 11pm is happy hour. This is the time when people have started to drink and are, therefore, no longer hungover, or are eager to start drinking and are therefore experiencing a burst of energy. At four o’clock the streets are filled with people rushing to get drinks or complete some chore so they can get to their drinks. The pubs start to fill up and will reach maximum capacity around 11pm. Eyes sparkle, conversation flows faster than Guinness, musicians begin to play, cigarettes are inhaled, and life is good. Now, after 11 is the hour of the louts. At this point the lads who have drunk too much begin to a) vandalize things b) injure themselves and go the hospital c) decorate their friends’ eyes d) swing shovels about and threaten to decapitate youths e) try to visit their friends at the police station f) head-butt vans.
To recap: Canadians have morning, afternoon, and evening. The Irish have hangover time, happy hour, and the hour of the louts.
My theory helps explain the apparent lethargy and inefficiency one sees in day-to-day Irish life. Let me give you an example. One Monday Karen and I pulled into the parking lot at the university to be confronted with a burned-out car. Now I mean completely gutted: the windows had shattered out, the interior was charred, pieces of trim had melted. It must have been one hell of a hot fire in that little car. The wreck was neatly parked. So here we have this wreck sitting in the university parking lot, in front of the university’s most famous building, and does anyone notice it? Does anyone stop to look at it? No. They all walk by as if it wasn’t there. Okay. Maybe they’ve seen burned-out cars before, but surely this car belonged to someone. Shouldn’t the police be notified? Or the insurance company? At the very least wouldn’t the university want this eyesore off its property? Apparently not. It’s been there for three weeks and shows no signs of being disturbed, much less moved.
Similarly, a few days after we arrived in Ireland a stop light at a major intersection near Max’s school went out. A month later, has it been repaired? No sir, nor does there seem to be any rush to do so.
Also, near the house we’re in there is a construction site. They are supposed to be building a new road. This road is, as far as I can figure, about 20 feet long. Not a major project. Every morning people arrive at the site and a few desultory noises are heard, but the road is not getting an inch longer.
And finally, a water main has burst under a road beside the supermarket where we do most of our shopping. This is a busy road and the burst pipe has created all sorts of problems. There’s a big hole in the middle of one lane and water is gushing out all over the road at an impressive rate. Some A-Type personality has put a traffic cone beside the hole so motorists don’t drive into it, but has the pipe been fixed? No sir. It’s been flooding the street for a week now.
Why all this indolence? It’s obvious: because work hours coincide with hangover time. The university groundskeeper probably sees the burned-out car ever day and realizes he should do something about it, but Jaysus Mother and Joseph, doesn’t his head hurt? A few too many pints last night so can’t you let a man just suffer in peace? The car will no go anywhere. Leave it be till tomorrow.
By four o’clock, when he is just feeling human enough to make a phone call and get the car towed, it’s quitting time and the pubs are beckoning. The same goes for the guys who repair the stop lights and build the roads. They show up to work dutifully each morning, then stand around moaning and comparing headaches until quitting time. If you wanted to make this country work you would start the workday at 4 o’clock. Tell everyone they couldn’t leave for the pub until the job was done and you’d see the most productive workforce in Europe. The Germans wouldn’t know what hit them. The car would be gone by 4:10. The stoplights fixed by 4:15, the road finished before 5, and the pipe plugged before dark.
Okay, but what about those famous Irish pubs where all this drinking takes place? What are they really like? I’m going to let you in on a sad secret. We were here for over a month before we got to see the inside of an Irish pub. How can that be? Because we live in a suburb. This suburb is so bizarre that I will dedicate an entire letter to describing it later, but for now let me explain that there is nothing around this house except more suburb. No stores, no shops, no library, no post office, and certainly no pubs. Back home in West Vancouver there is a Legion Hall at the end of my street. In other words, at home I can walk a few feet to a bar. Here, in Ireland, home of institutionalized alcoholism, I need to take a bus to get a drink. Go figure.
Anyway, this past weekend we decided to do it. We rented the kids a video ("Here boys, it’s, uh, something with animals. Uh, Reservoir Dogs. I think it’s Disney…") and took a bus downtown. Saturday evening, happy hour, the city center was absolutely jumping. We bypassed the tourist trap pubs to hit the recommended Roisin Dubh.
Now let’s stop there for a minute. What the hell does Roisin Dubh mean? I’ve got no idea. It’s Irish, one of the most perplexing languages ever spoken by man. Figure, I’m no linguist, but in my lifetime I have studied some languages: I’ve had classes in Latin, French, German, and Japanese. I was raised by people who spoke Lithuanian, a close cousin of Sanskrit. I’ve been close with people who speak Italian, Greek, Portuguese, and Cantonese. So I can at least recognize most of the Indo-European, and some Oriental, languages and even, in a pinch, figure out a word or two of them from various cognates. But Irish? No goddam way. A bizarre, consonant-rich language with a lilting rhythm, it sounds like someone trying to sing while gagging and spitting. It sounds like the Muppets’ Swedish Chef choking to death on an artichoke heart. And in written form it is only slightly more decipherable than Arabic. To give you a small example, the first time I was in an Irish restaurant I went to the washroom. What I found was a door marked "Mna." Mna? Must mean Man, right? Some Irish guy, in a hangover, slapped the letters on the door in the wrong order. Why Man instead of Men? Well, maybe it’s a really small bathroom. Anyway, I swung open the door and faced a surprised Mrs. Mna. That’s right, mna means women, while fir (pronounced feer) means men. Could you have guessed that?
Anyway, Roisin Dubh is Irish for something, maybe "happy hour," or "hangover cure," or "black eyes guaranteed." Whatever, it’s a low, dark, wooden trimmed, eccentric space of nooks, shelves, semi-private rooms, cigarette smoke, and spilled drinks. The clientele is eclectic in age and style, though leaning towards the bohemian. Everyone is drinking Guinness, everyone is smoking, everyone is talking. God, can these people talk. They just open their mouths and go. It’s astounding. We claimed some stools and I went to the bar for pints. Now, we all know that Guinness is not unlike alcoholic porridge and that it takes a while to pour, but I didn’t realize how long until I saw a pro do it. He fills the pint glass to within an inch of the top, then puts it aside and goes about some other business. Fifteen minutes later the drink has settled enough that it can now be topped up and he finishes pouring. So getting a beer at an Irish bar is not a speedy process. Bring a book. But if the barkeep rushes it, and the head on the drink is not just right, the clientele will tear a strip off him and refuse to accept the drink. So precise is the art of putting Guinness into a glass that when we asked our neighbors for the name of a good pub or two, they would always follow their recommendations with the supreme compliment, "They pour a good pint." An odd concept for a Canadian to get his mind around. What would be a bad pint in Canada? Why are you pouring the damn thing anyway? Break the neck off the bottle and I’ll pour it straight down my throat while straining the broken glass through my teeth. I’m thirsty over here.
Now, we had come to the Roisin Dubh because it was famous for its traditional music. There was supposed to be a set at 6pm. But that’s 6pm Irish time, which means anytime between 4:30 and 8pm. We didn’t see any sort of musical activity until around 7 when it became apparent that a group of people who were sitting at one of the tables was the band. "Band" is perhaps not the right term because the musical organization is much more informal than that word implies. It was a, uh, free-form collective. As far as I can figure out, musicians promise to show up at the table sometime between 4:30 and 8 (that is, 6) on a given day. When enough have wandered in, they will begin to pull out their instruments and play a tune or two. As the evening progresses, more musicians will wander in and join the table until quitting time. So, depending on when you show up at the pub, you might see a duet or a small orchestra. The night we were there the band went from two to seven over a couple of hours.
Traditional Irish instruments include, as far as I can see, the mandolin, the banjo, and the bazouki. Huh? Why not castanets or alpen horns? Throw in an accordion and a fiddle and you’ve got all your basics covered. One musician will begin to pick out a melody on one of these traditional Irish instruments, then everyone will join in and they’ll play the thing for fifteen minutes. Then they’ll do it again with an identical sounding melody. "The Old Dun Cow" leads into "The Ballad of Tom O’Dougal" which leads into "The Mad Buck Goat." A song ends when one of the musicians gets too tired to play any more. And so it goes all night. It’s more than a bit repetitive. Bu that’s fine for the drunks that are trying to focus their eyes on the action. Irish-traditional-music-enthusiast drunks are a sentimental lot. Play the same melody a dozen times in a row and each time they’ll nod in recognition ("Ah, that’s ‘Lead Me No More to Tubber, For My Heart Has Fled to Gort’"), their eyes will swell with tears, and they’ll be sniffling wrecks when the tune finally ends. Start the exact same song again ("Ah, that’s ‘I Lost My Side Mirror in Ballinasloe’") and fresh tears will leak into Guinness foam.
Karen and I felt a bit out of place. But then a young man came up and started talking to me. Turns out he was one of my students. A minute later a colleague and his wife walked in. Ten minutes later we were deep into our third Guinness, blabbing like Irishmen with our friends, and begging the band to play "A Breakfast of Grease by the Cliffs of Moher."
It was a great night.
By the way, this question of the flexibility of Irish time applies only to human beings. Irish dogs are very punctual. I discovered this by first noticing all the small dogs that were walking around the cities and suburbs. Short-legged mutts, all well fed and usually collared, walk purposely all over the place in Ireland without a master in sight. People ignore these dogs as they go about their business and the dogs return the favor. If you do pay attention to an individual dog, it inevitably turns out to be submissive and friendly, but once you’re finished patting it, the dog will hop up and continue on its way, usually walking a bit faster for having wasted those precious seconds with you. Now, I figured this was my imagination. Dogs don’t have appointments. I was wrong. Figure, there’s one of these small dogs who hangs out just inside the university cafeteria. He lies on the entrance mat, or walks slowly between the tables, totally ignored by the students and staff. He’s there every day except Mondays. And, I noticed after a week or so, he’s never there before 11. Obviously he shows up just as the lunch hour is beginning hoping to cage a fry-n-cream-egg or two. But exactly how punctual Mr. Mutt is became apparent when I left his building yesterday morning. I walked out the doors at two minutes to 11. There, just rounding the corner of the library, came the dog at a measured pace. I stopped and watched him. He made his way between the lounging, smoking, cell-phone nattering students, a four-legged bundle of serious purpose, and went down the stairs to the cafeteria just as the clock struck 11.
If that dog ran this country, things would get done.
But perhaps not all the problems of Ireland can be attributed to the Irish fondness for drink. There is another reason that things don’t get done here: the Irish don’t complain. We were told that by our neighbors. See, we were over having a drink with the people on the other half of our duplex. Nice folk. We asked them about the barking dog. Immediately behind their walled-in yard is the walled-in yard of the people from one street down. These people have a psychotic German shepherd that they turn out into their completely cemented backyard to bark all day long, every day until about 11pm. Every goddam day. Everyone in the estate knows and hates this dog. Everyone in the estate has lost sleep, or has had a child lose sleep, because of this dog. The people who have the other side of the duplex with the dog owners have a baby that has probably never slept. So we asked our neighbors about it. "Hey," I asked innocently, "Has anyone ever asked the dog owners to silence their mutt?" After a moment of shocked silence our neighbors said, "Oh no, no, no, no, no. Couldn’t do that. No no no. We Irish aren’t complainers." Okay. "How long has this dog been barking," I asked. "Oh, about five years," was the answer.
Hello? If this was Canada, after the first week we would be over there politely pointing out that the dog was keeping our children awake. After the second week, we’d be back having a less polite discussion. End of week three, the police are called. End of week four, these inconsiderate yahoos find Fido has somehow lost his head. Here, five years without anyone saying a word. The people who share the duplex with the dog owners have put their house up for sale rather than complain. No joke. They haven’t had any offers.
So perhaps traffic lights don’t get fixed and water mains are allowed to gush onto road because, well, no one has thought it polite to mention these minor inconveniences to the municipality.
Mum: Dear, the potato waffles have caught on fire and it’s spread to the curry beans. I’m afraid the kitchen is all aflame.
Da: Oh my. Well, perhaps we better call the fire department.
Mum: Oh no no no no. We can’t be phoning them every time our house burns down, now can we? They’ll think we’re a bunch of whiners. Next thing you’ll want to call the police when people break into the house and beat us. Or the ambulance when you have a heart attack. What will the neighbors think? The fire will burn itself out when it runs out of fuel. It’s not a big house.
Da: You’re probably right. There’s no water anyway with the water main burst.
Mum: Now don’t start moaning about that again.
In the next installment: I meet the President of Ireland.
Ireland: president and Paris
In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .
At the end of my last missive I left you with a teaser. I promised to tell you about how I met the president of Ireland. Now, you probably had a good chuckle over that. That Paul, what a kidder. The president indeed. He couldn’t meet the president of a Backstreet Boys Fan Club, much less the president of a European country. Har de har. Whadda schmuck. I’m gonna go back to cruising porn sites.
No guff. I met and shook hands with the president of Ireland, Mrs. Mary McAleese. To nderstand how this happened, we have to back up and talk about the Irish educational system.
Now, when we decided that we were indeed going to come to this country for six months, our first concern was the schooling of our boys, ages 9 and 13. We parents are portable, but the kidlits need to be tutored, they need to be nurtured, they need to be kept out of our hair for 8 hours a day. So we asked our Irish exchangee, Lionel, to look into it for us. He ended up arranging for Max, the youngest, to attend St. Nicholas Parochial School, and for Christian to attend The Jesuit middle school, known around town simply as the Jes.
Now, do you notice anything about the names of those schools? Don’t they seem different, somehow, from Riverdale Highschool or Toller Cranston Memorial? And that difference just might be the fact that the names are, well, religious. Christian. Holy. And this brings us to the first major difference between schools in Canada and in Ireland. In Canada, the vast majority of the schools are public. They’re run, ultimately, by the government. Sure, there are private schools and denominational schools, but they are for rich kids and religious wackos. Most of us, and most of our children, went to a public institution. The reverse is true in Ireland. There are a few public schools, but the vast majority are religious. They are run by, ultimately, a church. Why is that?
Well, it may come as a shock to you, but religion has occasionally been a bone of contention in this country. This country (I’m only talking about the Republic here, not Northern Ireland) survived the Protestant Reformation almost 100% Catholic. England, on the other hand, after some fits and starts, bought into the Reformation and even invented its own form of Protestantism, Anglicanism. This gave the English, who had been exploiting the Irish for centuries, a new improved excuse to exploit the Irish: they were Catholics! They hadn’t seen the light! They could not conceive the wisdom of abandoning a 1,500 year old church for a new one invented by a drunken German monk! We better take all their land that we haven’t taken already, enact a series of brutal laws that will reduce them to starvation and nakedness, and lord our superiority and money over them by building manor homes on the land that used to feed their families. That is sure to bring them around to our vision of Christ.
One of the enlightened laws that the English enforced concerned education. It was simple, really: Catholics were not allowed to be educated. At all. Period. No schools, no teachers, no books for Catholics. None. Only the English landlords and their children could go to school. The Irish were forced to invent “hedge schools.” These were secretive meetings of students and teachers in fields and ditches, under rocks, at the bottom of lakes, away from the righteous eyes of the English. That was the only education an Irish Catholic child could receive, and it was illegal. The English Protestants in the country could not only send their children to school, but to university. Trinity College Dublin, the most famous university in the country, was founded in 1592 with a clear admission policy: no Catholics allowed.
As you might guess, education has been a bone of contention in this country ever since. And when the Catholics won the right to education, they did the truly Christian thing and slapped up a bunch of schools that would not admit Protestants. They went further. In the 19th century when an attempt was made to create a national school board that was ecumenical, Bishop MacEvilly (real name) decreed that sending children to any of the non-denominational schools run by this board was not only a sin, but a “reserved sin,” that is a sin that could only be absolved by confession to the Bishop himself. You think you’re going to get off with a couple of Hail Marys from the Bishop? I don’t think so. Anyway, that was the end of non-denominational schooling around here. So now even schools that are officially run by the state are, in practice, run by one of the churches.
So our oldest boy is going to a Catholic school, a school founded by the Jesuit order. Now, I personally think that is rather cool. I’ve always thought that if you’re going to be a priest, be a Jesuit. As we know, the Jesuit order was founded in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish nobleman, as a sort of theological SWAT team to fight the Protestant threat, and ever since it has had a reputation for producing hard-nosed priests with razor-sharp intellects. What is less well known is that the Jesuit order contains the special squads of priests that specialize in killing vampires, re-interring zombies, and battling the anti-christ. Housed in a secret war-room deep beneath the Vatican, the Jesuit God-Squad monitors the planet 24-7 for outbursts of demonic activity and can dispatch an elite combat unit of priests, armed to the teeth with silver bullets, barbed crucifixes, and holy water cannons, to anywhere in the world in spiritually armored “holy-copters” in fifteen minutes. Do not mess with the Jesuits.
They are also famous educators. Pierre Eliot Trudeau learned his rigorous logic and self-control from the Jesuits. I imagined that my son would come out of this school with conversational Latin, firm opinions on the doctrinal errors of Aquinas, and a burning desire to rid the world of tyranny. Unfortunately, the Jes now employs few actual priests. The extent of my son’s theological education has been a weekly assurance, by the one dottering ecclesiastic who actually still teaches, that God wants to be his friend, his buddy, his homie. My son has been told that he should get down with God. Perhaps just as well. I remember, in my brief flirtation with Sunday school, being told by a nun that the ashtray she was using was made, as was everything in the universe, by God. I turned the ashtray over and read “Made in USA.” She insisted it was made by God. I guess God worked in an ashtray factory. I hope he had a good union. Anyway, I never made it to first communion. Our son has been having a great time at the Jes, but there’s little danger of him becoming pope.
St. Nicholas Parochial School, the one our youngest goes to, is not Catholic. It’s run by the Church of Ireland. What the hell is that? It’s the Irish branch of the Anglican Church, but you’re not supposed to know that. The C of I does everything it can to hide the fact that a) it’s Anglican b) it is, therefore, Protestant c) that Anglicanism started in England. It calls itself a Catholic and Protestant Church. It subtly implies that it gives its practitioners the best of both religious traditions: they get the superstition and gore of the Catholic Church along with the guilt and repression of the Protestant. Because of this salad-bar approach to theology, its school is the choice of parents who are not religious or belong to some entirely non-Irish faith, like Baha’i.
Anyway, St. Nick’s just celebrated its 75th year. In preparation for this event, the parents’ council came up with the idea of inviting the president. And she came. I was there in the school hall with about 50 other parents and 40 or so students.
