Have genes will travel

Black Walnuts

2012-02-02T18:38:00.000+01:00

There they are!

Get them! get them!

Dad is picking oily black items off the ground.

Lots and lots of them.

So many we can barely lug them all back to the car.

Although they don't look that numerous once you get them home and spread out on the driveway.

They weighed tons, really!

Now, how to get them out of their jackets?

One recommendation is driving on them.

So we did that.

Back and forth, many times.

But it took quite a lot of crushing and rolling them under our feet to get rid of the thick casings.

Next step: let them dry.

Last year Dad left them on the driveway, and the squirrels got them all.

This year he put them on the screen-porch,

and the cats had a great time watching the squirrels try to get them but fail.

at last

2012-01-20T18:02:00.000+01:00

Where, oh where, have I been?
Stuck in my office, for the most part. Putting out fires and trying to get in enough regular work so that new ones don't start. It's been a rough year so far.
Taking a bit of time out from all that, I figured it's about time I posted that poem from the theme a while ago. You know (well, likely not), the New Year's Eve Poetry Thingy that the once&future TFE invited folks to, the Poem Written at 9:30 pm on New Year's Eve.
Yes, really. Here it is.
Well, no, not yet. As I write this I am becoming terribly annoyed. Since finally getting google chrome on this machine I can partake fully of the wonderful world of blogger, and it has added a spellcheck function.
Which SHOULD not be a concern. I am a good speller, and a reasonable typist.
BUT
In spite of my doing everything I can find to do to tell blogger that I BLOG IN ENGLISH, I can neither change languages nor shut the damned spellcheck off.
And you all know (at least those of you who blog too on blogger) how lame their "help" is. You eventually get to some forum where you sift through the thousands of comments to find someone with a similar problem, and...
Did I come here to complain?
How did it end up that way?
If I get quickly to the poem maybe I can get it all out before seeing too much red to continue.

21:30 31/12/11

So close to the end

the last few hours ticking impatiently away

I feel I ought to leap up and do something.

Something that would make this

a Banner Year

a Notable Year

a Year for History

But it's all too late for that.

Better to spend these last hours in quiet relaxation

no point in catching up

let it go.

Open the champagne, and toast this day

& all the days

Here's to the idea of a fresh future

whatever the calender says.

Solstice

2011-12-22T05:26:00.000+01:00

Ah, at last.
About time.
The world is finally coming to its senses and going back 'round the other way, to sunlight, then warmth, and eventually leaves on the trees.
At least one hopes.
I will test it in the morning, see if it's on track.

Are we going yet?

2011-12-20T01:43:00.000+01:00

Overheard somewhere in the course of the day:
"We have the right to bear arms. The French have the right to strike."

10:20. boarding starts for the flight from Paris to Minneapolis. Getting through security was slow, but not horribly so. An ordinarily crowded pre-holiday weekend. No delay has been posted. So far the strike of several airport security companies has not been too bad.
10:55. five minutes late for departure, they announce a delay of 15 minutes for the 30-odd people still lacking.
11:15. aw, we'll give them 20 minutes more.
11:50. Passengers Smith, Jones, and Wesson are to notify the crew immediately if they are on the plane. If not, they will be considered to have missed the connection, and their baggage will be chucked off.
11:55. waiting for clearance from the controllers
12:20. a "security issue" is announced, and we're warned we will be deplaning soon. So don't get into those carryons!
13:00. everybody off! Take everything with you. Every last thing.
We're taken to a holding area on the way to the passport check leading into France, where about 300 of us stand around for an hour before they start running us through a new security check. There's nowhere to sit. There's no bathroom. It's forbidden to use cell phones but many people do anyway. A generous fellow passenger lets me send an email to the folks, though I don't quite know what to say. I could just make my connection still. Or I might be spending the night in Minneapolis. Or something in between.
Slowly, very slowly they run us through a new check. Very thorough, shoes off and everything (I've never seen that in Europe, only the States), every last electronic item out of bags and into the tray.
14:40. The last passengers make it back to their seats.
15:22. Taxiing. Off we go at last.
15:22 to 0:30 the next day. No security problems arise on our flight. Nothing exciting at all. A job well done? Or a waste of time?
On arrival they have a whole table set up with new boarding passes for those who have missed connections, very easy to find yours, very efficient. Mine says I'll be leaving for St Louis in just under two hours. Time for a phone call, a glass of wine, and a bit of blogging.