Now, before I tell you what it was like, let us imagine the Canadian Prime Minister visiting my son’s school back in Canada. What would happen? Well, first, the ever-competent RCMP would set up riot fences to give the protesters-de-jour something to knock over. When the PM’s car finally pulled up, the protestors would begin banging on their body jewelry and chanting some profound political slogan: “Hey hey, ho ho, mindless repetition has got to go. Hey hey, ho ho…” The RCMP would tear gas some people who “Appeared to be smirking in our direction” (a few years later a Royal Commission would find that the RCMP acted properly because the smirks might have verged into grimaces). Meanwhile the PM would be whisked in a side door so he could go into the school auditorium and deliver one of his eloquent and fiercely argued speeches: “Allo to you. I ham very glad to be ear in dis school today. You know, I was a school boy too, un petit gars, in Quebec many year ago. Now I ham prime minister for life, so you cannot have dat job, so you better study some ting to get an udder job, like to be da lawyer or cheese maker. Good bye to you.” And off he goes.
Here, there were no protestors. Security for the visit was one hung-over policeman sitting in a car near the school. He didn’t even look at me when I walked in the front door of the school. I think I could have be dressed like a mullah and pushing a wheelbarrow containing a metal drum covered in bio-hazard signs and he still wouldn’t have stopped me. The president showed up on time and gave a speech, off the top of her head, that was funny and eloquent. She played to the kids and they loved her for it, as did their parents. She unveiled a plaque, received some gifts from shy children, then hopped down to meet people. She talked to every kid who would stand still and to every single parent in the room. She asked me about Vancouver and my stay in Ireland. She was as charming as the Irish are reported in legend to be. I would vote for her in a minute.
On the other hand, the president’s role in the government of Ireland is more ceremonial than executive. The real head of the government is the Taoiseach, who is appointed by the President on the nomination of the Dáil (the parliament, divided, like ours, into two houses). The Taoiseach nominates one member of Government to be Tánaiste, who acts in the place of the Taoiseach if the Taoiseach is absent. That’s clear as mud, ain’t it? I say let Mary run the whole damn thing.
My other big recent adventure was a four-day trip to Paris. We booked this jaunt because of the irresistible ticket price offered by Ryan Air. Now, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this Irish company, but it is one of the big successes in commercial aviation in the world. While other airlines are chopping routes and staff, Ryan Air is buying planes. It may well be the largest carrier in the world in a few years. And its reaped this success by being a no-frills, super-budget airline.
How budget is it? Would you believe 10 euro (that’s $14) one-way from Ireland to Paris. Hello? And even better deals can be had. Seriously. Check out the website: ryanair.com. How do they do this? Well, it’s really no-frills. And I don’t mean that they stiff you on the free cocktails, I mean there no in-flight service and no before-flight service. They don’t have ticket agents; you have to book the flights yourself on the web. They don’t reserve seats; everyone charges on the plane and grabs what he can. They don’t offer connections with other flights. But the main way this airline saves money is by avoiding the major airports. If you fly Air Canada to Paris you will land in one of two airports: Charles De Gaulle or Orly. Ryan Air lands in Beauvais. Have you ever heard of Beauvais airport? Of course not. Why? Because it really isn’t an airport at all. As far as I can tell, it’s a goat farm with a long driveway. As we were landing I saw a farmer desperately trying to get his herd off the tarmac before the plane hit them. The control tower at Beauvais is a guy in a beret sitting on a step ladder at the edge of the field. The “terminal” is a corrugated metal shed that was obviously designed for storing animal feed. The luggage carousel isn’t motorized. The luggage sits there and the passengers have to run around it.
The bus ride from Beauvais to Paris is advertised as taking 45 minutes, but those must be metric minutes, cause my watch said it took over an hour. But hey, who cares? We got off the bus and got onto Paris’s brilliant subway system, the Metro, and headed for our hotel. When we came up out of our Metro station we found ourselves staring at the Moulin Rouge. Kinda cool.
Then we turned around to face the direction of our hotel and saw before us every porno shop, adult cinema, and peep show you can imagine. We had arrived in the center of Paris’s sex strip, Pigalle. And the porno shops of Paris are not subtle. They have names like “Porno Shop,” “Sex Shop,” “Le Porno Sexy Shop,” or “Sex-o Porn Sexy Shop de Porn Sex.” And because it was Saturday evening, the touts were standing in the doorways of these fine establishments advertising their wares, with typical Gallic discretion, by bellowing, “Fucky sucky porno sexy fuck sex porno sex-o!” In case you still could not figure out what these shops were about (I guess if you were a deaf illiterate), there were large, and fairly explicit, posters beside the doorways. These drew the attention of my nine-year-old son.
Son: Daddy, look at all the pictures! Why is that naked lady lying on top of that other naked lady backwards?
Me: Well, uh, the lady on the bottom has, um, frostbite and so the lady on top is pressing her body against the frozen part to thaw it out. That’s how the Eskimos deal with frostbite.
Son: So all the naked ladies in the pictures are Eskimos?
Me: Yes. They’re blonde Eskimos with huge breasts.
Son: Why is that naked Eskimo lady hitting that man with the whip?
Me: Uh, she’s practicing her whipping technique for a dog sled race.
Son: Are there lots of Eskimos in Paris?
Me: Well, just this part of Paris.
Son: Why?
Me: Well, you know in Vancouver we have a Chinatown? This is Paris’s Eskimo-town. I think they call it Le Petite Alaska.
Son: Can we go in a shop and meet and Eskimo lady?
Me: No, son, you have to be 18 years old to go in the shop.
Son: Why?
Me: Shut up, that’s why.
The hotel, despite the neighborhood, was great and Paris, well, what can one say about Paris? If you’ve been there, I don’t have to tell you what it’s like. If you haven’t been there, call your travel agent. I had not been in Paris in fifteen years, but all the good stuff was still there. Beans on toast for brekkie? I don’t think so. Vandalized public benches? No sir. Sure, some people can be snooty (a quality that the Irish are incapable of), but they can also be gracious. But all in all, when you walk along the Siene on a brilliant Sunday in spring; when you grab a crepe from the best crepe stand (itself a brilliant idea) in Paris, the one near the Grands Boulevards Metro station; when you wander through the Egyptian wing of the Louvre; when you climb the Arc de Triumph and see the city radiating from that central monument; when you are the only person in the room at the Museum of Cluny that holds the Damsel and the Unicorn tapestries; when you have your second dinner in a row at Chartier, the oldest continuing operating restaurant in Paris, still decorated as it was at the turn of the century, where the waiters write your bill on the tablecloth and where you can order a fine three-course meal for four with wine for under $100; when you walk into a grocery store and smell real (!) cheeses, buy excellent wines for under $5, and exquisite pastries; then there are only two words that come to mind to express the depth of your satisfaction with what Western civilization can offer: I win.
Coming soon: I take on city hall.
At the end of my last missive I left you with a teaser. I promised to tell you about how I met the president of Ireland. Now, you probably had a good chuckle over that. That Paul, what a kidder. The president indeed. He couldn’t meet the president of a Backstreet Boys Fan Club, much less the president of a European country. Har de har. Whadda schmuck. I’m gonna go back to cruising porn sites.
No guff. I met and shook hands with the president of Ireland, Mrs. Mary McAleese. To nderstand how this happened, we have to back up and talk about the Irish educational system.
Now, when we decided that we were indeed going to come to this country for six months, our first concern was the schooling of our boys, ages 9 and 13. We parents are portable, but the kidlits need to be tutored, they need to be nurtured, they need to be kept out of our hair for 8 hours a day. So we asked our Irish exchangee, Lionel, to look into it for us. He ended up arranging for Max, the youngest, to attend St. Nicholas Parochial School, and for Christian to attend The Jesuit middle school, known around town simply as the Jes.
Now, do you notice anything about the names of those schools? Don’t they seem different, somehow, from Riverdale Highschool or Toller Cranston Memorial? And that difference just might be the fact that the names are, well, religious. Christian. Holy. And this brings us to the first major difference between schools in Canada and in Ireland. In Canada, the vast majority of the schools are public. They’re run, ultimately, by the government. Sure, there are private schools and denominational schools, but they are for rich kids and religious wackos. Most of us, and most of our children, went to a public institution. The reverse is true in Ireland. There are a few public schools, but the vast majority are religious. They are run by, ultimately, a church. Why is that?
Well, it may come as a shock to you, but religion has occasionally been a bone of contention in this country. This country (I’m only talking about the Republic here, not Northern Ireland) survived the Protestant Reformation almost 100% Catholic. England, on the other hand, after some fits and starts, bought into the Reformation and even invented its own form of Protestantism, Anglicanism. This gave the English, who had been exploiting the Irish for centuries, a new improved excuse to exploit the Irish: they were Catholics! They hadn’t seen the light! They could not conceive the wisdom of abandoning a 1,500 year old church for a new one invented by a drunken German monk! We better take all their land that we haven’t taken already, enact a series of brutal laws that will reduce them to starvation and nakedness, and lord our superiority and money over them by building manor homes on the land that used to feed their families. That is sure to bring them around to our vision of Christ.
One of the enlightened laws that the English enforced concerned education. It was simple, really: Catholics were not allowed to be educated. At all. Period. No schools, no teachers, no books for Catholics. None. Only the English landlords and their children could go to school. The Irish were forced to invent “hedge schools.” These were secretive meetings of students and teachers in fields and ditches, under rocks, at the bottom of lakes, away from the righteous eyes of the English. That was the only education an Irish Catholic child could receive, and it was illegal. The English Protestants in the country could not only send their children to school, but to university. Trinity College Dublin, the most famous university in the country, was founded in 1592 with a clear admission policy: no Catholics allowed.
As you might guess, education has been a bone of contention in this country ever since. And when the Catholics won the right to education, they did the truly Christian thing and slapped up a bunch of schools that would not admit Protestants. They went further. In the 19th century when an attempt was made to create a national school board that was ecumenical, Bishop MacEvilly (real name) decreed that sending children to any of the non-denominational schools run by this board was not only a sin, but a “reserved sin,” that is a sin that could only be absolved by confession to the Bishop himself. You think you’re going to get off with a couple of Hail Marys from the Bishop? I don’t think so. Anyway, that was the end of non-denominational schooling around here. So now even schools that are officially run by the state are, in practice, run by one of the churches.
So our oldest boy is going to a Catholic school, a school founded by the Jesuit order. Now, I personally think that is rather cool. I’ve always thought that if you’re going to be a priest, be a Jesuit. As we know, the Jesuit order was founded in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish nobleman, as a sort of theological SWAT team to fight the Protestant threat, and ever since it has had a reputation for producing hard-nosed priests with razor-sharp intellects. What is less well known is that the Jesuit order contains the special squads of priests that specialize in killing vampires, re-interring zombies, and battling the anti-christ. Housed in a secret war-room deep beneath the Vatican, the Jesuit God-Squad monitors the planet 24-7 for outbursts of demonic activity and can dispatch an elite combat unit of priests, armed to the teeth with silver bullets, barbed crucifixes, and holy water cannons, to anywhere in the world in spiritually armored “holy-copters” in fifteen minutes. Do not mess with the Jesuits.
They are also famous educators. Pierre Eliot Trudeau learned his rigorous logic and self-control from the Jesuits. I imagined that my son would come out of this school with conversational Latin, firm opinions on the doctrinal errors of Aquinas, and a burning desire to rid the world of tyranny. Unfortunately, the Jes now employs few actual priests. The extent of my son’s theological education has been a weekly assurance, by the one dottering ecclesiastic who actually still teaches, that God wants to be his friend, his buddy, his homie. My son has been told that he should get down with God. Perhaps just as well. I remember, in my brief flirtation with Sunday school, being told by a nun that the ashtray she was using was made, as was everything in the universe, by God. I turned the ashtray over and read “Made in USA.” She insisted it was made by God. I guess God worked in an ashtray factory. I hope he had a good union. Anyway, I never made it to first communion. Our son has been having a great time at the Jes, but there’s little danger of him becoming pope.
St. Nicholas Parochial School, the one our youngest goes to, is not Catholic. It’s run by the Church of Ireland. What the hell is that? It’s the Irish branch of the Anglican Church, but you’re not supposed to know that. The C of I does everything it can to hide the fact that a) it’s Anglican b) it is, therefore, Protestant c) that Anglicanism started in England. It calls itself a Catholic and Protestant Church. It subtly implies that it gives its practitioners the best of both religious traditions: they get the superstition and gore of the Catholic Church along with the guilt and repression of the Protestant. Because of this salad-bar approach to theology, its school is the choice of parents who are not religious or belong to some entirely non-Irish faith, like Baha’i.
Anyway, St. Nick’s just celebrated its 75th year. In preparation for this event, the parents’ council came up with the idea of inviting the president. And she came. I was there in the school hall with about 50 other parents and 40 or so students.
Now, before I tell you what it was like, let us imagine the Canadian Prime Minister visiting my son’s school back in Canada. What would happen? Well, first, the ever-competent RCMP would set up riot fences to give the protesters-de-jour something to knock over. When the PM’s car finally pulled up, the protestors would begin banging on their body jewelry and chanting some profound political slogan: “Hey hey, ho ho, mindless repetition has got to go. Hey hey, ho ho…” The RCMP would tear gas some people who “Appeared to be smirking in our direction” (a few years later a Royal Commission would find that the RCMP acted properly because the smirks might have verged into grimaces). Meanwhile the PM would be whisked in a side door so he could go into the school auditorium and deliver one of his eloquent and fiercely argued speeches: “Allo to you. I ham very glad to be ear in dis school today. You know, I was a school boy too, un petit gars, in Quebec many year ago. Now I ham prime minister for life, so you cannot have dat job, so you better study some ting to get an udder job, like to be da lawyer or cheese maker. Good bye to you.” And off he goes.
Here, there were no protestors. Security for the visit was one hung-over policeman sitting in a car near the school. He didn’t even look at me when I walked in the front door of the school. I think I could have be dressed like a mullah and pushing a wheelbarrow containing a metal drum covered in bio-hazard signs and he still wouldn’t have stopped me. The president showed up on time and gave a speech, off the top of her head, that was funny and eloquent. She played to the kids and they loved her for it, as did their parents. She unveiled a plaque, received some gifts from shy children, then hopped down to meet people. She talked to every kid who would stand still and to every single parent in the room. She asked me about Vancouver and my stay in Ireland. She was as charming as the Irish are reported in legend to be. I would vote for her in a minute.
On the other hand, the president’s role in the government of Ireland is more ceremonial than executive. The real head of the government is the Taoiseach, who is appointed by the President on the nomination of the Dáil (the parliament, divided, like ours, into two houses). The Taoiseach nominates one member of Government to be Tánaiste, who acts in the place of the Taoiseach if the Taoiseach is absent. That’s clear as mud, ain’t it? I say let Mary run the whole damn thing.
My other big recent adventure was a four-day trip to Paris. We booked this jaunt because of the irresistible ticket price offered by Ryan Air. Now, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this Irish company, but it is one of the big successes in commercial aviation in the world. While other airlines are chopping routes and staff, Ryan Air is buying planes. It may well be the largest carrier in the world in a few years. And its reaped this success by being a no-frills, super-budget airline.
How budget is it? Would you believe 10 euro (that’s $14) one-way from Ireland to Paris. Hello? And even better deals can be had. Seriously. Check out the website: ryanair.com. How do they do this? Well, it’s really no-frills. And I don’t mean that they stiff you on the free cocktails, I mean there no in-flight service and no before-flight service. They don’t have ticket agents; you have to book the flights yourself on the web. They don’t reserve seats; everyone charges on the plane and grabs what he can. They don’t offer connections with other flights. But the main way this airline saves money is by avoiding the major airports. If you fly Air Canada to Paris you will land in one of two airports: Charles De Gaulle or Orly. Ryan Air lands in Beauvais. Have you ever heard of Beauvais airport? Of course not. Why? Because it really isn’t an airport at all. As far as I can tell, it’s a goat farm with a long driveway. As we were landing I saw a farmer desperately trying to get his herd off the tarmac before the plane hit them. The control tower at Beauvais is a guy in a beret sitting on a step ladder at the edge of the field. The “terminal” is a corrugated metal shed that was obviously designed for storing animal feed. The luggage carousel isn’t motorized. The luggage sits there and the passengers have to run around it.
The bus ride from Beauvais to Paris is advertised as taking 45 minutes, but those must be metric minutes, cause my watch said it took over an hour. But hey, who cares? We got off the bus and got onto Paris’s brilliant subway system, the Metro, and headed for our hotel. When we came up out of our Metro station we found ourselves staring at the Moulin Rouge. Kinda cool.
Then we turned around to face the direction of our hotel and saw before us every porno shop, adult cinema, and peep show you can imagine. We had arrived in the center of Paris’s sex strip, Pigalle. And the porno shops of Paris are not subtle. They have names like “Porno Shop,” “Sex Shop,” “Le Porno Sexy Shop,” or “Sex-o Porn Sexy Shop de Porn Sex.” And because it was Saturday evening, the touts were standing in the doorways of these fine establishments advertising their wares, with typical Gallic discretion, by bellowing, “Fucky sucky porno sexy fuck sex porno sex-o!” In case you still could not figure out what these shops were about (I guess if you were a deaf illiterate), there were large, and fairly explicit, posters beside the doorways. These drew the attention of my nine-year-old son.
Son: Daddy, look at all the pictures! Why is that naked lady lying on top of that other naked lady backwards?
Me: Well, uh, the lady on the bottom has, um, frostbite and so the lady on top is pressing her body against the frozen part to thaw it out. That’s how the Eskimos deal with frostbite.
Son: So all the naked ladies in the pictures are Eskimos?
Me: Yes. They’re blonde Eskimos with huge breasts.
Son: Why is that naked Eskimo lady hitting that man with the whip?
Me: Uh, she’s practicing her whipping technique for a dog sled race.
Son: Are there lots of Eskimos in Paris?
Me: Well, just this part of Paris.
Son: Why?
Me: Well, you know in Vancouver we have a Chinatown? This is Paris’s Eskimo-town. I think they call it Le Petite Alaska.
Son: Can we go in a shop and meet and Eskimo lady?
Me: No, son, you have to be 18 years old to go in the shop.
Son: Why?
Me: Shut up, that’s why.
The hotel, despite the neighborhood, was great and Paris, well, what can one say about Paris? If you’ve been there, I don’t have to tell you what it’s like. If you haven’t been there, call your travel agent. I had not been in Paris in fifteen years, but all the good stuff was still there. Beans on toast for brekkie? I don’t think so. Vandalized public benches? No sir. Sure, some people can be snooty (a quality that the Irish are incapable of), but they can also be gracious. But all in all, when you walk along the Siene on a brilliant Sunday in spring; when you grab a crepe from the best crepe stand (itself a brilliant idea) in Paris, the one near the Grands Boulevards Metro station; when you wander through the Egyptian wing of the Louvre; when you climb the Arc de Triumph and see the city radiating from that central monument; when you are the only person in the room at the Museum of Cluny that holds the Damsel and the Unicorn tapestries; when you have your second dinner in a row at Chartier, the oldest continuing operating restaurant in Paris, still decorated as it was at the turn of the century, where the waiters write your bill on the tablecloth and where you can order a fine three-course meal for four with wine for under $100; when you walk into a grocery store and smell real (!) cheeses, buy excellent wines for under $5, and exquisite pastries; then there are only two words that come to mind to express the depth of your satisfaction with what Western civilization can offer: I win.
Coming soon: I take on city hall.
Ireland: horse racing
In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .
I was going to tell you about my adventures trying to get a straight answer from city hall as to why they are building gulags in Ireland, but that will have to wait. I haven’t been able to make it to the hall because our family has been more or less constantly sick for the past three weeks. That’s one thing they don’t tell you about moving to a new continent: it’s full of viruses that you’re never experienced before and you can count of being ill for about six months. In other words, for exactly as long as we’re going to be here.
Anyway, despite illness Karen and I went out on Saturday night. Our older son’s school was having a fundraiser and since they been so good about fitting him into the curriculum we thought it would be churlish not go. So Saturday night we called a cab and bombed over to the very swish Salt Hill Hotel.
Now, Salt Hill itself is a stylish/touristy part of Galway that runs along the waterfront. There’s a promenade there that some lunatics like to walk along for exercise. If I may be allowed a digression, I’ll tell you why these people are lunatics. It’s because of the weather? Now, in the phone calls that I’ve made back to Canada, the people I’ve spoken to have always asked, how’s the weather. Usually I cannot answer without opening the door and looking. The reason is simple: if the question comes more than one minute into the call, the weather may be entirely different than when I first dialed the phone. No guff, gentlemen, but I climbed in the car one morning to hear this weather forecast on the radio: "Sunny today, with rain, sleet, hail, snow, thunder and wind." Now the forecaster didn’t mean, as he would in Canada, that this wild melange of weather conditions would play out over the day. No. He meant it would play out every ten minutes. And it did. It is possible, in this country, to leave the house in sunshine and be in a hail storm by the end of the block. You need to carry six different outfits with you on any given day.
The only constant, and the reason for this lunatic weather, is the wind. Now let’s think about wind. Some days you may say to yourself, "hey, it’s really blowing out here! Maybe I should take the kids out kite flying! It would be a good day for sailing!" Uh huh. Yeah. That ain’t the sort of wind we’re talking about. The wind here works like this: you’re lying in bed, sound asleep, when suddenly WHAM! A truck drives into your house! You sit bolt upright, gasping in fear, and start to fumble for the phone. Quick! Call the police, call the ambulance! A truck has crashed into the house! Before you can find the phone, however, it happens again. But this time you notice it’s not at ground level. The truck has smashed into the second floor! A flying truck? A double-decker bus? Or is there some lunatic out there with a crane and a wrecking ball trying to take out your house? We’re under mortar attack!
No. It’s the wind. A wind so strong it rips plants out of the garden, bends trees to the ground, and topples fences. How strong it is? An American tourist was hiking west of here a couple of weeks ago. She climbed to the top of the hill AND THE WIND BLEW HER OFF! She died. The wind killed her. We have driven along Salt Hill Road, past the promenade, on a windy day and seen the ocean being washed up over the walk, through a parking lot, across the road, to deposit sea weed and rocks on the far side. This is the length of a city block away. Big rocks.
Anyway, some lunatics walk through this. They find it bracing. Energizing. They are often found washed out to sea.
This also serves to explain why the windows in our house here each have five locks on them: two on each side and one at the bottom. These things lock so tight you could put them in the side of a submarine and not worry about leaks. But if they weren’t that securely fastened, the wind would rip them from the building and send them crashing down the street.
Anyway, the Salthill Hotel. The fund-raising event being run by the school was called "A Night at the Races." The invitations said to be there at 8 sharp. We showed up at 8, found the big room, and it was nearly empty. Punctuality is not a concept the Irish are comfortable with. We’ve been to several plays where people were walking into the theatre 45 minutes late. That for a play that runs 90 minutes. We retired to the bar and tried again at 8:30. It had begun to fill up.
Now, picture a fair-sized meeting room. It’s full of small round tables, each set with a white table cloth, an ashtray, and two bags of chips. At the back of the room is a large, well-stocked bar manned by one of the biggest women I have ever seen. This lady was two axe handles across. She could hoist a keg of Guinness on either shoulder while carrying a tray of drinks in her teeth. Don’t mess with the bar keep. Anyway, at the front of the room is a table with prizes on it. We were given a little yellow booklet full of ads from sponsors and 12 "racing charts." Each listed the names of ten horses, their owners, and jockeys.
Gentlemen, we were in a hotel, not at a race track. What the hell was going on here?
An MC came out and told us to place our bets on the first race. Bet tickets cost 1 euro. ($1.40 Cdn). Utterly fucking confused, I went to the betting table and bought two tickets for the first horse. Why the first? It’s name was Karen’s Fancy. I then sat down and craned my neck around to see the horses. Where were they? Behind the bar? Where were they going to run? Around the tables? From bag of chips to bag of chips? Between you and me, I’m rather frightened of horses. They’re big and have hooves. They’re also stupid and easily spooked. You let loose ten horses in a room full of drinking, smoking Irishmen and it would be a blood bath. I was beginning to sweat as race time approached. I noted where the nearest exit was and braced myself to bolt. Any damn horse comes in the room and I’m gone. Karen, well, Karen likes horses. She’d be fine.
But I was being irrational. No way they would bring ten horses into a hotel ballroom. It had to be ponies. Perhaps the famous Connemara ponies, wild natives of rocky western Ireland. Small and sturdy, these beasts are famous for their endurance and hardiness. You could get ten of them in the room no problem. You could even put midget riders on them and still clear the ceiling. But they would play havoc on the carpet.
The betting finished and the MC grabbed his microphone and shouted "Let’s go racing!!" He dimmed the lights and I tensed to sprint. Then a movie started. I had not noticed it before, but in the corner was a movie screen and a projector. This was one of those old reel-to-reel projectors, the type they had in our grade schools. You know, the ones that never quite worked, that burned the film, that had really bad sound. One of those. Two old geezers started this antique up and a film of a horse race, than might have taken place 40 years ago, played on the screen, slightly out of focus and with bad sound. The racing commentator on the film called the horses’s progress but did not use their names, only numbers. In a minute it was over.
Karen’s Fancy, horse no. 1, won. I made 6 euro.
Get it? The entire night was dedicated to betting on horses in movies. Horse race movie betting. Every race was a separate one-minute film, laboriously threaded into the projector by the old boys. Before each film the MC exhorted us to lay our money down. WE WERE BETTING ON MOVIE HORSES!
Am I the only one who thinks this is insane? How do you make an intelligent bet on a horse that appears in an old movie of a horse race? How are the odds figured on the horses? And why, oh why, were people CHEERING ON THE HORSES?! By the last race, when people were really liquored up, folks were jumping out of their chairs, tearing their hair out, and SCREAMING at the screen as their horses ran around the track. What? I mean, screaming at a real race track is illogical enough: how would a horse, a creature that is slightly stupider than a cat (and that’s saying something) surrounded by nine other horses thundering around a track, while being whipped by some saddle monkey on his back, how would that animal be encouraged by the sound – as if he could hear it – of some yahoo in the stands calling his name? Now, how would the movie version of that same horse be motivated by someone yelling at the screen?!
The Irish are a strange and superstitious people.
The only time they stopped screaming was when the hotel staff put some complimentary snacks on the tables: bowls of tiny fried and salted pork sausages. Those grease-bomb type that you have for breakfast when you’re hungover. A bowl of those. With salt.
People hoovered them up. They evaporated out of the bowl. Throw that sort of snack food in with the ciggies and the booze and you have to wonder a) why everyone in this country over the age of 15 doesn’t have heart disease, and b) why the streets aren’t full of the sort of hyper-obese specimens you see in so much of middle America.
But back to the race. Maybe it’s not such a surprise. The Irish love to gamble. The Irish Sweepstakes was, for years, the largest lottery in the world. There is a bookmaker on every corner of downtown Galway. The Irish will bet on anything: horse racing, dog racing, cow racing. They will happily take odds on what colour will come up next on a traffic light. And every sports organization, church group, and public works project has a lottery. Some of these, like the ones run by the church groups, are laughably small, but they are still reported on the radio. Yes, the radio. A couple of times a week 20 minutes of airtime is taken up with reading of ALL the lottery results in the county. We’re given winning numbers, names of winners, and amounts won. It gets very odd when they get down to the smaller lotteries: "And this just in! The Ladies Auxillary of St. Joseph of the Bloody-Nail-Filled-Cross Church in Upper Rahoon, Galway County, has a winner in their Easter Basket fundraising lottery. The winning ticket number was 7, and that was held by Mrs. Fiona O’Leary, who won 12 euro. Well done Fiona!"
Now throw into the mix the Irish love of sports. They’re nuts about any and all sporting events. The sports section of the newspaper is easily twice as big as all the other sections put together and the news broadcasts are regularly two-thirds sports. How is that possible in a small country? Because the sports at ALL levels are deemed newsworthy. International sports, of course, but also national, county, university, highschool, primary school, and play-school sports are reported: "Little Mary O’Casey, aged 5, bested her friends in a thrilling game of hopscotch this morning before a record crowd of admiring parents. That marks the third straight victory for Mary who is expected to be moving on to Grade 1 hopscotch finals next month. We will be keeping a close eye on this up-and-comer and will keep you posted on her career."
And they don’t just report on soccer, rugby, Irish football (like rugby but much less polite), and hurling (like field hockey but much more dangerous). I have heard radio reports of the results from billiard tournaments and (wait for it) dog trials. Yes, dog trials: "This just in! Patrick McDonnell’s prize bitch, Snapper, has just won the gold in sheep herding at the Rosmuc Sheepdog Trials. Congratulations to Patrick and Snapper!"
So, the Irish love to bet and they love sports. On a windy spring night there’s no horse racing so they get hammered, eat pork sausages, and bet on movie horses. The next day they play Irish football and burn off the calories. It all fits. It’s nuts, but it fits.
And by the way, this Sunday is St. Patrick’s Day. I shall report on the festivities.
I was going to tell you about my adventures trying to get a straight answer from city hall as to why they are building gulags in Ireland, but that will have to wait. I haven’t been able to make it to the hall because our family has been more or less constantly sick for the past three weeks. That’s one thing they don’t tell you about moving to a new continent: it’s full of viruses that you’re never experienced before and you can count of being ill for about six months. In other words, for exactly as long as we’re going to be here.
Anyway, despite illness Karen and I went out on Saturday night. Our older son’s school was having a fundraiser and since they been so good about fitting him into the curriculum we thought it would be churlish not go. So Saturday night we called a cab and bombed over to the very swish Salt Hill Hotel.
Now, Salt Hill itself is a stylish/touristy part of Galway that runs along the waterfront. There’s a promenade there that some lunatics like to walk along for exercise. If I may be allowed a digression, I’ll tell you why these people are lunatics. It’s because of the weather? Now, in the phone calls that I’ve made back to Canada, the people I’ve spoken to have always asked, how’s the weather. Usually I cannot answer without opening the door and looking. The reason is simple: if the question comes more than one minute into the call, the weather may be entirely different than when I first dialed the phone. No guff, gentlemen, but I climbed in the car one morning to hear this weather forecast on the radio: "Sunny today, with rain, sleet, hail, snow, thunder and wind." Now the forecaster didn’t mean, as he would in Canada, that this wild melange of weather conditions would play out over the day. No. He meant it would play out every ten minutes. And it did. It is possible, in this country, to leave the house in sunshine and be in a hail storm by the end of the block. You need to carry six different outfits with you on any given day.
The only constant, and the reason for this lunatic weather, is the wind. Now let’s think about wind. Some days you may say to yourself, "hey, it’s really blowing out here! Maybe I should take the kids out kite flying! It would be a good day for sailing!" Uh huh. Yeah. That ain’t the sort of wind we’re talking about. The wind here works like this: you’re lying in bed, sound asleep, when suddenly WHAM! A truck drives into your house! You sit bolt upright, gasping in fear, and start to fumble for the phone. Quick! Call the police, call the ambulance! A truck has crashed into the house! Before you can find the phone, however, it happens again. But this time you notice it’s not at ground level. The truck has smashed into the second floor! A flying truck? A double-decker bus? Or is there some lunatic out there with a crane and a wrecking ball trying to take out your house? We’re under mortar attack!
No. It’s the wind. A wind so strong it rips plants out of the garden, bends trees to the ground, and topples fences. How strong it is? An American tourist was hiking west of here a couple of weeks ago. She climbed to the top of the hill AND THE WIND BLEW HER OFF! She died. The wind killed her. We have driven along Salt Hill Road, past the promenade, on a windy day and seen the ocean being washed up over the walk, through a parking lot, across the road, to deposit sea weed and rocks on the far side. This is the length of a city block away. Big rocks.
Anyway, some lunatics walk through this. They find it bracing. Energizing. They are often found washed out to sea.
This also serves to explain why the windows in our house here each have five locks on them: two on each side and one at the bottom. These things lock so tight you could put them in the side of a submarine and not worry about leaks. But if they weren’t that securely fastened, the wind would rip them from the building and send them crashing down the street.
Anyway, the Salthill Hotel. The fund-raising event being run by the school was called "A Night at the Races." The invitations said to be there at 8 sharp. We showed up at 8, found the big room, and it was nearly empty. Punctuality is not a concept the Irish are comfortable with. We’ve been to several plays where people were walking into the theatre 45 minutes late. That for a play that runs 90 minutes. We retired to the bar and tried again at 8:30. It had begun to fill up.
Now, picture a fair-sized meeting room. It’s full of small round tables, each set with a white table cloth, an ashtray, and two bags of chips. At the back of the room is a large, well-stocked bar manned by one of the biggest women I have ever seen. This lady was two axe handles across. She could hoist a keg of Guinness on either shoulder while carrying a tray of drinks in her teeth. Don’t mess with the bar keep. Anyway, at the front of the room is a table with prizes on it. We were given a little yellow booklet full of ads from sponsors and 12 "racing charts." Each listed the names of ten horses, their owners, and jockeys.
Gentlemen, we were in a hotel, not at a race track. What the hell was going on here?
An MC came out and told us to place our bets on the first race. Bet tickets cost 1 euro. ($1.40 Cdn). Utterly fucking confused, I went to the betting table and bought two tickets for the first horse. Why the first? It’s name was Karen’s Fancy. I then sat down and craned my neck around to see the horses. Where were they? Behind the bar? Where were they going to run? Around the tables? From bag of chips to bag of chips? Between you and me, I’m rather frightened of horses. They’re big and have hooves. They’re also stupid and easily spooked. You let loose ten horses in a room full of drinking, smoking Irishmen and it would be a blood bath. I was beginning to sweat as race time approached. I noted where the nearest exit was and braced myself to bolt. Any damn horse comes in the room and I’m gone. Karen, well, Karen likes horses. She’d be fine.
But I was being irrational. No way they would bring ten horses into a hotel ballroom. It had to be ponies. Perhaps the famous Connemara ponies, wild natives of rocky western Ireland. Small and sturdy, these beasts are famous for their endurance and hardiness. You could get ten of them in the room no problem. You could even put midget riders on them and still clear the ceiling. But they would play havoc on the carpet.
The betting finished and the MC grabbed his microphone and shouted "Let’s go racing!!" He dimmed the lights and I tensed to sprint. Then a movie started. I had not noticed it before, but in the corner was a movie screen and a projector. This was one of those old reel-to-reel projectors, the type they had in our grade schools. You know, the ones that never quite worked, that burned the film, that had really bad sound. One of those. Two old geezers started this antique up and a film of a horse race, than might have taken place 40 years ago, played on the screen, slightly out of focus and with bad sound. The racing commentator on the film called the horses’s progress but did not use their names, only numbers. In a minute it was over.
Karen’s Fancy, horse no. 1, won. I made 6 euro.
Get it? The entire night was dedicated to betting on horses in movies. Horse race movie betting. Every race was a separate one-minute film, laboriously threaded into the projector by the old boys. Before each film the MC exhorted us to lay our money down. WE WERE BETTING ON MOVIE HORSES!
Am I the only one who thinks this is insane? How do you make an intelligent bet on a horse that appears in an old movie of a horse race? How are the odds figured on the horses? And why, oh why, were people CHEERING ON THE HORSES?! By the last race, when people were really liquored up, folks were jumping out of their chairs, tearing their hair out, and SCREAMING at the screen as their horses ran around the track. What? I mean, screaming at a real race track is illogical enough: how would a horse, a creature that is slightly stupider than a cat (and that’s saying something) surrounded by nine other horses thundering around a track, while being whipped by some saddle monkey on his back, how would that animal be encouraged by the sound – as if he could hear it – of some yahoo in the stands calling his name? Now, how would the movie version of that same horse be motivated by someone yelling at the screen?!
The Irish are a strange and superstitious people.
The only time they stopped screaming was when the hotel staff put some complimentary snacks on the tables: bowls of tiny fried and salted pork sausages. Those grease-bomb type that you have for breakfast when you’re hungover. A bowl of those. With salt.
People hoovered them up. They evaporated out of the bowl. Throw that sort of snack food in with the ciggies and the booze and you have to wonder a) why everyone in this country over the age of 15 doesn’t have heart disease, and b) why the streets aren’t full of the sort of hyper-obese specimens you see in so much of middle America.
But back to the race. Maybe it’s not such a surprise. The Irish love to gamble. The Irish Sweepstakes was, for years, the largest lottery in the world. There is a bookmaker on every corner of downtown Galway. The Irish will bet on anything: horse racing, dog racing, cow racing. They will happily take odds on what colour will come up next on a traffic light. And every sports organization, church group, and public works project has a lottery. Some of these, like the ones run by the church groups, are laughably small, but they are still reported on the radio. Yes, the radio. A couple of times a week 20 minutes of airtime is taken up with reading of ALL the lottery results in the county. We’re given winning numbers, names of winners, and amounts won. It gets very odd when they get down to the smaller lotteries: "And this just in! The Ladies Auxillary of St. Joseph of the Bloody-Nail-Filled-Cross Church in Upper Rahoon, Galway County, has a winner in their Easter Basket fundraising lottery. The winning ticket number was 7, and that was held by Mrs. Fiona O’Leary, who won 12 euro. Well done Fiona!"