11. And then it was the last day.

2011-12-19T08:02:00.000+01:00

In the morning I have some time to kill, so I plug the camera's card into the computer to start sifting through all my photos.

It shows me one photo, and then stops. The whole system hangs up. My photos are gone. There's not on the computer; they're not on the card when I put it back in the camera. They're just gone. 600 pictures, oh well! I could cry.

One of my friend Lai Sheng's fellow graduate students picks me up at the hotel to take me to his apartment, where I can leave my luggage for the day's explorations. My flight is at midnight, dinner with Lai Sheng and his family at 6. I've got the rest of the day to go back to the fabulously decorated Chen museum with my camera, and time to follow up on a lead on a shop selling books in english, in the hopes of coming away with a photo book of the city or the region.

First thing: Miss Yuan has only been to Lai Sheng's once, and is not at all sure how to get back there. She phones him three times on our way, and we finally do arrive to the beaming smiles of his mother and the contented cooing of his baby son. Such a fat-cheeked baby! Suddenly I realize that I've left my gorgeous painting at the hotel. The box with the scroll is too long formy luggage, and somehow I didn't notice not having everything when I left. So I have to go back for it, and Miss Yuan has to go back to work. Will I be able to find my way back to the apartment on my own?

Hm.

Good question.

I have his phone number, and take careful notes on my way back to the metro station. His alley is the one with the big key sign on the main road. There's a guy with a sewing machine halfway down it. Turn right up the road, past the electric company, past the Happy Springtime Hotel, to the T intersection by the shiny new womens hospital. Right again down the hill to the metro. Easy as pie.

Get my painting, drop it off with the grandmother who only speaks the local language, and out into the fairly sunny day.

All this running around has worn me out. At the Chen place I marvel at the decoration through my zoom lens and spend quite a lot of time just hanging around. I had thought to go around the city, taking new photos of everything I liked so much - the Liurong Temple, People playing hackysack in the park, the view of the city from the top of a hill.

But I don't have much heart for it. I walk back to the temple, which isn't far from the Chen museum if you don't get lost, and spend some time there, enjoying the real quiet now that it's mid-week and most people are at work. I feel much more out of place this time, with the grounds not bursting with people everywhere.

After that, I just want to find the bookstore and be done with it all. And I find it, but they don't have any books full of photos at all, at least none with captions in anything but Chinese. The English language section targets Chinese people working on their English - lots of pulp fiction and language books. There is a small section with travel guides, but they're all for Beijing or Shanghai. I buy a book by a european guy who spent two years travelling around the country quite recently. To compare notes.

Back to the apartment they're laying on a grand buffet for me, and I'm famished. It's wonderful, simple, food. Just never mind the seaweed soup.

Li family chicken

Lai Sheng heard from Miss Yuan about my photograph disaster, and we spend an hour recovering my pictures. They're in there. The card seems to have picked up a virus (where??), but he gets almost everything back for me. I'm so happy!

Off to the airport on the metro. It takes a while, but we get there. Once airside I have an hour to kill, and a last fistfull of yuan to get rid of, so I spend most of the time wandering around the gift shops, amazed at the prices as much as 10 times what you'd pay elsewhere. And then, what's this? A simple t-shirt with a great dragon printed on it, just my size, and just right to empty my pockets of yuan. Deal!

The view from the window

I'm settled into my seat, blanket up to my chin and eyeshade on, a good hour into the flight when I realize I've left my painting behind once again. No going back for it this time!

10. Guangzhou Toured

2011-12-11T10:41:00.000+01:00

Then we go to the Chen family dynasty museum. This place I’ve got to come back to with the camera, hence the photos. This huge compound with its rooms open to the courtyards is where the Chens used to run their empire. The museum aspect is pretty ordinary, but the decoration on the buildings is pretty impressive. Those are all real people and events and legends up along the edges of the roofs and carved into the wall panels. I wonder if anybody can still read the whole story of this building from the walls. I wonder if the story is compiled into a picture book. A picture book in English. In fact, I wonder if there are picture books in English at all. Most any place I visit, there’s always picture books in a dozen languages at the gift shops. I’ve been looking for some. Aside from the photographer in Zhangjiajie, I have yet to find one.

Time for lunch. We have dim sum for lunch, inviting the driver in order to diversify the dishes ordered. Just one bit of this! Just taste that! It’s mostly delicious, but my stomach is groaning and easily upset from eating like this for days on end. It’s not polite for Chinese hosts not to push food on you, but it’s not polite for Western tourists to refuse, so in the end I’ve got another stomachache.

Happily, after lunch we get to do some walking.

We’re in a large shopping district, and in getting to our restaurant we passed lots of shops with jade jewelry and tiny beautiful teapots and lots of stuff like that that I’d be interested in taking home as a gift or a souvenir for myself. So I’m happy we’re going to walk down one of the long pedestrian streets lined with shops.

It’s an interesting walk along a nice broad and clean sidewalk dotted with sculptures. The shops are full of the things you find in any mall, however. Shoes, clothes, electronic gadgetry, that kind of thing. It’s the Made-in-China I don’t shop for at home, and I’m not going to start now just because it’s half price. All these clothes - I have not once noticed anyone in the street whose clothes made me wonder if I could get some. Where's all the beautiful silk?

We stroll up and down for half an hour, chatting and people-watching, but I’m not tempted to shop, so we’re back to our starting point in record time for a tour. My guide says this part usually takes more than an hour and they often do just the first block when she has a dozen clients. If they went to the end like we just did, it would take the rest of the afternoon.

Next it’s time to visit the Guangdong regional museum. And the TV tower! We’ll have a great view of the tv tower from there. This is a big point with my guide. I just want to take my time strolling around the museum and perhaps find a western-style toilet, because my stomach is rebelling against too much lunch. In fact, I’d rather we skip dinner, or at least have it much later than planned.

Oh, no, No skipping the dinner! Part of the tour! We have reservations at a special restaurant. Very good seafood. And we can’t have it much later than planned, either, because the driver has to finish his day.

Well... can we have some simple steamed fish? Nothing fried? I swear I will have just a little taste.

So I linger in the museum. But it closes at 5 and there’s no lingering any longer than that. When we go outside, the huge fountain on the grounds is having its hourly water show, so we watch that. I like the sign that announces the water show pond is “like a gigantic sailing ship carrying the pragmatic and struggling Guangdong people toward the ocean full of passion”. And another “Excellent Parking Lot”, and further on “Outstanding Garden Path”. These signs are merely typical. This glorious, heavenly hyperbole seems to be just how the Chinese express themselves. It’s normal.

No, it’s weird.

My guide does a lot of talking, which is apparently something she doesn’t always do on her tours. Usually, it’s just give a set spiel at each site and then let the clients talk among themselves. But I don’t have anyone else to talk to, so she fills in a lot. We talk about the myriad good luck charms and rituals all over town. Luck is very important in Chinese culture; it’s tightly linked to happiness and wealth. Which themselves seem to be inextricably intertwined. Again and again through the day, she equates happiness with money, and money with happiness.

I failed to write it down, but even the words for happiness and money seem to be linked. The same term can mean either one. The money=happiness thing is part of the foundation of chineseness, and a lot of what other people have said along this trip makes more sense now that I see this equation. Like this TV tower. It’s a sign of the people’s wealth, and that makes them happy. They don’t understand that it bores me.

9. Back to Guangzhou

2011-12-09T18:44:00.000+01:00

I was hoping that the hotel in Guangzhou getting back from my tour of the countryside would be situated someplace more interesting, but it’s the same one. Way out at the convention center next to nothing much. Awww. I’ve seen this hotel. It’s boring.

But the bathwater is hot and the towels fluffy.

In the morning BIT is offering me the one-day tour of the city for free. The least they can do after making a mint off me with the cancelled trip. They must be raking it in, these guys, between what westerners expect to pay for a trip and what it actually costs. A guide and a driver for the day are well within the margins.

Somehow in getting ready, I manage to leave my camera outside of my bag. Which is not such a bad thing. Sometimes when you’re touring you spend so much attention getting pictures of stuff that you don’t pay much attention to what’s actually going on. I’m fine with a day of paying more attention to remembering stuff, not counting on having it in pictures for later.

The other effect, though, is to speed things up considerably, which gives us a really fast pace - the other speed factor being that there’s nobody else on this tour. With a group it takes so much longer just to walk down the block for every body added.