Now throw into the mix the Irish love of sports. They’re nuts about any and all sporting events. The sports section of the newspaper is easily twice as big as all the other sections put together and the news broadcasts are regularly two-thirds sports. How is that possible in a small country? Because the sports at ALL levels are deemed newsworthy. International sports, of course, but also national, county, university, highschool, primary school, and play-school sports are reported: "Little Mary O’Casey, aged 5, bested her friends in a thrilling game of hopscotch this morning before a record crowd of admiring parents. That marks the third straight victory for Mary who is expected to be moving on to Grade 1 hopscotch finals next month. We will be keeping a close eye on this up-and-comer and will keep you posted on her career."
And they don’t just report on soccer, rugby, Irish football (like rugby but much less polite), and hurling (like field hockey but much more dangerous). I have heard radio reports of the results from billiard tournaments and (wait for it) dog trials. Yes, dog trials: "This just in! Patrick McDonnell’s prize bitch, Snapper, has just won the gold in sheep herding at the Rosmuc Sheepdog Trials. Congratulations to Patrick and Snapper!"
So, the Irish love to bet and they love sports. On a windy spring night there’s no horse racing so they get hammered, eat pork sausages, and bet on movie horses. The next day they play Irish football and burn off the calories. It all fits. It’s nuts, but it fits.
And by the way, this Sunday is St. Patrick’s Day. I shall report on the festivities.
Ireland: sidetrip to Spain
In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .
What do I know about Spain? Virtually nothing. I know sangria, bullfighting, and flamenco. The bullfighting we can deal with right away: it’s a barbaric blood sport in which a guy dressed like a figure skater wearing floppy Mickey Mouse ears tortures a cow to death. Not my thing. As for sangria and flamenco, well, my Uncle Justin introduced me to those about twenty years ago. Justin and his wife Violet have a passion for things Spanish. Their house is decorated with Spanish-style furniture. This is dark, heavy stuff that looks like it came from a medieval torture dungeon. Anyway, some twenty years ago a flamenco bar opened in Toronto and Justin insisted that all the extended family come out for a night of sangria and heel stamping. So off we went, some ten of us, to drink sangria and watch the show. Well, maybe watch isn’t the right word.
You see, Uncle Justin likes a small drinky-poo now and again. Mainly now. This is a guy who has been pulled off a train by the police for being a little too dinky-pooed. This is a guy who disappeared on a Mexican beach for three days, wearing only a bathing suit (no shoes, no wallet, no shirt), because he met some other drinky-poo aficionados. Well, sangria is a Spanish drinky-poo. And after a few tubs of it, Justin turned the flamenco show into an, uh, inter-active event. Who needs lessons when you’ve had sufficient drinky-poos?
Anyway, Lithuanians were banned from that bar from then on.
So, that’s what I know about Spain. But hey, we got a really cheap flight to Barcelona so last Saturday we were on our way.
Now, I had hoped to learn Spanish in the days before the trip. Unfortunately work interfered and I had to leave the language lessons for the plane ride. No problem, or should I say, no problemo? By the time we landed in Barcelona I could say the following in Spanish: hello, please, thank you, one beer, Merry Christmas. Fully armed, I got the family on the Aerobus to the center of downtown Barcelona, the Place Catalyuna.
On a Saturday night, this place was rocking. There were people everywhere. There was dancing in the streets, musicians playing, street performers doing their thing. Many of the people were drunk English. The English love to whip over to Spain for the weekend to soak up sun and cheap wine. The first people we saw when we got off the bus were a gaggle of sloshed English secretaries looking for another night club to shake their pale Anglo hinnies in.
We caught a cab. Barcelona has millions of cabs and they’re cheap. Not only that, but most of the major streets have special lanes for buses and taxis only. Brilliant. Anyway, I showed the cabby an address. This was the apartment of a woman named Saskia. She’s the agent who booked us an apartment.
A travel tip here: when travelling with more than one child and staying in one location for more than a few days, book an apartment instead of a hotel room. Most hotels in Europe don’t accommodate four, or if they do they’re very expensive. An apartment is not only cheaper but it gives you room so that you can get away from your children (no small consideration). It also gives you cooking facilities, which saves money and hassle, and often has laundry, which is a life saver.
But Barcelona is such a popular destination that we had trouble finding an apartment for the days we wanted. The agent, Saskia, had one for the day after we arrived, but not for the first Saturday night. So she told us we could have her apartment for the first night at a very cheap price.
Fine.
Her address was in Barcenoleta, a residential area south of downtown. The cabby dropped us off on a narrow, dark street and took off. We looked around. The street was deserted and, well, a bit creepy. We rang the apartment doorbell. No answer. Great. We ran again. No answer. Thinking we had the wrong number we tried another and an English voice answered and told us that, yes, we had been pushing the right button for Saskia.
Great. So here we are, with our children, standing in a deserted creepy street in a county we don’t know anything about and the only sentence I can form in the language is "Merry Christmas! One beer, please."
Just then a taxis pulled out and Saskia jumped out, gushing apologies. She had been handling an emergency at another apartment. She let us in, took us up to her nice little apartment, showed us around, and then went to bed.
Dig it: she stayed in the apartment with us. In her own room. We hadn’t expected that. We thought she was going to give us her apartment for the night, but no; she was sharing the apartment for the night.
Strangely disconcerting. Also disconcerting was the fact that the boys were sharing a bed. Since they were wired from a day of travelling, this didn’t work too well and Max ended up coming into our bed for the night. He managed to keep Karen awake most of the night (I slept fine) and she woke up exhausted and crippled with a sore back. The joys of traveling with children.
As it turns out, Barceloneta is a fine little neighborhood; there’s nothing creepy about it. But the next morning we were off to the apartment we had booked for the duration, so we all bundled into another cab. The cabby, like many Spanish people, was not at all put off by the fact that we spoke no Spanish. Indeed, this encouraged him to speak more Spanish at us. I was sitting in the front with him, and so he directed his avalanche of incomprehensible questions and statements to me. I nodded stupidly and said "Merry Christmas" a few times. Eventually he figured out that I was Canadian and he got very excited. He started shouting "Alaska, Alaska" and then pulled out an envelope full of photos. So, here we are, bombing through insane Barcelona traffic while the cabby is shifting gears and showing me pictures of a vacation he took in Tokyo and Hong Kong. He had flown over Alaska to get there (he had pictures taken out the airplane window to prove it) and Alaska is, of course, the same as Canada, so we were practically neighbors. At least that’s what I think he said. I was more worried about dying in a head-on collision than in fostering international relations.
We got to the apartment and when we rang the bell the door opened immediately. What a relief. This was a classic old Spanish apartment building: there were worn marble stairs leading up a dark stairwell. A lot of stairs. And no elevator. Since our apartment was no. 3.1 I thought it would be on the third floor. Silly me. It was on the fifth. Ah, those wry Spaniards. So that my children wouldn’t feel bad about getting tired on the climb up, I paused halfway up and pretended to be short of breath. Boy, am I a considerate dad.
When we got to the apartment, with me pretending to be wheezing, we were greeted by the young woman who owned it: Madelena, or Magarita, or Manuella, or something like that. She had obviously renovated the apartment herself. What she lacked in skill and common sense she more than made up with in bad ideas. Like using two-by-fours as baseboards and attaching them to the walls with picture-hanging nails. Bad idea! Every time you walked into a room the baseboards fell off the wall. Or having a drying rack for the dishes but no draining board under it. Bad idea! You put the dishes in the rack and the water ran onto the floor. The place was decorated in early Ikea.
But it was an apartment in a very good location. There were shops and restaurants nearby, a serious shopping avenue a block away, and a huge and beautiful park just around the corner. This park houses several museums and Barcelona’s zoo, the largest zoo in Europe. While Karen took a nap I packed the kids off to the zoo and we spent a pleasant afternoon gawking at capybara and dik-diks. This zoo is also famous for having the only albino gorilla in captivity, Snowflake. A bonafide celebrity, Snowflake teases the audience by spending most of the time with his butt turned towards them, only occasionally turning around to let us look at his ugly kisser. And let me tell you, the strangest thing about this critter is not the white hair but the pink, and therefore eerily human, face. He looks a lot like my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Spanitz.
It was a good thing we hit that park on the first full day we were there, because the next day the weather started to turn. Now, as we all know, the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, but the rule is suspended during THE STORM OF THE CENTURY. That’s what the papers were calling it. The east coast of Spain was hit with rain storms of unprecedented fury while we were there. How bad were they? Beach resorts like Costa Brava and Costa Sol were hit so hard that they lost a) resorts, and b) beaches. That is, some resort buildings were destroyed by floods and several beaches were simply washed away by rough seas. No more beach. Bye bye sand. You can imagine that a number of Brits are a bit worried about their May vacations right about now. Apparently thousands of them have prepaid for beach resort holidays in towns where there are no longer beaches or resorts. They’re going to end up in a tent on a mudbank.
It wasn’t that bad in Barcelona but it was windy and wet. Hey, I get that back in Ireland. Who needs this crap in Spain? But we were stuck with it and so we planned a lot of indoor activities. Now, for Karen and I, that means museums. But it’s a funny thing about children: museums entertain them for about five minutes and that long only if the displays include mummies, animals, or mummified animals. So to placate them we had to take them to shops. Now, one of the other joys of traveling with children is that the shops they want to go into sell exactly the same sort of crap that they can buy back home. Like Lego. Why would my youngest son want to buy Lego in Spain? Why should I spend two hours looking at Lego in Barcelona? It’s not different Lego. There’s no bullfighting Lego set, or little brick Lego Flamenco dancers. It’s just Lego. But look at it we did. And my oldest son needed to find Warhammer. For those of you who don’t know, Warhammer is an elaborate war and strategy game that is played with incredibly expensive miniature figures sold by authorized dealers. It is exactly the same in every country in the world and stores that sell it are all exactly the same, but it was the only thing that my son wanted to see in any of the big cities we visited. I now know where to buy Warhammer in Paris, Rome, Dublin, and, you guessed it, Barcelona.
When we weren’t looking at crap that we could buy back home, we were eating. When you live in Ireland for a few months, you think a lot about eating: about eating things with "taste" and "texture"; about eating things that aren’t deep-fried or served with chips; about eating in a restaurant without having to mortgage your house.
This is how Spanish eating works. You get up bright and early and have a coffee and a bun. Then you go to work. At 10:30 or 11 you take a break and have a snack, usually a sandwich. This is also the time when you start drinking. It is a little disconcerting to see airport traffic controllers and cardio-vascular surgeons polishing off a bottle of wine this early in the day, but it doesn’t phase the Spanish.
Then you have lunch at 2. This is the main meal of the day. Most stores close from 2 to 5 so people can have lunch. Lunch is so important that all but the most expensive restaurants are required BY LAW to serve a set menu at lunch, the "menu del dia." This is a three-course meal that costs between 6 and 9 euro. The restaurant by our apartment put one on for 7 euro. One day I had a chick pea soup, veal and potatoes, and a crème catalana (a local specialty) for that price. And let me tell you, it was a bargain. They give you crippling amounts of food, Brobdignagian portions. The soup alone was worth 7 euro. Hell, it was worth twice that since it was a meal in itself; it would have fed a whole family of non-Lithuanians. And if you ask for wine with your meal, as Karen and I did, they don’t bring a glass; no sir, they bring a bottle. At 3 euro, who’s going to argue? Not me.
When you finish your lunch you are pole-axed, stuffed, beyond bloated. You want someone to shoot you, to pump your stomach, to induce vomiting. Standing, let alone walking, seems theoretical, something you were capable of years ago but no longer. All you can do is look around warily for a whaling ship that might be baring down on you, the harpoonist screaming "Thar she blows!" as he prepares to launch a ten-foot barbed spear into your blubbery side. With help from a passing forklift you make it to your feet, and all you can say is "I’ll never eat again," as you roll home to take part in that other Spanish tradition, the siesta. The siesta, then, is not an option; it IS going to happen. You ARE going to pass out so you might as well have a cultural excuse for it. See, after that pig-out, consciousness is painful since all the blood in your body has left your brain to circulate around your distended gut. So you sleep till four. When you wake up, you’re still stuffed from lunch. Six o’clock? Still full. Seven? Not hungry. It’s not until 9:30 at night that you realize you could, maybe, have a bite to eat. So you go to a tapas bar.
Now, tapas bars have been appearing all over the world. There are a dozen in Vancouver. And they suck. They get it wrong. And the reason they get it wrong is because non-Spanish people on non-Spanish schedules in non-Spanish cities don’t eat at 10 at night in preparation for going to a nightclub at 1am.
How do they work in Spain? You sit at the bar and there are heaps of different types of foods before you: chicken wings, clams, seafood salads, different vegetables, sausages. You point at what you want and if it’s a cold dish, it’s thrown on a small plate for you right away. If it’s hot, it’s whisked off to the chef who warms it up for you before it’s put in front of you. You order a couple, then eat them while you talk and drink. A while later, you order a few more. And so it goes for hours. Because you had that siesta, you’re not tired; because you’re Spanish, you can talk forever; because the food and drink is cheap, there is no reason to leave.
And what to drink? Well the favorite drink in Spain is cavas, which is Spanish champagne. It is very good and very cheap. It’s so good and cheap that after finishing a bottle you may be tempted to have another. And perhaps one more after that. They you’ll wake up the next morning with a throbbing headache.
Or so I’ve read.
Now, Barcelona is not only an exciting cosmopolitan city full of museums, nightclubs, and restaurants, it is also a city of architectural marvels. And the main marvel is this: how did the Barcelonians decide to let a lunatic be their architectural guru? The lunatic was, of course, Antoni Gaudi. Born in 1852, he started practicing as an architect in the 1880s. He doesn’t seem to have liked things like "right angles." Nor did he like wood or brick. No, he like swooping, curvy buildings made of ceramic bits and abstract mosaics. He liked to decorate things with statues of drooling lizards and broken tiles. He liked pillars that branched off in eccentric directions and towers shaped like trees. His work became so complicated that the church he designed, the Sagrada Familia, IS STILL BEING BUILT. People have been working on it for 115 years! And I mean working on it. We went there; there are crews of people banging away at this thing, but it is nowhere near finished, not even close. I predict that our grandchildren will not see its completion, it is that bizarre and complicated. What has been built looks like a cross between one of the elf sets in Lord of the Rings and Disneyland’s Adventure Land covered in concrete. It’s the only church I’ve seen that has turtles and geckos worked into its design. Geckos? You know, I’ve read the bible, and I don’t remember any mention of geckos. Have I been reading the wrong one? Is there a Gospel of the Lizard?
How nuts was Gaudi? He spent the last few years of his life living as a virtual hermit in a basement apartment, fine tuning the Sagrada Familia and becoming more and more devoted to obscure theological symbolism, presumably involving reptiles. One day he was on his way to church and he was struck and killed by a streetcar. He was dressed so shabbily that he was assumed to be a vagrant and his body lay unclaimed for weeks.
Yeah, that’s the guy that I want designing my city.
But really, how did this guy get more than one commission? I mean, after he bankrupts his first clients by designing something that will require bizarre building materials and end up looking like a melted birthday cake, who hires him again? Barcelonanians whacked on cavas is my guess.
So it was a good trip. Barcelona is a very hip city, almost too hip. Because it is so cosmopolitan at times you don’t feel like you’re in Spain at all. Of course if the weather was better, maybe you would. Anyway, if I return to Spain I will try to get into a smaller town, out in the country, some place where my incredible command of the language will really come in handy. I shall try to go at Christmas.
But the adventure wasn’t over yet. We landed back in Shannon airport and cleared customs. Once again, we were waved into the country without a second look. I have now entered this country FOUR TIMES and have yet to receive a stamp on my passport from an Irish official. I predict that when we leave this country at the end of June we will still not have received such a stamp and so I’ll have no proof that I was ever here.
A strange way to run a border.
Anyway, we hopped in the car and settled down for the drive back to Galway. It’s a good hour-and-a-half drive but I’m used to it now and the road between Shannon and Galway is, by Irish standards, a superhighway: it has two lanes the whole way. We’re about half way home, making good time cause there’s no traffic on the road, when I see something up ahead. What could it be? Not a car. It’s a person, but surrounded by something else. Crap on a stick! It’s a horse. No it isn’t; it’s eight horses! Eight goddam horses running around on the highway. There’s an old guy who has a rope tied to one of the beasts, but the others are running free. There are two women who are attempting to herd them by waving their arms in the air. This works just about as well as you think it would. The horses ignore them and run back and forth, sniffing at hedges, whinnying at other horses in fields, and generally getting out of control.
Now I have explained in a previous letter that horses make me nervous. They’re big, they’re really dumb, they have sharp hooves, and coffin-shaped heads. And these particular horses were really big and really dumb. And they were starting to gallop. At me. At my car. Anyone of these monsters could climb over the Citroen and reduce it to tinsel in a second, and here come eight of them. At the last minute they veer away and gallop the other way. Then one of the women who is trying to control them runs up to us. I roll down the window and am about to say, in my gentle way, "Get the fucking horses of the road" when she asks for a ride and, before I can answer, opens the back door and climbs in with the kids. The horses, she explains, are out of control.
Really? They don’t normally gallop at cars on the highway? Well imagine that.
She asks us to drive her up a ways so she can get ahead of them and help herd them. Fine. I drive ahead, wait until the beasts are all on one side of the road, then zip ahead and let her out. She thanks me and runs back to deal with horses that still show no sign of being corralled. They’re probably still running on the road. They should be in Galway by the end of this week.
Now, I’m no horseman and I’m no farmer, but I’m going to guess that the most efficient way to move a bunch of horses from one field to another is NOT to put a rope on one and then turn the rest out onto a highway and hope they’ll prance merrily into their pen. Why not rope them together? Not enough rope? Then take them one at a goddam time. But that, apparently, is not the Irish way.
Got home, drank a beer to calm down, and then noticed something very strange. The sun was shining. This happens so rarely on the west coast of Ireland that it enters folklore ("Aye, I remember the time the sun shone back in ’83. Like a great ball of fire in the sky, it was. It lasted almost 15 minutes…"). Apparently when we were in rainy Spain, Ireland had been experiencing full days of radiant sunshine.
The next morning we awoke to rain and wind.
Adios for now.
What do I know about Spain? Virtually nothing. I know sangria, bullfighting, and flamenco. The bullfighting we can deal with right away: it’s a barbaric blood sport in which a guy dressed like a figure skater wearing floppy Mickey Mouse ears tortures a cow to death. Not my thing. As for sangria and flamenco, well, my Uncle Justin introduced me to those about twenty years ago. Justin and his wife Violet have a passion for things Spanish. Their house is decorated with Spanish-style furniture. This is dark, heavy stuff that looks like it came from a medieval torture dungeon. Anyway, some twenty years ago a flamenco bar opened in Toronto and Justin insisted that all the extended family come out for a night of sangria and heel stamping. So off we went, some ten of us, to drink sangria and watch the show. Well, maybe watch isn’t the right word.
You see, Uncle Justin likes a small drinky-poo now and again. Mainly now. This is a guy who has been pulled off a train by the police for being a little too dinky-pooed. This is a guy who disappeared on a Mexican beach for three days, wearing only a bathing suit (no shoes, no wallet, no shirt), because he met some other drinky-poo aficionados. Well, sangria is a Spanish drinky-poo. And after a few tubs of it, Justin turned the flamenco show into an, uh, inter-active event. Who needs lessons when you’ve had sufficient drinky-poos?
Anyway, Lithuanians were banned from that bar from then on.
So, that’s what I know about Spain. But hey, we got a really cheap flight to Barcelona so last Saturday we were on our way.
Now, I had hoped to learn Spanish in the days before the trip. Unfortunately work interfered and I had to leave the language lessons for the plane ride. No problem, or should I say, no problemo? By the time we landed in Barcelona I could say the following in Spanish: hello, please, thank you, one beer, Merry Christmas. Fully armed, I got the family on the Aerobus to the center of downtown Barcelona, the Place Catalyuna.
On a Saturday night, this place was rocking. There were people everywhere. There was dancing in the streets, musicians playing, street performers doing their thing. Many of the people were drunk English. The English love to whip over to Spain for the weekend to soak up sun and cheap wine. The first people we saw when we got off the bus were a gaggle of sloshed English secretaries looking for another night club to shake their pale Anglo hinnies in.
We caught a cab. Barcelona has millions of cabs and they’re cheap. Not only that, but most of the major streets have special lanes for buses and taxis only. Brilliant. Anyway, I showed the cabby an address. This was the apartment of a woman named Saskia. She’s the agent who booked us an apartment.
A travel tip here: when travelling with more than one child and staying in one location for more than a few days, book an apartment instead of a hotel room. Most hotels in Europe don’t accommodate four, or if they do they’re very expensive. An apartment is not only cheaper but it gives you room so that you can get away from your children (no small consideration). It also gives you cooking facilities, which saves money and hassle, and often has laundry, which is a life saver.
But Barcelona is such a popular destination that we had trouble finding an apartment for the days we wanted. The agent, Saskia, had one for the day after we arrived, but not for the first Saturday night. So she told us we could have her apartment for the first night at a very cheap price.
Fine.
Her address was in Barcenoleta, a residential area south of downtown. The cabby dropped us off on a narrow, dark street and took off. We looked around. The street was deserted and, well, a bit creepy. We rang the apartment doorbell. No answer. Great. We ran again. No answer. Thinking we had the wrong number we tried another and an English voice answered and told us that, yes, we had been pushing the right button for Saskia.
Great. So here we are, with our children, standing in a deserted creepy street in a county we don’t know anything about and the only sentence I can form in the language is "Merry Christmas! One beer, please."
Just then a taxis pulled out and Saskia jumped out, gushing apologies. She had been handling an emergency at another apartment. She let us in, took us up to her nice little apartment, showed us around, and then went to bed.
Dig it: she stayed in the apartment with us. In her own room. We hadn’t expected that. We thought she was going to give us her apartment for the night, but no; she was sharing the apartment for the night.
Strangely disconcerting. Also disconcerting was the fact that the boys were sharing a bed. Since they were wired from a day of travelling, this didn’t work too well and Max ended up coming into our bed for the night. He managed to keep Karen awake most of the night (I slept fine) and she woke up exhausted and crippled with a sore back. The joys of traveling with children.
As it turns out, Barceloneta is a fine little neighborhood; there’s nothing creepy about it. But the next morning we were off to the apartment we had booked for the duration, so we all bundled into another cab. The cabby, like many Spanish people, was not at all put off by the fact that we spoke no Spanish. Indeed, this encouraged him to speak more Spanish at us. I was sitting in the front with him, and so he directed his avalanche of incomprehensible questions and statements to me. I nodded stupidly and said "Merry Christmas" a few times. Eventually he figured out that I was Canadian and he got very excited. He started shouting "Alaska, Alaska" and then pulled out an envelope full of photos. So, here we are, bombing through insane Barcelona traffic while the cabby is shifting gears and showing me pictures of a vacation he took in Tokyo and Hong Kong. He had flown over Alaska to get there (he had pictures taken out the airplane window to prove it) and Alaska is, of course, the same as Canada, so we were practically neighbors. At least that’s what I think he said. I was more worried about dying in a head-on collision than in fostering international relations.
We got to the apartment and when we rang the bell the door opened immediately. What a relief. This was a classic old Spanish apartment building: there were worn marble stairs leading up a dark stairwell. A lot of stairs. And no elevator. Since our apartment was no. 3.1 I thought it would be on the third floor. Silly me. It was on the fifth. Ah, those wry Spaniards. So that my children wouldn’t feel bad about getting tired on the climb up, I paused halfway up and pretended to be short of breath. Boy, am I a considerate dad.
When we got to the apartment, with me pretending to be wheezing, we were greeted by the young woman who owned it: Madelena, or Magarita, or Manuella, or something like that. She had obviously renovated the apartment herself. What she lacked in skill and common sense she more than made up with in bad ideas. Like using two-by-fours as baseboards and attaching them to the walls with picture-hanging nails. Bad idea! Every time you walked into a room the baseboards fell off the wall. Or having a drying rack for the dishes but no draining board under it. Bad idea! You put the dishes in the rack and the water ran onto the floor. The place was decorated in early Ikea.
But it was an apartment in a very good location. There were shops and restaurants nearby, a serious shopping avenue a block away, and a huge and beautiful park just around the corner. This park houses several museums and Barcelona’s zoo, the largest zoo in Europe. While Karen took a nap I packed the kids off to the zoo and we spent a pleasant afternoon gawking at capybara and dik-diks. This zoo is also famous for having the only albino gorilla in captivity, Snowflake. A bonafide celebrity, Snowflake teases the audience by spending most of the time with his butt turned towards them, only occasionally turning around to let us look at his ugly kisser. And let me tell you, the strangest thing about this critter is not the white hair but the pink, and therefore eerily human, face. He looks a lot like my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Spanitz.
It was a good thing we hit that park on the first full day we were there, because the next day the weather started to turn. Now, as we all know, the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, but the rule is suspended during THE STORM OF THE CENTURY. That’s what the papers were calling it. The east coast of Spain was hit with rain storms of unprecedented fury while we were there. How bad were they? Beach resorts like Costa Brava and Costa Sol were hit so hard that they lost a) resorts, and b) beaches. That is, some resort buildings were destroyed by floods and several beaches were simply washed away by rough seas. No more beach. Bye bye sand. You can imagine that a number of Brits are a bit worried about their May vacations right about now. Apparently thousands of them have prepaid for beach resort holidays in towns where there are no longer beaches or resorts. They’re going to end up in a tent on a mudbank.
It wasn’t that bad in Barcelona but it was windy and wet. Hey, I get that back in Ireland. Who needs this crap in Spain? But we were stuck with it and so we planned a lot of indoor activities. Now, for Karen and I, that means museums. But it’s a funny thing about children: museums entertain them for about five minutes and that long only if the displays include mummies, animals, or mummified animals. So to placate them we had to take them to shops. Now, one of the other joys of traveling with children is that the shops they want to go into sell exactly the same sort of crap that they can buy back home. Like Lego. Why would my youngest son want to buy Lego in Spain? Why should I spend two hours looking at Lego in Barcelona? It’s not different Lego. There’s no bullfighting Lego set, or little brick Lego Flamenco dancers. It’s just Lego. But look at it we did. And my oldest son needed to find Warhammer. For those of you who don’t know, Warhammer is an elaborate war and strategy game that is played with incredibly expensive miniature figures sold by authorized dealers. It is exactly the same in every country in the world and stores that sell it are all exactly the same, but it was the only thing that my son wanted to see in any of the big cities we visited. I now know where to buy Warhammer in Paris, Rome, Dublin, and, you guessed it, Barcelona.
When we weren’t looking at crap that we could buy back home, we were eating. When you live in Ireland for a few months, you think a lot about eating: about eating things with "taste" and "texture"; about eating things that aren’t deep-fried or served with chips; about eating in a restaurant without having to mortgage your house.
This is how Spanish eating works. You get up bright and early and have a coffee and a bun. Then you go to work. At 10:30 or 11 you take a break and have a snack, usually a sandwich. This is also the time when you start drinking. It is a little disconcerting to see airport traffic controllers and cardio-vascular surgeons polishing off a bottle of wine this early in the day, but it doesn’t phase the Spanish.
Then you have lunch at 2. This is the main meal of the day. Most stores close from 2 to 5 so people can have lunch. Lunch is so important that all but the most expensive restaurants are required BY LAW to serve a set menu at lunch, the "menu del dia." This is a three-course meal that costs between 6 and 9 euro. The restaurant by our apartment put one on for 7 euro. One day I had a chick pea soup, veal and potatoes, and a crème catalana (a local specialty) for that price. And let me tell you, it was a bargain. They give you crippling amounts of food, Brobdignagian portions. The soup alone was worth 7 euro. Hell, it was worth twice that since it was a meal in itself; it would have fed a whole family of non-Lithuanians. And if you ask for wine with your meal, as Karen and I did, they don’t bring a glass; no sir, they bring a bottle. At 3 euro, who’s going to argue? Not me.
When you finish your lunch you are pole-axed, stuffed, beyond bloated. You want someone to shoot you, to pump your stomach, to induce vomiting. Standing, let alone walking, seems theoretical, something you were capable of years ago but no longer. All you can do is look around warily for a whaling ship that might be baring down on you, the harpoonist screaming "Thar she blows!" as he prepares to launch a ten-foot barbed spear into your blubbery side. With help from a passing forklift you make it to your feet, and all you can say is "I’ll never eat again," as you roll home to take part in that other Spanish tradition, the siesta. The siesta, then, is not an option; it IS going to happen. You ARE going to pass out so you might as well have a cultural excuse for it. See, after that pig-out, consciousness is painful since all the blood in your body has left your brain to circulate around your distended gut. So you sleep till four. When you wake up, you’re still stuffed from lunch. Six o’clock? Still full. Seven? Not hungry. It’s not until 9:30 at night that you realize you could, maybe, have a bite to eat. So you go to a tapas bar.
Now, tapas bars have been appearing all over the world. There are a dozen in Vancouver. And they suck. They get it wrong. And the reason they get it wrong is because non-Spanish people on non-Spanish schedules in non-Spanish cities don’t eat at 10 at night in preparation for going to a nightclub at 1am.
How do they work in Spain? You sit at the bar and there are heaps of different types of foods before you: chicken wings, clams, seafood salads, different vegetables, sausages. You point at what you want and if it’s a cold dish, it’s thrown on a small plate for you right away. If it’s hot, it’s whisked off to the chef who warms it up for you before it’s put in front of you. You order a couple, then eat them while you talk and drink. A while later, you order a few more. And so it goes for hours. Because you had that siesta, you’re not tired; because you’re Spanish, you can talk forever; because the food and drink is cheap, there is no reason to leave.
And what to drink? Well the favorite drink in Spain is cavas, which is Spanish champagne. It is very good and very cheap. It’s so good and cheap that after finishing a bottle you may be tempted to have another. And perhaps one more after that. They you’ll wake up the next morning with a throbbing headache.
Or so I’ve read.
Now, Barcelona is not only an exciting cosmopolitan city full of museums, nightclubs, and restaurants, it is also a city of architectural marvels. And the main marvel is this: how did the Barcelonians decide to let a lunatic be their architectural guru? The lunatic was, of course, Antoni Gaudi. Born in 1852, he started practicing as an architect in the 1880s. He doesn’t seem to have liked things like "right angles." Nor did he like wood or brick. No, he like swooping, curvy buildings made of ceramic bits and abstract mosaics. He liked to decorate things with statues of drooling lizards and broken tiles. He liked pillars that branched off in eccentric directions and towers shaped like trees. His work became so complicated that the church he designed, the Sagrada Familia, IS STILL BEING BUILT. People have been working on it for 115 years! And I mean working on it. We went there; there are crews of people banging away at this thing, but it is nowhere near finished, not even close. I predict that our grandchildren will not see its completion, it is that bizarre and complicated. What has been built looks like a cross between one of the elf sets in Lord of the Rings and Disneyland’s Adventure Land covered in concrete. It’s the only church I’ve seen that has turtles and geckos worked into its design. Geckos? You know, I’ve read the bible, and I don’t remember any mention of geckos. Have I been reading the wrong one? Is there a Gospel of the Lizard?
How nuts was Gaudi? He spent the last few years of his life living as a virtual hermit in a basement apartment, fine tuning the Sagrada Familia and becoming more and more devoted to obscure theological symbolism, presumably involving reptiles. One day he was on his way to church and he was struck and killed by a streetcar. He was dressed so shabbily that he was assumed to be a vagrant and his body lay unclaimed for weeks.
Yeah, that’s the guy that I want designing my city.
But really, how did this guy get more than one commission? I mean, after he bankrupts his first clients by designing something that will require bizarre building materials and end up looking like a melted birthday cake, who hires him again? Barcelonanians whacked on cavas is my guess.
So it was a good trip. Barcelona is a very hip city, almost too hip. Because it is so cosmopolitan at times you don’t feel like you’re in Spain at all. Of course if the weather was better, maybe you would. Anyway, if I return to Spain I will try to get into a smaller town, out in the country, some place where my incredible command of the language will really come in handy. I shall try to go at Christmas.
But the adventure wasn’t over yet. We landed back in Shannon airport and cleared customs. Once again, we were waved into the country without a second look. I have now entered this country FOUR TIMES and have yet to receive a stamp on my passport from an Irish official. I predict that when we leave this country at the end of June we will still not have received such a stamp and so I’ll have no proof that I was ever here.
A strange way to run a border.
Anyway, we hopped in the car and settled down for the drive back to Galway. It’s a good hour-and-a-half drive but I’m used to it now and the road between Shannon and Galway is, by Irish standards, a superhighway: it has two lanes the whole way. We’re about half way home, making good time cause there’s no traffic on the road, when I see something up ahead. What could it be? Not a car. It’s a person, but surrounded by something else. Crap on a stick! It’s a horse. No it isn’t; it’s eight horses! Eight goddam horses running around on the highway. There’s an old guy who has a rope tied to one of the beasts, but the others are running free. There are two women who are attempting to herd them by waving their arms in the air. This works just about as well as you think it would. The horses ignore them and run back and forth, sniffing at hedges, whinnying at other horses in fields, and generally getting out of control.
Now I have explained in a previous letter that horses make me nervous. They’re big, they’re really dumb, they have sharp hooves, and coffin-shaped heads. And these particular horses were really big and really dumb. And they were starting to gallop. At me. At my car. Anyone of these monsters could climb over the Citroen and reduce it to tinsel in a second, and here come eight of them. At the last minute they veer away and gallop the other way. Then one of the women who is trying to control them runs up to us. I roll down the window and am about to say, in my gentle way, "Get the fucking horses of the road" when she asks for a ride and, before I can answer, opens the back door and climbs in with the kids. The horses, she explains, are out of control.
Really? They don’t normally gallop at cars on the highway? Well imagine that.
She asks us to drive her up a ways so she can get ahead of them and help herd them. Fine. I drive ahead, wait until the beasts are all on one side of the road, then zip ahead and let her out. She thanks me and runs back to deal with horses that still show no sign of being corralled. They’re probably still running on the road. They should be in Galway by the end of this week.
Now, I’m no horseman and I’m no farmer, but I’m going to guess that the most efficient way to move a bunch of horses from one field to another is NOT to put a rope on one and then turn the rest out onto a highway and hope they’ll prance merrily into their pen. Why not rope them together? Not enough rope? Then take them one at a goddam time. But that, apparently, is not the Irish way.
Got home, drank a beer to calm down, and then noticed something very strange. The sun was shining. This happens so rarely on the west coast of Ireland that it enters folklore ("Aye, I remember the time the sun shone back in ’83. Like a great ball of fire in the sky, it was. It lasted almost 15 minutes…"). Apparently when we were in rainy Spain, Ireland had been experiencing full days of radiant sunshine.
The next morning we awoke to rain and wind.
Adios for now.
Ireland: St. Pat's day
In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .
We are leaving on an eight-day trip to Italy this weekend so I will be out of touch for a while. Just thought I’d drop a short note before then explaining a little about St. Patrick’s Day, which was celebrated this past Sunday.
Now, you probably want to know, right off the bat, did we go out to a pub, drink green beer, wear little green bowlers, and sing maudlin Irish songs? The answer is no. We did not go out. And to explain why, I have to back up to Saturday night. See, we have been invited out for a great number of pleasant lunches and dinners since we’ve been here, so we decided to throw a party on Saturday night and invite all the new friends we had made. We billed it as a Canadian-style party: I found some Canadian beer, Karen made butter tarts, and I made sushi (which is the fast food of Vancouver). Pretty much everyone we invited came. The Irish love a party. People showed up at the door that I didn’t even recognize. Like the people we had sat beside at the "horse" racing night. I didn’t know I had invited them, I didn’t know their names, but there they were with bells on. Anyway, it was a pretty good party, made all the better by the fact that it wasn’t our house so who cares what happens? Fire on the carpet? Put it out with a few bottles of red wine. No room to dance? Put the couch and arm chairs on the front lawn. It’s not raining that hard.
Actually, there wasn’t that much dancing. Karen and boys had packed a lot of their CDs from home, and these are what we played at the party. Good dance stuff: Fat Boy Slim, Chemical Brothers, Utah Saints, and some great CDs my brother has burned for me over the years. Mega dance stuff. But not for middle-aged Irish people. Our neighbors looked positively aghast. "Paul," says our neighbor Eamon, "I can nip next door and get some Leo Sayer CDs." You do and you’re a dead man, replies I.
Anyway, we asked a lot of our guests about what we should do on Sunday, St. Pat’s day. The universal response was go to the parade, maybe go to the pub around noon for one pint, then get the hell out of the drinking establishments and the city, rush home and batten down the hatches.
Wha?
Well, remember how I told you that 90% of the crime and most of the illness in this country was related to alcohol abuse? I wasn’t kidding. A recent newspaper article speculated that the Irish medical service is on the brink of collapse because of drink-related accidents. One quarter of all medical emergencies in this country are caused by alcohol-related stupidity. On weekends, fully 80% of the cases admitted to emergency are alcohol related. This number goes way up on St. Patrick’s day. The pubs become battles between man and booze, and the city streets the war. The downtown was described as a "drunken field party" the following day, and apparently public urination, vomiting, and vandalism reached heights not seen since the last Viking invasion.