We see some things that I wandered past on my own, but they’re on the schedule so we’re going back.

First - the Sun Yat Sen Memorial. Very pretty from the outside. Inside it’s just a big auditorium. A nice one. They’re busy setting up a show for this evening, or we could go up on the stage. Darn.

Sun Yet Sen, though, is more than just a local hero. He’s the father of modern China, the one who got all of the modernization going before Mao. Now that that era is gone, people are getting back to just how great SYS was.

Second - Yue Xiu park for another look at the 5-goat statue. It’s about the same the second time. None of the goats have moved. There’s still a huge crowd of people playing hackey-sack, only instead of little beanbags, they bounce things that look like badminton birdies with a spring. We’re ahead of schedule, so we spend some time playing. It’s a lot harder than it looks. You have to get your foot under there in time, and not send it off into the bushes. People play this in groups of half a dozen or so, and it’s great exercise.

I think it would be neat to practice at home, so I buy one. This lets me discover that, like Sam, my guide is not interested in helping me get a good price. 10% off is all. That’s ridiculous, but it’s only in hindsight that I resolve to argue a fair price.

After that we visit the site of the tomb of a very early dynasty that was unearthed only in the last couple of decades when they started digging the foundations for a new block of apartments. Second century or something if I remember (I’m 3 weeks late with the blog!) correctly. It’s a small place, but nicely done. You can visit the excavated tomb itself, which now is just empty space, the coffins and afterlife supplies having been removed.

What I find most interesting is not the site itself as the fact that they now know where to look for other sites from the same era, and they’re deliberately not doing it because the stuff they unearthed here degraded instantly when exposed. They want to come up with a way of saving the artifacts before losing them, before opening the next tomb. Which is refreshingly thoughtful in go-go-go China.

8. Tianmen Mountain

2011-12-06T19:01:00.000+01:00

It’s nearly 2 when we start up the long, long lift to Tianmen Mountain (just Tianmen, not Tiananmen). The day is smoggy, as I suspect most days are around here, and the humidity has burned off as much as it’s going to. Sam was marveling at the good weather earlier, certain that the lack of clouds meant we’d have a spectacular aerial view. But no, visibility isn’t more than a mile or so, and the city is soon lost in the haze.

Down below we can see small farms, one after the other. As an American, it’s funny to see all these small, personal farms - where’s the industrial-scale agriculture? The miles and miles of monoculture? Coming soon, probably, but for today it seems that most of the food around here comes from these smallholdings.

At the top, there are two areas to see. One is the highest peak in the region, at the end of the 2-part lift, and the other is the keyhole formation, for which we’ll go back to the intermediate cable car station and take a bus to.

At the high peak, they’ve constructed a walkway around the cliff, a sort of single-lane tourist highway. It’s a nice view, with lesser peaks marching off into the bluish haze and the city a tan smudge in the distance. Red flags are tied to many of the overhanging trees, carrying wishes and prayers, giving the whole place a festive yet reflective air. The path goes on around the contours of the peak, weaving in and out of the gorges. As you go around the light changes, making each new corner rounded a new perspective.

Sam, however, finds this all pretty much the same. We’ve been here 20 minutes already: I’ve seen it, haven’t I?

Well, no, not if the light keeps changing! What’s around the other side? I want to keep going around the entire loop, but he tells me we have wonderful things to see at the other site. He says this like we’ll miss something is we don’t hurry away, in spite of our both noticing several times already that with only one person to usher around the tour has been going lickety-split. I don’t require a lot of explanation. But he’s the one who knows what’s yet to be seen, so I give up on poking around one last corner and follow him back down.

It’s a slow bus ride to the next destination. This keyhole that the Chinese are so excited about is a rock that fell off of one peak and got wedged between that peak and its neighbor, making a little keyhole at the pass between them. There’s some mystical explanation I don’t retain that makes it so popular. On our way up the switchbacks in the bus, he tells me all about how they’re building a giant new 5-star hotel at the base (yep, nice construction site they’ve got going - really adds to the panorama), as well as an elevator to whisk people up from there to the top. Ah, so that’s the construction stuff that’s marring the view through the hole.

He’ll wait for me here if I desire to climb the 990 steps to the top.