How drunk were people? Well, remember the case of the man who got drunk and head-butted a van? Some guy on St. Pat’s day head-butted a wall. A wall. How drunk to you have to be do that? To reel out of a pub, turn to a stone wall, and start shouting, "What are you looking at? Hey! I’m talking to you! What are you looking at? You want a piece of me? Huh? You want a piece of me?!" before driving your forehead into the wall to teach it a lesson?
The wall won.
Now, here’s the magic question: why do the Irish get so hammered on St. Patrick’s day? The obvious reason is that since St. Pat’s is the national saint and drinking is the national pastime, it’s downright patriotic to mix the two on this day of the year. But the real reason is religious. See, St. Patrick’s day comes in the middle of Lent, and Lent is taken very seriously in this country. There are radio shows and newspaper articles on fasting and abstinence. People make public pledges to refrain from some pleasure for the pre-Easter season. I myself have given up liver for Lent. Not duck or goose liver, but cow and pig liver. Not a bite shall pass these lips until I see the Easter bunny, and maybe not even then.
Now, if you’re a good Catholic Irishman and you want to really feel the pain of abstinence, what would you pledge to give up? That’s right: booze. The most common Lent sacrifice is alcohol. The pubs get very quiet in the days before Easter.
But here’s the rub: by long tradition, St. Patrick’s day is exempt from Lent. It’s the Lent holiday from abstinence. So if you have pledged to give up drink for Lent, you can still drink on St. Paddy’s day. Indeed, you have to get 40 days worth of drinking into one day. And the Irish manage it. Hence, no sane person wants to be in a pub or downtown after about 12pm on St. Patrick’s Day.
So we just went to the parade in the morning. Actually we had to go to the parade since our youngest son was in it, marching with his school. It was a cool, wet, and blustery day, but the entire city turned out to watch. People had dyed their hair green, were wearing goofy green hats, and had shamrocks pinned to the their lapels. The parade itself, in best Irish fashion, was badly organized but heart felt. There were the requisite bands, the hoards of seniors, the school kids, the clubs and organizations. One truck carried a big hunk of stone. No explanation was given, but people applauded the rock enthusiastically.
The smallest and least impressive entry in the parade? The Irish Teetotalers League. It was comprised of exactly two old men, both wearing the hang-dog faces of people who know their cause is lost long before it has begun. No one applauded them.
That’s all for now. I have to pack. Coming soon: we conquer Italy.
We are leaving on an eight-day trip to Italy this weekend so I will be out of touch for a while. Just thought I’d drop a short note before then explaining a little about St. Patrick’s Day, which was celebrated this past Sunday.
Now, you probably want to know, right off the bat, did we go out to a pub, drink green beer, wear little green bowlers, and sing maudlin Irish songs? The answer is no. We did not go out. And to explain why, I have to back up to Saturday night. See, we have been invited out for a great number of pleasant lunches and dinners since we’ve been here, so we decided to throw a party on Saturday night and invite all the new friends we had made. We billed it as a Canadian-style party: I found some Canadian beer, Karen made butter tarts, and I made sushi (which is the fast food of Vancouver). Pretty much everyone we invited came. The Irish love a party. People showed up at the door that I didn’t even recognize. Like the people we had sat beside at the "horse" racing night. I didn’t know I had invited them, I didn’t know their names, but there they were with bells on. Anyway, it was a pretty good party, made all the better by the fact that it wasn’t our house so who cares what happens? Fire on the carpet? Put it out with a few bottles of red wine. No room to dance? Put the couch and arm chairs on the front lawn. It’s not raining that hard.
Actually, there wasn’t that much dancing. Karen and boys had packed a lot of their CDs from home, and these are what we played at the party. Good dance stuff: Fat Boy Slim, Chemical Brothers, Utah Saints, and some great CDs my brother has burned for me over the years. Mega dance stuff. But not for middle-aged Irish people. Our neighbors looked positively aghast. "Paul," says our neighbor Eamon, "I can nip next door and get some Leo Sayer CDs." You do and you’re a dead man, replies I.
Anyway, we asked a lot of our guests about what we should do on Sunday, St. Pat’s day. The universal response was go to the parade, maybe go to the pub around noon for one pint, then get the hell out of the drinking establishments and the city, rush home and batten down the hatches.
Wha?
Well, remember how I told you that 90% of the crime and most of the illness in this country was related to alcohol abuse? I wasn’t kidding. A recent newspaper article speculated that the Irish medical service is on the brink of collapse because of drink-related accidents. One quarter of all medical emergencies in this country are caused by alcohol-related stupidity. On weekends, fully 80% of the cases admitted to emergency are alcohol related. This number goes way up on St. Patrick’s day. The pubs become battles between man and booze, and the city streets the war. The downtown was described as a "drunken field party" the following day, and apparently public urination, vomiting, and vandalism reached heights not seen since the last Viking invasion.
How drunk were people? Well, remember the case of the man who got drunk and head-butted a van? Some guy on St. Pat’s day head-butted a wall. A wall. How drunk to you have to be do that? To reel out of a pub, turn to a stone wall, and start shouting, "What are you looking at? Hey! I’m talking to you! What are you looking at? You want a piece of me? Huh? You want a piece of me?!" before driving your forehead into the wall to teach it a lesson?
The wall won.
Now, here’s the magic question: why do the Irish get so hammered on St. Patrick’s day? The obvious reason is that since St. Pat’s is the national saint and drinking is the national pastime, it’s downright patriotic to mix the two on this day of the year. But the real reason is religious. See, St. Patrick’s day comes in the middle of Lent, and Lent is taken very seriously in this country. There are radio shows and newspaper articles on fasting and abstinence. People make public pledges to refrain from some pleasure for the pre-Easter season. I myself have given up liver for Lent. Not duck or goose liver, but cow and pig liver. Not a bite shall pass these lips until I see the Easter bunny, and maybe not even then.
Now, if you’re a good Catholic Irishman and you want to really feel the pain of abstinence, what would you pledge to give up? That’s right: booze. The most common Lent sacrifice is alcohol. The pubs get very quiet in the days before Easter.
But here’s the rub: by long tradition, St. Patrick’s day is exempt from Lent. It’s the Lent holiday from abstinence. So if you have pledged to give up drink for Lent, you can still drink on St. Paddy’s day. Indeed, you have to get 40 days worth of drinking into one day. And the Irish manage it. Hence, no sane person wants to be in a pub or downtown after about 12pm on St. Patrick’s Day.
So we just went to the parade in the morning. Actually we had to go to the parade since our youngest son was in it, marching with his school. It was a cool, wet, and blustery day, but the entire city turned out to watch. People had dyed their hair green, were wearing goofy green hats, and had shamrocks pinned to the their lapels. The parade itself, in best Irish fashion, was badly organized but heart felt. There were the requisite bands, the hoards of seniors, the school kids, the clubs and organizations. One truck carried a big hunk of stone. No explanation was given, but people applauded the rock enthusiastically.
The smallest and least impressive entry in the parade? The Irish Teetotalers League. It was comprised of exactly two old men, both wearing the hang-dog faces of people who know their cause is lost long before it has begun. No one applauded them.
That’s all for now. I have to pack. Coming soon: we conquer Italy.
Ireland: a trip to Italy
In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .
Where do you live? In a nice house on a big lot in beautiful West Vancouver? Or a character home or snazzy apartment in trendy Kitsilano? Maybe you live in an older house on a tree-lined street in London, Ontario or in Toronto’s quiet west end. Perhaps you live in a mansion on a multi-acre estate in Carmel, California.
Well, if you live in any of these places, you are a fucking idiot. And guess what? I’m a fucking idiot too. And why are we fucking idiots? BECAUSE WE COULD BE LIVING IN ITALY! In fact, if any of us had any sense or guts we would sell everything we own today, liquidate the whole lot, then use that money to rent a modest apartment in Italy, and live the dolce vita until the funds ran out. If the money only lasted a few years, fine. When it’s all gone, we kill ourselves. At least we got to spend that time in Italy.
Yes, gentlemen, Italy is that good. But before I go into the details of our extraordinary trip there, let me quickly do a blow by blow comparison of Italy and Ireland.
Italian people: charming and gregarious
Irish people: charming and gregarious
Italian religious practice: overwhelmingly Catholic, but no one goes to church until after his 60th birthday.
Irish religious practice: overwhelmingly Catholic, but no one goes to church until after his 60th birthday.
Italian politics: labyrinth and corrupt
Irish politics: labyrinth and corrupt
Italian countryside: rolling hills, beautiful fields, all dotted with olive trees and vineyards.
Irish countryside: rolling hills, rocky fields, all dotted with litter and bags of household trash.
Italian spring weather: warm, brilliantly sunny days followed by cool, crisp nights.
Irish spring weather: cold rainy windy days followed by cold rainy windy nights.
Italian urban nightlife: as soon as the day cools off, Italians put on their best clothes and stroll to the shops, stopping for gelati and conversation with their neighbours.
Irish urban nightlife: as soon as four o’clock rolls around, the Irish get roaring drunk and head butt walls.
Italian dinner: vino della casa rosso con aqua minerale, antipasto misto di mare, gnocchi speck e mascarpone, tagliata ai porcini, panna cotta con salse, grappa
Irish dinner: beer, beans on toast, cream egg
Now, to afford this trip we once more availed ourselves of the tender mercies of Ryanair. This time we flew into Bologna. Or at least I thought we were flying into Bologna. In fact, we were flying into Ryanair’s Bologna which, like Ryanair’s Paris, is actually a little airport located in a goat field 1000s of kilometres from the actual urban entity it purports to serve. So we landed in a town called Forli which, as far as I could make out, was located in northern Turkey. We had to take a lengthy bus ride into Bologna and from there made our way to the train station to catch a choo-choo to Florence. We ended up in a compartment with a very nervous man from Venice who couldn’t speak a word of English but tried to explain to us that in Venice there is a lot of water. Fascinating. The hallways of the train were filled with lads going to a soccer match. Now, if you got on a train in England that was full of young men going to a soccer game, you can probably be sure that you’d be dead before the train reaches the station. The Italians, however, while fanatical about their soccer are not hooligans and so the fans entertained us with songs for about an hour before piling off the train.
And then we were in Florence.
Now, I have written to some of you about the delights of Florence before. Suffice to say it remains a city of stunning beauty and overwhelming crowds. It also has the Ponte Vecchio, the famous bridge lined with gold shops. Curiously, whenever I’m in Florence Karen wants to visit the Ponte Vecchio. I can’t cross the damn bridge without my VISA card going radioactive. Next time I go I’m renting a boat to cross the river.
And then on to Rome, the eternal city. A nice train ride deposited us in Rome’s huge train station, then we got on the metro and headed south from downtown to the Colli Albani station where our apartment was located. Roman subway cars are done up in a retro style. In a tribute to New York of the 1970s, they are covered in graffiti. Actually, although Rome is a remarkably clean city, virtually every wall in the city is covered in graffiti. Much of the graffiti is unintelligible, but the most common word one sees sprayed on the walls of Rome is "Roma." Roman graffiti artists, then, spend hours reminding us where we are. Many thanks, friends.
We showed up at the apartment in Rome, rang the door bell and nothing happened. Momentary panic. What if we’re lost? What if we paid for an apartment that doesn’t exist? If it’s some sort of scam? While we were fretting on the sidewalk two different people came up and offered to help us. They checked the address for us, checked the name on the doorbell, and both concluded that our hosts must have stepped out for a moment. Nice folk. I rang the doorbell one more time and a woman answered. She was not expecting us for a few hours and so was busy cleaning the apartment. We went in to drop our bags off and I couldn’t figure out what she was cleaning. This was the cleanest apartment I had ever seen. It was cleaner, much cleaner, than the last hospital I had been in (in Ireland), but it was not up to her standards, so we went out for a walk to give her time to boil the walls.
We grabbed some terrific pizza slices downstairs. The woman behind the counter apologised that there was no pasta left for lunch, but if we would please come back tomorrow there would be lots. After we ate, we headed into the park that was across from the apartment building. This is the Antica Valley, a huge valley that was a sacred site in Etruscan and Roman times. It is laced with walking and biking trails; it contains the remains of Roman aqueducts and a bath; it has ancient Christian sites in it. It also has a stream and caves. In other words, it is paradise for boys, including this boy, who just wanted to touch the Roman aqueduct over and over.
This park also contains a working farm. The farmhouse looks like something out of a Mario Puzo novel. Because of this farm it was possible to walk through the park and suddenly find yourself in a flock of sheep. We did. It was freaky. Sheep close up are a fair size. They look at you with dark, brooding eyes. I don’t trust them. Those hooves look razor sharp. This farm also meant that in the evenings we could sit on the apartment balcony, sipping our Camparis, and watch a girl herd cows on her moped.
On this first visit to the park, as we were heading back towards the apartment, we noticed an old woman sitting in the yard of the farm. Beside her was a sign advertising home-made cheese. Karen approached her and asked about the cheese. The old woman was delighted to see us. Now, my Italian is not as good as Karen’s, but I think this is what she said: "What beautiful boys you have! You are too young to have such big boys! Boys are the best; you should have more! You are from Canada? I have relatives in Toronto! Your husband is from Toronto? Perhaps he knows my niece, Anna. She was at university there. He was too? And his name is Paul B? The same name as the monster who seduced young Anna, robbed her of her virtue and left her broken-hearted to become a nun? The same Paul B that my family has sworn a blood oath to be revenged upon? Aeeeiiii! Georgio! Luigi! Come quick! Our prayers to the Virgin have been answered! Vengeance is ours! Bring the cleavers!"
Well, the first part anyway. She was very taken with the boys. Anyway, she led us into a room of her house where she makes the cheese. There were three sheep carcasses hanging on meat hooks in the same room. That’ll teach them to stare at tourists. We bought a hunk of cheese and, after listening to many compliments on our children, headed back to the apartment which was now so clean you could have performed brain surgery in it.
So, let us review: since arriving in Rome I had discussions with the locals, ate great food, touched a Roman aqueduct and bath, stood on an ancient Christian tomb, been menaced by sheep, been inside an Italian farmhouse, bought handmade cheese.
I had been in town for two hours.
Rome is my kind of town.
Now, Karen and I had been to Italy before, but this trip was different because we were travelling with children. It is always a delight to expose your progeny to the masterpieces of western art and culture if only to watch their unmediated innocent reactions. Take them to see the fresco of the Annunciation by Fra Angelico in San Marco, and listen to them marvel: "This is boring, this is stupid, I’m hungry, my feet hurt, I want to watch TV." Bring them into St. Peter’s Basilica during an Easter Mass and hear them gasp: "This is boring this is stupid I’m hungry my feet hurt I want to watch TV." Bring them into the Coliseum itself, a structure no less daunting and impressive for all the images we have seen of it and hear them cry, "ThisisboringthisisstupidI’mhungrymyfeethurtIwanttowatchTV."
Yes, travelling with children can be trying, especially if you’re culture hounds like we are. But travelling in Italy with children is actually a good idea. It’s such a good idea that when I move to Italy I’m going to start a company called Rent-a-Kid. This will allow tourists to the country to rent a cute child for the duration o f the trip. You see, the Italians are nuts about kids (though they don’t have as many as the Irish do). As the conversation with the cheese lady demonstrated, having children with you when you deal with Italians immediately opens doors and prompts conversations. For example, the first day we were in Rome we stopped at a store near our apartment to buy some supplies. We had the boys with us. Now, everyone was great in the store: friendly and helpful. Since the boys just stood to the side during our transactions, I didn’t think that they had even been noticed. But the next day when Karen and I went back to the same store, the woman behind the cash machine began to ask us, "Where are the boys? At the apartment? Do you have enough food for them? Do they like Rome? The big one needs to eat a lot!" One day on the subway, an elderly man turned to Max and said, "Hey boy! How you like-a Rome? Issa nice?" He ruffled Max’s hair as he got of the train. Rent-a-Kid. Invest now. Just send me a blank cheque. I’ll handle the rest.
Of course the Italians are warm and chatty even when you are not packing children, especially when you get away from the tourist areas. And so the Italian shop keepers, at least in our neighbourhood, were incredibly friendly. We were warmly greeted as regulars if we entered the same store twice. Back in Ireland I have been going to the same grocery store virtually every day for three months now and the only clerk who acknowledges my existence is a retarded girl with a crush on my eldest son.
Anyway, we couldn’t see everything Rome had to offer so we made a quick decision and headed to the Vatican. We entered Vatican city and I, for one, was disappointed that there wasn’t a passport office. But the central square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica is overwhelming. We’re talking big-time grandiosity. It even shushed the kids for a minute. We then headed into St. Peter’s Basilica itself but found that there was a mass in progress and so tourists were not allowed to circulate through the building. The Swiss Guards were blocking the way. Real macho looking guys, the Swiss Guards. Yeah, if I was the pope I’d want a body guard comprised of guys in leotards with bed pans on their heads. They’re armed with halberds, which are essentially long spears with a little axe heads attached to one end. Brilliant weapon to use against terrorists. A psycho come at me with an AK-47 I want a Swiss guard with a long stick defending me.
Anyway, things were crowded because this was the day before Good Friday -- So-so Thursday -- and Catholics from all over the world were jammed into the cathedral. I led the family out and set off to find the Sistine Chapel. As I later discovered, you can only access the Sistine by progressing through the length of Vatican Museum, a huge building that contains such holy relics as Christ’s foreskin. I didn’t know that at the time, however, and my map seemed to indicate that we could get to the Chapel if we went around the north wall of the Basilica. So off we went. There were some other people coming and going that way, so I figured we were on the right track. Finally we came to an unmarked door through which a small number of people were passing. We went in, up a flight of stairs, and came face to face with a Swiss Guard who gave me a booklet and ushered us to the right. We were back in St. Peter’s Basilica. The door we entered was for late comers to the mass. The booklet was an outline of the service (in Italian) containing hymns and responses. We were ushered to chairs in the north nave of the church to watch the rest of the service.
Now I’m as lapsed a Catholic as you are going to find, but standing in St. Peter’s which, let’s face it, ain’t a bad dump, watching a mass being conducted in Italian and Latin, well I was ready to kiss the Pope’s ring. Or at least go to confession. There are confession booths all over the Basilica and each has a sign on it declaring the language in which confession in that particular booth is being conducted: German, French, Italian, English, Inuit. I was ready to head into the English booth and let the priest have it: "Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It’s been, uh, forty years since my last confession. Since that time I have taken the Lord’s name in vain three times. Okay, maybe four. But if you hit your thumb it doesn’t count, does it? Or, if, you know, you say it in the throes of, like, uh, passion? Anyway, better go with five times. And I coveted my neighbour’s weedeater. That’s about it. And could you put in a good word with Santa Claus for me?"
Never got into the Sistine Chapel but had a good lunch near the Vatican.
Other sights: the Trevi Fountain is exquisite but it’s a bit hard to see. As soon as you sit down on the benches to admire it, a street hawker will stand in front of you and try to sell you some piece of crap. The piece of crap du jour when we were there was a toy made of a little rubber sack full of goo that could be pulled into different shapes to make funny faces. The first hawker stood in front of me and demonstrated the piece of junk. I said no. He kept demonstrating. I said no again, louder. He moved on. As soon as he stepped aside another hawker took his place and demonstrated the exact same stupid toy. I got rid of him and a THIRD hawker stepped up with the same item. "Oh yes," I said to him, "I was just waiting for YOUR piece of crap. The other identical pieces of crap being sold by identical vendors mere seconds ago did not move me the way your piece of crap and sophisticated sales pitch do. I’ll take a hundred pieces of crap, please. Do you accept VISA?"
Before I could finish the transaction I heard a strange sound. It was familiar, but something I had not heard in years. As it got louder I couldn’t believe it. It was the Hare Krishna chant. And lo and behold, here they come: a bevy of bald, face-painted white boys’n’girls in saffron togas beating drums, playing saxophones badly, and chanting George Harrison melodies. They stopped to dance and jam beside the fountain.
I got to tell you, it was a weird watching the Hare Krishna swirling around, smiling their "I have discarded my brain for Krishna" smiles in front of the Trevi Fountain. What were they thinking? That Italians are going to forsake the 2,000 years of Catholicism for a shaved head and war paint? Forsake the true Church so they can dance like Smurfs in the street? They didn’t make any converts at the fountain, so they went merrily on their way, possibly to the Vatican. The pope is going to be selling incense on street corners any day now.
As in any big tourist town, there were portrait artists. You know the guys; they sit under and umbrella on a folding chair displaying their brilliant sketches of people like Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts. You pony up some cash and they do a portrait of your loved one. Well, there were a couple of them around the Trevi Fountain, but one in particular caught my eye. The celebrity portraits that he had on display were terrifying. The one marked "Tom Cruise" looked like a llama. Another one was marked "Marilyn Monroe,’ but it could have been a white Uncle Ben in drag. A cat could draw better than this guy. He was doing a brisk business.
What was the strangest thing that we saw in Rome? Well, there is a church that is run by the Capuchin order of monks. It’s not particularly interesting architecturally, but to the side of the main church is second entrance. You go in there, pay a donation, then you are allowed into five smallish rooms with low vaulted ceilings. Each of these rooms has been decorated with human bones. There are bones on the ceiling and walls. The light fixtures are made of bones. At the front of each room is a large shrine made of human skulls. Different types and sizes of bones are used for different effect. There are individual vertebrae, jaws, and split hip bones arranged in bizarre patterns. There are also some complete skeletons that have been given wings (made of bones) or implements like sickles (made of bones). There are a few complete mummified monks sitting in one of the rooms, and other rooms have piles of dirt (brought from Jerusalem) on the floor under which nestle human organs. In the last of the rooms is a sign that reads, "What you are, we were; what we are, you will become."
Gee. Thanks. Back at ya.
Now, let us think about this. This bizarre temple of doom is designed to remind us that we are going to die. Alright. I can dig that. But to make it, these damn monks had to dig up their thousands of their predecessors, separate and cut the bones, then nail them to the walls and ceilings in patterns. This took over two hundred years to complete.
How many beers would you have to drink before you even thought of doing such a thing? Before you turned to your friends and said, "Hey guys! I just had a great idea. Let’s dig up our 4,000 of our dead homeboys and do a Martha Stewart with their remains"? How much would they have had to drink to agree? "Gee Paul, what a great idea! I could slap myself for not thinking of it first! Of course! All those bones are just mildewing in the earth when they could be decorating our walls! First one to the crypt is a rotten egg!" And then imagine the arguments over patterns: "No no no! This wall is just TOO femur! That is SO tenth century. We need a splash of something lighter, something fun, something that says ‘Yes I’m a dead monk but dammit I still rock.’ Call me crazy, people, but I’m thinking rib cages."
We didn’t get to see as many of the Roman ruins as I would have liked because there were large line-ups and I wasn’t going to subject the boys to standing around for hours. Okay, that’s a lie. They were not going to let me subject them to hours of standing in line-ups. So we only stood in line for one, the Coliseum. And it was worth it. This thing is amazing. Figure, it could hold 50,000 spectators but was so well designed it could be evacuated, in case of fire, in five minutes. Not only did it contain elevators in the floor to allow the lifting of combatants and animals, it could be filled with water so sea battles could be staged in it. In the nineteenth century botanists found over 400 rare species of plant growing in the Coliseum. They have come in the feed and dung of exotic animals that had been imported for the games.
Now, here’s a little secret: you know what all the middle-aged male tourists did when they got to the centre of the Coliseum? They straightened their backs, affected a Russell Crowe-type glower, and whispered, "I am gladiator." Their wives were appropriately embarrassed, as was mine.
All too soon we had to leave Rome and catch a train to Pisa. Shared a compartment with an older Australian couple who were doing an eight-week tour of Europe before meeting their daughter in England. Boy, can Australians talk. The wife did not shut her mouth to draw breath for three hours. And she found everything exciting: "Hey mate! What’s that you’re carrying your clothes in? A suitcase? Good on ya!" She gave me recipes, told me where to stay in half a dozen European cities, and extended a standing invitation to crash at their apartment in Sydney.
Now, Pisa is actually a nice little town. The only reason anyone goes to it, of course, is to see the tower. Yes, it leans. Yes, it is very odd to see. But odder still is the story behind it. It was designed by a guy called Pisano. He built it as a bell tower to the Pisa duomo, or cathedral. Fine. But during construction the thing started to lean when it was only three stories high. Now, if I was building a tower, hell, if I was building a fence, I would get worried if it started to lean so early into the project. But not Pisano. He kept building. What was he thinking? That making it taller would mask the fact that it’s falling over? What did he say to his employers? "Leaning? It’s not leaning. That’s an optical illusion causes by, uh, the slope of the lawn. Let’s put ten more floors on it and THEN see if it’s leaning."
The only problem with Pisa was the hotel. See, it was a serious budget hotel run by a family. It only had about ten rooms. Our room was conveniently located on the first floor near the kitchen, the reception desk, and the cleaning supply closet. Nice and quiet. It was decorated by someone with a sadistic sense of humour.
The family that ran it was Sicilian. The grandfather didn’t like having people in his house. He told my boys to be quiet at two in the afternoon. The daughter, a homely little thing, was friendly but spaced out. The mother glared at everyone who entered. The son was painfully shy. The father was easygoing and nonchalant. They had a neurotic Pomeranian that hid under a sofa and growled at people. We only stayed one night but managed to make a nuisance of ourselves by sleeping in until 9 the next morning. Since breakfast was being served from 8-10, we didn’t think this was a problem, but when we stumbled out to the dining room we found that day-light saving’s time had gone into effect the night before. It was, in fact, 10:15 and breakfast was no longer being served. Fine, we thought, this place was kinda creepy anyway. But no, here comes the father, who, with a wave of his hand let’s us know that it’s no big deal, and so the painfully shy son goes about the business of making us breakfast and trying to talk to us, a process that causes him to blush and stammer. Things were made more uncomfortable by the dining room which was decorated with lampfixtures that must had come from the set of Battleship Galatica, portraits of Jesus pointing at his bleeding exposed heart, and framed photographs of various family members, including a young girl who had, apparently, won a rollerskating competition. As we munched our cornettos, the unseen Pomeranian snarled at us from under the chair. Let me tell you, it’s hard to eat breakfast when the arm chair keeps growling.
We got out of there as quickly as we could and opted for hanging around in front of the train station for a few hours before our train arrived rather than try to squeeze some more time out of the Hotel R.
Our last Italian stop was Genova, or Genoa. Damn Italians can’t make up their minds about the names of their own cities. Anyway, it’s a rather polluted industrial port that feels a bit shabby around the edges and downright unsavoury in some areas. It is still interesting, however, because it’s vertical. That is, every second street is a staircase leading up to another level. Going to the corner for a quart of milk in this city is like spending two hours on a stair master. Want to get in shape? Like women with strong thighs? Move to Genoa.
And then back to Ireland. The boys, let it be said, were not thrilled to return.
But the travel bug had bitten us, and two days after returning Karen declared that we were driving to Knock.
The town of Knock lies about an hour’s drive north of Galway deep in county Mayo. It was utterly undistinguished for years. Then, in 1879, fifteen locals saw a vision of the Virgin, a couple of saints, a sheep, and a whole handful of angels hovering over the gable of the church. The vision lasted, like, an hour. After the event, the Vatican sent in its hoax-busters and interviewed the visionaries. The Church decided that they had a bona fide miracle on its hands and Knock became the second most important Marian shrine in Europe, second only to Lourdes. It is now visited by tens of thousands of pilgrims and curiosity seekers a year. The pope has been there, as has Mother Theresa. It is on the Catholic map.
How have the good people of Knock responded to this sudden prominence? Well, they tore down most of the original church to build a godawful ugly building that features a giant picture window so people can sit outside on benches and watch the mass. It’s like a giant religious terrarium. Instead of a lizard and a few plants, you have a priest, a congregation, and the Host. You are discouraged from tapping on the glass. On one exterior wall of the church they built a giant rosary. That was insufficiently ugly, however, so a new basilica was slapped up beside the church. Now, a quick question: who the hell designs modern churches? The same guy who designs mini-putt courses? Cause this thing, like so many religious buildings thrown up on the twentieth century, is as ugly as a mud wall. But not ugly enough. No. So the grounds were decorated with statues of the virgin and Stations of the Cross that were done by the guy who designs My Little Pony.
Finally the church grounds were ugly enough to suit the Irish. Now came the matter of redesigning the town itself. All the buildings along the main drag were turned into religious souvenir shops. You can get anything in these stores. Want a snow ball with the Virgin inside? No problem. How about a bust of Mary with a blue light in it that can be set to blink mode? Got ‘em. And what about prayers? That’s right, prayers printed on scrolls, tea towels, t-shirts, jockey shorts, home pregnancy kits, ant farms. We heard people asking the store help for specific prayers: "Would you be having a prayer for an expectant mother?" "Oh yes dear, loads of them. Over here." "And would you have a prayer for a hangover?" "What type, dear? Beer? Whiskey, was it? Or mixed?"
Now, the only reason we were here is because Karen is fascinated by this stuff. See, she was raised Lutheran. Her grandfather was a Lutheran minister. The Lutherans, as the first successful Christian heresy, were very careful to define themselves against the Catholic Church from which they had broken. If Catholics like it, Lutherans are against it. No stained glass windows or bloody statues of Christ in a Lutheran church. No celibate priests, bishops or pope. No confession, no icons, no rosary, no Virgin Mother to pray to. No cool outfits, censors, prayer candles. No forgiveness, no talking, no fun. All a Lutheran needs is the knowledge that he is inadequate in his faith and he should feel guilty for everything that he’s ever done or will do.
Raised in such a faith, Karen is dazzled by the excesses of European and Latin American Catholicism. Those icons, statues, bottles of holy water, books of obscure prayers, are for her a form of theological pornography. A turn on. People are always a bit surprised to come to our house and see all the crucifixes, pictures of saints, and religious candles spread around. They figure they’re in for a bible-thumping evening. But no, it’s a personal kink.
But Knock was too much even for her: the three gallon bottles for collecting holy water; the plates with a picture of Jesus on them; the ashtrays with prayers wore her down. We decided to grab a quick lunch and head home.
Big mistake. We should have known as soon as we walked into the restaurant that we were in trouble. It smelled of mould. There were religious knick-knacks for sale along one wall. The "menu" listed a score of things, like hamburgers, all with chips. They offered chips with chips. I finally settled on soup and bread. Max had fish and chips. Karen had a ham sandwich and soup. Christian, the smartest of us all, was at home in bed. Max’s "fish and chips" was two undercooked fish sticks and some droopy fries. The soup was Knorr’s, you know, the dehydrated stuff. They had not added quite enough water so there was still powder at the bottom of the bowl. The ham sandwich was two pieces of moist white bread, a hunk of butter placed, but not spread, on one of them, and a slice of straight-from-the-vacuum-pack ham. It was not just inedible, it was not food. It wasn’t even the illusion of food. It was hell on a plate.
This meal cost me 24 euro. That’s, like, $27 Canadian. You can get lunch in Italy, a GOOD lunch with a glass of wine, for 6 euro. I had a family dinner in Pisa that included two huge pizzas for the boys (Max couldn’t finish his), absolutely delicious three-course meals for Karen and I, a litre of wine, and two grappa for 39 euro.
It is to weep. I did.
And then I headed back to the church, dipped my fingers in holy water, made the sign of the cross, and prayed with all my soul to be transported back to Italy.
Because God loves me, he agreed. We return in June.
Ciao, baby.
Where do you live? In a nice house on a big lot in beautiful West Vancouver? Or a character home or snazzy apartment in trendy Kitsilano? Maybe you live in an older house on a tree-lined street in London, Ontario or in Toronto’s quiet west end. Perhaps you live in a mansion on a multi-acre estate in Carmel, California.
Well, if you live in any of these places, you are a fucking idiot. And guess what? I’m a fucking idiot too. And why are we fucking idiots? BECAUSE WE COULD BE LIVING IN ITALY! In fact, if any of us had any sense or guts we would sell everything we own today, liquidate the whole lot, then use that money to rent a modest apartment in Italy, and live the dolce vita until the funds ran out. If the money only lasted a few years, fine. When it’s all gone, we kill ourselves. At least we got to spend that time in Italy.
Yes, gentlemen, Italy is that good. But before I go into the details of our extraordinary trip there, let me quickly do a blow by blow comparison of Italy and Ireland.
Italian people: charming and gregarious
Irish people: charming and gregarious
Italian religious practice: overwhelmingly Catholic, but no one goes to church until after his 60th birthday.
Irish religious practice: overwhelmingly Catholic, but no one goes to church until after his 60th birthday.
Italian politics: labyrinth and corrupt
Irish politics: labyrinth and corrupt
Italian countryside: rolling hills, beautiful fields, all dotted with olive trees and vineyards.
Irish countryside: rolling hills, rocky fields, all dotted with litter and bags of household trash.
Italian spring weather: warm, brilliantly sunny days followed by cool, crisp nights.
Irish spring weather: cold rainy windy days followed by cold rainy windy nights.
Italian urban nightlife: as soon as the day cools off, Italians put on their best clothes and stroll to the shops, stopping for gelati and conversation with their neighbours.
Irish urban nightlife: as soon as four o’clock rolls around, the Irish get roaring drunk and head butt walls.
Italian dinner: vino della casa rosso con aqua minerale, antipasto misto di mare, gnocchi speck e mascarpone, tagliata ai porcini, panna cotta con salse, grappa
Irish dinner: beer, beans on toast, cream egg
Now, to afford this trip we once more availed ourselves of the tender mercies of Ryanair. This time we flew into Bologna. Or at least I thought we were flying into Bologna. In fact, we were flying into Ryanair’s Bologna which, like Ryanair’s Paris, is actually a little airport located in a goat field 1000s of kilometres from the actual urban entity it purports to serve. So we landed in a town called Forli which, as far as I could make out, was located in northern Turkey. We had to take a lengthy bus ride into Bologna and from there made our way to the train station to catch a choo-choo to Florence. We ended up in a compartment with a very nervous man from Venice who couldn’t speak a word of English but tried to explain to us that in Venice there is a lot of water. Fascinating. The hallways of the train were filled with lads going to a soccer match. Now, if you got on a train in England that was full of young men going to a soccer game, you can probably be sure that you’d be dead before the train reaches the station. The Italians, however, while fanatical about their soccer are not hooligans and so the fans entertained us with songs for about an hour before piling off the train.
And then we were in Florence.
Now, I have written to some of you about the delights of Florence before. Suffice to say it remains a city of stunning beauty and overwhelming crowds. It also has the Ponte Vecchio, the famous bridge lined with gold shops. Curiously, whenever I’m in Florence Karen wants to visit the Ponte Vecchio. I can’t cross the damn bridge without my VISA card going radioactive. Next time I go I’m renting a boat to cross the river.
And then on to Rome, the eternal city. A nice train ride deposited us in Rome’s huge train station, then we got on the metro and headed south from downtown to the Colli Albani station where our apartment was located. Roman subway cars are done up in a retro style. In a tribute to New York of the 1970s, they are covered in graffiti. Actually, although Rome is a remarkably clean city, virtually every wall in the city is covered in graffiti. Much of the graffiti is unintelligible, but the most common word one sees sprayed on the walls of Rome is "Roma." Roman graffiti artists, then, spend hours reminding us where we are. Many thanks, friends.
We showed up at the apartment in Rome, rang the door bell and nothing happened. Momentary panic. What if we’re lost? What if we paid for an apartment that doesn’t exist? If it’s some sort of scam? While we were fretting on the sidewalk two different people came up and offered to help us. They checked the address for us, checked the name on the doorbell, and both concluded that our hosts must have stepped out for a moment. Nice folk. I rang the doorbell one more time and a woman answered. She was not expecting us for a few hours and so was busy cleaning the apartment. We went in to drop our bags off and I couldn’t figure out what she was cleaning. This was the cleanest apartment I had ever seen. It was cleaner, much cleaner, than the last hospital I had been in (in Ireland), but it was not up to her standards, so we went out for a walk to give her time to boil the walls.
We grabbed some terrific pizza slices downstairs. The woman behind the counter apologised that there was no pasta left for lunch, but if we would please come back tomorrow there would be lots. After we ate, we headed into the park that was across from the apartment building. This is the Antica Valley, a huge valley that was a sacred site in Etruscan and Roman times. It is laced with walking and biking trails; it contains the remains of Roman aqueducts and a bath; it has ancient Christian sites in it. It also has a stream and caves. In other words, it is paradise for boys, including this boy, who just wanted to touch the Roman aqueduct over and over.
This park also contains a working farm. The farmhouse looks like something out of a Mario Puzo novel. Because of this farm it was possible to walk through the park and suddenly find yourself in a flock of sheep. We did. It was freaky. Sheep close up are a fair size. They look at you with dark, brooding eyes. I don’t trust them. Those hooves look razor sharp. This farm also meant that in the evenings we could sit on the apartment balcony, sipping our Camparis, and watch a girl herd cows on her moped.
On this first visit to the park, as we were heading back towards the apartment, we noticed an old woman sitting in the yard of the farm. Beside her was a sign advertising home-made cheese. Karen approached her and asked about the cheese. The old woman was delighted to see us. Now, my Italian is not as good as Karen’s, but I think this is what she said: "What beautiful boys you have! You are too young to have such big boys! Boys are the best; you should have more! You are from Canada? I have relatives in Toronto! Your husband is from Toronto? Perhaps he knows my niece, Anna. She was at university there. He was too? And his name is Paul B? The same name as the monster who seduced young Anna, robbed her of her virtue and left her broken-hearted to become a nun? The same Paul B that my family has sworn a blood oath to be revenged upon? Aeeeiiii! Georgio! Luigi! Come quick! Our prayers to the Virgin have been answered! Vengeance is ours! Bring the cleavers!"
Well, the first part anyway. She was very taken with the boys. Anyway, she led us into a room of her house where she makes the cheese. There were three sheep carcasses hanging on meat hooks in the same room. That’ll teach them to stare at tourists. We bought a hunk of cheese and, after listening to many compliments on our children, headed back to the apartment which was now so clean you could have performed brain surgery in it.
So, let us review: since arriving in Rome I had discussions with the locals, ate great food, touched a Roman aqueduct and bath, stood on an ancient Christian tomb, been menaced by sheep, been inside an Italian farmhouse, bought handmade cheese.
I had been in town for two hours.
Rome is my kind of town.
Now, Karen and I had been to Italy before, but this trip was different because we were travelling with children. It is always a delight to expose your progeny to the masterpieces of western art and culture if only to watch their unmediated innocent reactions. Take them to see the fresco of the Annunciation by Fra Angelico in San Marco, and listen to them marvel: "This is boring, this is stupid, I’m hungry, my feet hurt, I want to watch TV." Bring them into St. Peter’s Basilica during an Easter Mass and hear them gasp: "This is boring this is stupid I’m hungry my feet hurt I want to watch TV." Bring them into the Coliseum itself, a structure no less daunting and impressive for all the images we have seen of it and hear them cry, "ThisisboringthisisstupidI’mhungrymyfeethurtIwanttowatchTV."
Yes, travelling with children can be trying, especially if you’re culture hounds like we are. But travelling in Italy with children is actually a good idea. It’s such a good idea that when I move to Italy I’m going to start a company called Rent-a-Kid. This will allow tourists to the country to rent a cute child for the duration o f the trip. You see, the Italians are nuts about kids (though they don’t have as many as the Irish do). As the conversation with the cheese lady demonstrated, having children with you when you deal with Italians immediately opens doors and prompts conversations. For example, the first day we were in Rome we stopped at a store near our apartment to buy some supplies. We had the boys with us. Now, everyone was great in the store: friendly and helpful. Since the boys just stood to the side during our transactions, I didn’t think that they had even been noticed. But the next day when Karen and I went back to the same store, the woman behind the cash machine began to ask us, "Where are the boys? At the apartment? Do you have enough food for them? Do they like Rome? The big one needs to eat a lot!" One day on the subway, an elderly man turned to Max and said, "Hey boy! How you like-a Rome? Issa nice?" He ruffled Max’s hair as he got of the train. Rent-a-Kid. Invest now. Just send me a blank cheque. I’ll handle the rest.
Of course the Italians are warm and chatty even when you are not packing children, especially when you get away from the tourist areas. And so the Italian shop keepers, at least in our neighbourhood, were incredibly friendly. We were warmly greeted as regulars if we entered the same store twice. Back in Ireland I have been going to the same grocery store virtually every day for three months now and the only clerk who acknowledges my existence is a retarded girl with a crush on my eldest son.
Anyway, we couldn’t see everything Rome had to offer so we made a quick decision and headed to the Vatican. We entered Vatican city and I, for one, was disappointed that there wasn’t a passport office. But the central square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica is overwhelming. We’re talking big-time grandiosity. It even shushed the kids for a minute. We then headed into St. Peter’s Basilica itself but found that there was a mass in progress and so tourists were not allowed to circulate through the building. The Swiss Guards were blocking the way. Real macho looking guys, the Swiss Guards. Yeah, if I was the pope I’d want a body guard comprised of guys in leotards with bed pans on their heads. They’re armed with halberds, which are essentially long spears with a little axe heads attached to one end. Brilliant weapon to use against terrorists. A psycho come at me with an AK-47 I want a Swiss guard with a long stick defending me.
Anyway, things were crowded because this was the day before Good Friday -- So-so Thursday -- and Catholics from all over the world were jammed into the cathedral. I led the family out and set off to find the Sistine Chapel. As I later discovered, you can only access the Sistine by progressing through the length of Vatican Museum, a huge building that contains such holy relics as Christ’s foreskin. I didn’t know that at the time, however, and my map seemed to indicate that we could get to the Chapel if we went around the north wall of the Basilica. So off we went. There were some other people coming and going that way, so I figured we were on the right track. Finally we came to an unmarked door through which a small number of people were passing. We went in, up a flight of stairs, and came face to face with a Swiss Guard who gave me a booklet and ushered us to the right. We were back in St. Peter’s Basilica. The door we entered was for late comers to the mass. The booklet was an outline of the service (in Italian) containing hymns and responses. We were ushered to chairs in the north nave of the church to watch the rest of the service.
Now I’m as lapsed a Catholic as you are going to find, but standing in St. Peter’s which, let’s face it, ain’t a bad dump, watching a mass being conducted in Italian and Latin, well I was ready to kiss the Pope’s ring. Or at least go to confession. There are confession booths all over the Basilica and each has a sign on it declaring the language in which confession in that particular booth is being conducted: German, French, Italian, English, Inuit. I was ready to head into the English booth and let the priest have it: "Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It’s been, uh, forty years since my last confession. Since that time I have taken the Lord’s name in vain three times. Okay, maybe four. But if you hit your thumb it doesn’t count, does it? Or, if, you know, you say it in the throes of, like, uh, passion? Anyway, better go with five times. And I coveted my neighbour’s weedeater. That’s about it. And could you put in a good word with Santa Claus for me?"
Never got into the Sistine Chapel but had a good lunch near the Vatican.
Other sights: the Trevi Fountain is exquisite but it’s a bit hard to see. As soon as you sit down on the benches to admire it, a street hawker will stand in front of you and try to sell you some piece of crap. The piece of crap du jour when we were there was a toy made of a little rubber sack full of goo that could be pulled into different shapes to make funny faces. The first hawker stood in front of me and demonstrated the piece of junk. I said no. He kept demonstrating. I said no again, louder. He moved on. As soon as he stepped aside another hawker took his place and demonstrated the exact same stupid toy. I got rid of him and a THIRD hawker stepped up with the same item. "Oh yes," I said to him, "I was just waiting for YOUR piece of crap. The other identical pieces of crap being sold by identical vendors mere seconds ago did not move me the way your piece of crap and sophisticated sales pitch do. I’ll take a hundred pieces of crap, please. Do you accept VISA?"
Before I could finish the transaction I heard a strange sound. It was familiar, but something I had not heard in years. As it got louder I couldn’t believe it. It was the Hare Krishna chant. And lo and behold, here they come: a bevy of bald, face-painted white boys’n’girls in saffron togas beating drums, playing saxophones badly, and chanting George Harrison melodies. They stopped to dance and jam beside the fountain.
I got to tell you, it was a weird watching the Hare Krishna swirling around, smiling their "I have discarded my brain for Krishna" smiles in front of the Trevi Fountain. What were they thinking? That Italians are going to forsake the 2,000 years of Catholicism for a shaved head and war paint? Forsake the true Church so they can dance like Smurfs in the street? They didn’t make any converts at the fountain, so they went merrily on their way, possibly to the Vatican. The pope is going to be selling incense on street corners any day now.
As in any big tourist town, there were portrait artists. You know the guys; they sit under and umbrella on a folding chair displaying their brilliant sketches of people like Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts. You pony up some cash and they do a portrait of your loved one. Well, there were a couple of them around the Trevi Fountain, but one in particular caught my eye. The celebrity portraits that he had on display were terrifying. The one marked "Tom Cruise" looked like a llama. Another one was marked "Marilyn Monroe,’ but it could have been a white Uncle Ben in drag. A cat could draw better than this guy. He was doing a brisk business.
What was the strangest thing that we saw in Rome? Well, there is a church that is run by the Capuchin order of monks. It’s not particularly interesting architecturally, but to the side of the main church is second entrance. You go in there, pay a donation, then you are allowed into five smallish rooms with low vaulted ceilings. Each of these rooms has been decorated with human bones. There are bones on the ceiling and walls. The light fixtures are made of bones. At the front of each room is a large shrine made of human skulls. Different types and sizes of bones are used for different effect. There are individual vertebrae, jaws, and split hip bones arranged in bizarre patterns. There are also some complete skeletons that have been given wings (made of bones) or implements like sickles (made of bones). There are a few complete mummified monks sitting in one of the rooms, and other rooms have piles of dirt (brought from Jerusalem) on the floor under which nestle human organs. In the last of the rooms is a sign that reads, "What you are, we were; what we are, you will become."
Gee. Thanks. Back at ya.
Now, let us think about this. This bizarre temple of doom is designed to remind us that we are going to die. Alright. I can dig that. But to make it, these damn monks had to dig up their thousands of their predecessors, separate and cut the bones, then nail them to the walls and ceilings in patterns. This took over two hundred years to complete.
How many beers would you have to drink before you even thought of doing such a thing? Before you turned to your friends and said, "Hey guys! I just had a great idea. Let’s dig up our 4,000 of our dead homeboys and do a Martha Stewart with their remains"? How much would they have had to drink to agree? "Gee Paul, what a great idea! I could slap myself for not thinking of it first! Of course! All those bones are just mildewing in the earth when they could be decorating our walls! First one to the crypt is a rotten egg!" And then imagine the arguments over patterns: "No no no! This wall is just TOO femur! That is SO tenth century. We need a splash of something lighter, something fun, something that says ‘Yes I’m a dead monk but dammit I still rock.’ Call me crazy, people, but I’m thinking rib cages."
We didn’t get to see as many of the Roman ruins as I would have liked because there were large line-ups and I wasn’t going to subject the boys to standing around for hours. Okay, that’s a lie. They were not going to let me subject them to hours of standing in line-ups. So we only stood in line for one, the Coliseum. And it was worth it. This thing is amazing. Figure, it could hold 50,000 spectators but was so well designed it could be evacuated, in case of fire, in five minutes. Not only did it contain elevators in the floor to allow the lifting of combatants and animals, it could be filled with water so sea battles could be staged in it. In the nineteenth century botanists found over 400 rare species of plant growing in the Coliseum. They have come in the feed and dung of exotic animals that had been imported for the games.
Now, here’s a little secret: you know what all the middle-aged male tourists did when they got to the centre of the Coliseum? They straightened their backs, affected a Russell Crowe-type glower, and whispered, "I am gladiator." Their wives were appropriately embarrassed, as was mine.
All too soon we had to leave Rome and catch a train to Pisa. Shared a compartment with an older Australian couple who were doing an eight-week tour of Europe before meeting their daughter in England. Boy, can Australians talk. The wife did not shut her mouth to draw breath for three hours. And she found everything exciting: "Hey mate! What’s that you’re carrying your clothes in? A suitcase? Good on ya!" She gave me recipes, told me where to stay in half a dozen European cities, and extended a standing invitation to crash at their apartment in Sydney.
Now, Pisa is actually a nice little town. The only reason anyone goes to it, of course, is to see the tower. Yes, it leans. Yes, it is very odd to see. But odder still is the story behind it. It was designed by a guy called Pisano. He built it as a bell tower to the Pisa duomo, or cathedral. Fine. But during construction the thing started to lean when it was only three stories high. Now, if I was building a tower, hell, if I was building a fence, I would get worried if it started to lean so early into the project. But not Pisano. He kept building. What was he thinking? That making it taller would mask the fact that it’s falling over? What did he say to his employers? "Leaning? It’s not leaning. That’s an optical illusion causes by, uh, the slope of the lawn. Let’s put ten more floors on it and THEN see if it’s leaning."
The only problem with Pisa was the hotel. See, it was a serious budget hotel run by a family. It only had about ten rooms. Our room was conveniently located on the first floor near the kitchen, the reception desk, and the cleaning supply closet. Nice and quiet. It was decorated by someone with a sadistic sense of humour.
The family that ran it was Sicilian. The grandfather didn’t like having people in his house. He told my boys to be quiet at two in the afternoon. The daughter, a homely little thing, was friendly but spaced out. The mother glared at everyone who entered. The son was painfully shy. The father was easygoing and nonchalant. They had a neurotic Pomeranian that hid under a sofa and growled at people. We only stayed one night but managed to make a nuisance of ourselves by sleeping in until 9 the next morning. Since breakfast was being served from 8-10, we didn’t think this was a problem, but when we stumbled out to the dining room we found that day-light saving’s time had gone into effect the night before. It was, in fact, 10:15 and breakfast was no longer being served. Fine, we thought, this place was kinda creepy anyway. But no, here comes the father, who, with a wave of his hand let’s us know that it’s no big deal, and so the painfully shy son goes about the business of making us breakfast and trying to talk to us, a process that causes him to blush and stammer. Things were made more uncomfortable by the dining room which was decorated with lampfixtures that must had come from the set of Battleship Galatica, portraits of Jesus pointing at his bleeding exposed heart, and framed photographs of various family members, including a young girl who had, apparently, won a rollerskating competition. As we munched our cornettos, the unseen Pomeranian snarled at us from under the chair. Let me tell you, it’s hard to eat breakfast when the arm chair keeps growling.
We got out of there as quickly as we could and opted for hanging around in front of the train station for a few hours before our train arrived rather than try to squeeze some more time out of the Hotel R.
Our last Italian stop was Genova, or Genoa. Damn Italians can’t make up their minds about the names of their own cities. Anyway, it’s a rather polluted industrial port that feels a bit shabby around the edges and downright unsavoury in some areas. It is still interesting, however, because it’s vertical. That is, every second street is a staircase leading up to another level. Going to the corner for a quart of milk in this city is like spending two hours on a stair master. Want to get in shape? Like women with strong thighs? Move to Genoa.
And then back to Ireland. The boys, let it be said, were not thrilled to return.
But the travel bug had bitten us, and two days after returning Karen declared that we were driving to Knock.
The town of Knock lies about an hour’s drive north of Galway deep in county Mayo. It was utterly undistinguished for years. Then, in 1879, fifteen locals saw a vision of the Virgin, a couple of saints, a sheep, and a whole handful of angels hovering over the gable of the church. The vision lasted, like, an hour. After the event, the Vatican sent in its hoax-busters and interviewed the visionaries. The Church decided that they had a bona fide miracle on its hands and Knock became the second most important Marian shrine in Europe, second only to Lourdes. It is now visited by tens of thousands of pilgrims and curiosity seekers a year. The pope has been there, as has Mother Theresa. It is on the Catholic map.
How have the good people of Knock responded to this sudden prominence? Well, they tore down most of the original church to build a godawful ugly building that features a giant picture window so people can sit outside on benches and watch the mass. It’s like a giant religious terrarium. Instead of a lizard and a few plants, you have a priest, a congregation, and the Host. You are discouraged from tapping on the glass. On one exterior wall of the church they built a giant rosary. That was insufficiently ugly, however, so a new basilica was slapped up beside the church. Now, a quick question: who the hell designs modern churches? The same guy who designs mini-putt courses? Cause this thing, like so many religious buildings thrown up on the twentieth century, is as ugly as a mud wall. But not ugly enough. No. So the grounds were decorated with statues of the virgin and Stations of the Cross that were done by the guy who designs My Little Pony.
Finally the church grounds were ugly enough to suit the Irish. Now came the matter of redesigning the town itself. All the buildings along the main drag were turned into religious souvenir shops. You can get anything in these stores. Want a snow ball with the Virgin inside? No problem. How about a bust of Mary with a blue light in it that can be set to blink mode? Got ‘em. And what about prayers? That’s right, prayers printed on scrolls, tea towels, t-shirts, jockey shorts, home pregnancy kits, ant farms. We heard people asking the store help for specific prayers: "Would you be having a prayer for an expectant mother?" "Oh yes dear, loads of them. Over here." "And would you have a prayer for a hangover?" "What type, dear? Beer? Whiskey, was it? Or mixed?"
Now, the only reason we were here is because Karen is fascinated by this stuff. See, she was raised Lutheran. Her grandfather was a Lutheran minister. The Lutherans, as the first successful Christian heresy, were very careful to define themselves against the Catholic Church from which they had broken. If Catholics like it, Lutherans are against it. No stained glass windows or bloody statues of Christ in a Lutheran church. No celibate priests, bishops or pope. No confession, no icons, no rosary, no Virgin Mother to pray to. No cool outfits, censors, prayer candles. No forgiveness, no talking, no fun. All a Lutheran needs is the knowledge that he is inadequate in his faith and he should feel guilty for everything that he’s ever done or will do.
Raised in such a faith, Karen is dazzled by the excesses of European and Latin American Catholicism. Those icons, statues, bottles of holy water, books of obscure prayers, are for her a form of theological pornography. A turn on. People are always a bit surprised to come to our house and see all the crucifixes, pictures of saints, and religious candles spread around. They figure they’re in for a bible-thumping evening. But no, it’s a personal kink.
But Knock was too much even for her: the three gallon bottles for collecting holy water; the plates with a picture of Jesus on them; the ashtrays with prayers wore her down. We decided to grab a quick lunch and head home.
Big mistake. We should have known as soon as we walked into the restaurant that we were in trouble. It smelled of mould. There were religious knick-knacks for sale along one wall. The "menu" listed a score of things, like hamburgers, all with chips. They offered chips with chips. I finally settled on soup and bread. Max had fish and chips. Karen had a ham sandwich and soup. Christian, the smartest of us all, was at home in bed. Max’s "fish and chips" was two undercooked fish sticks and some droopy fries. The soup was Knorr’s, you know, the dehydrated stuff. They had not added quite enough water so there was still powder at the bottom of the bowl. The ham sandwich was two pieces of moist white bread, a hunk of butter placed, but not spread, on one of them, and a slice of straight-from-the-vacuum-pack ham. It was not just inedible, it was not food. It wasn’t even the illusion of food. It was hell on a plate.
This meal cost me 24 euro. That’s, like, $27 Canadian. You can get lunch in Italy, a GOOD lunch with a glass of wine, for 6 euro. I had a family dinner in Pisa that included two huge pizzas for the boys (Max couldn’t finish his), absolutely delicious three-course meals for Karen and I, a litre of wine, and two grappa for 39 euro.
It is to weep. I did.
And then I headed back to the church, dipped my fingers in holy water, made the sign of the cross, and prayed with all my soul to be transported back to Italy.
Because God loves me, he agreed. We return in June.
Ciao, baby.
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