Of course I’m climbing to the top. I didn’t give up on my views from the high peak just to stop at the parking lot/souvenir gallery/construction site and turn around.

From the bottom the stairs look quite easy, and the bottom section is. The steps are deep enough to set a size 8 foot on. But soon the rise is too steep to maintain that, and the steps are only about 6 inches deep. For these steep sections there are extra guardrails to hold on to, as much to keep you from succumbing to vertigo as to help against the inevitable collisions with other tourists when everybody’s looking at their feet. Every so often there’s a rest area off to the side.

Aw, come on. 990 steps is not that many.

At the top there’s a shop that will sell you a red prayer ribbon or a padlock or a photo of yourself holding the keyhole open. Then there’s a little shrine to tie your prayer to, and put a lock on love. The fountain has been drained because of all the construction going on for the elevator. In fact, half the surface up here is given over to this construction, which is quite a distraction from any remaining natural beauty.

Down the other side is not the verdant gateway to the mountainous hinterland so much as another stairway under construction and a dim view through the smog of further peaks.

What I like the most about this place is the huge accumulation of prayer flags and joss sticks at the Buddhist shrine at the bottom of the stairs.

And that’s it. We’re done with the tour, and we have hours to kill before my flight back to Guangzhou.

Why, oh why, then, did you rush me through the parts I was actually interested in spending more time at!

Well, let’s see a bit of the city.

What’s there to see?

Er, not much. Anything you want to shop for?

Nothing in particular.

So we spend some time wandering around the city center until dark and it’s “time” for dinner. I dislike eating so early, but it’s on the schedule to eat now, so fine. We have a reservation for traditional hot pot. Which is very nice, once you get used to just setting aside the parts of chicken not usually considered food.

Though of course once we’re done we still have time to kill but now the lively market has packed up (why not linger longer in the market and eat later???). So we go back to where we had lunch, a place owned by Sam’s friends and where we stashed the luggage for the afternoon, and hang around sipping tea and chatting before it’s reasonable to head for the airport.

7. Baifeng Lake

2011-12-04T12:20:00.000+01:00

In the morning Sam says that we’ll be finished with the items on the tour by noon, and proposes, for a modest extra fee, to take me to some additional, really spectacular sights.

Um, excuse me? The tour is supposed to be two full days. What do you mean there’s only a half day today? We’re supposed to see a lake, and a forest. All day.

Well, with Louis having to leave early, he kind of rushed the program yesterday, and we’ve already done the forest. That was the bit at the end yesterday. We’ll go to the lake this morning, but it’s a boat tour with a set itinerary and there’s not much else to do there.

Why don’t we just go back to the forest? The sign said the one trail was 5.6 km - I only saw a tiny bit!

Yes, but there’s a ticket to get in, and we’ve already done that. There’s a great place for you to see that’s not on this tour. It doesn’t cost much - I just need to pay the driver and the entrance fee. It isn’t much.

And it’s not really so much in western terms. Sam is such a nice guy and he’s so charming and informative that fine, I’ll pay the supplement. But I know I’m getting ripped off, and that puts an unpleasant aftertaste to everything.

Sigh. On to the lake.

Walking up to the lake, which is in another park with an entrance fee and paved paths, we pass by a cage of monkeys. There are signs saying beware of monkeys, but they don’t come out much in the cold season, so there’s a cage full of them to make sure you get your regulation monkey sighting. It’s everything I hate about zoos, too. Three macaques are housed in a concrete box with a wire front and roof, with one tree trunk for decoration. There’s not enough space. There’s nothing for them to do. Just bare prison walls.

A little farther up is a different kind of zoo, a tiny Buddhist monastery has its temple just a hundred meters up the concrete path. It’s beautifully peaceful, but I’d hate to be here in the high season with the chattering crowd poking into everything. The dormitory is much farther up the steep gorge, in the no-go zone.

Now for the lake itself. This lake, and the spectacular waterfall visible from where we entered the park, used to be just a pond and a dribble. Now that tourism is so popular, though, they diverted more flow into the lake so it stays fuller, and engineered a larger hole for the outlet so the waterfall is bigger. It’s all for the cameras. There is no other use for this lake - no fishing, no drinking (upstream), nobody lives along the shore.

The tour of the lake is like all the other places we’ve been. You start at the one boat dock/souvenir shop, take one of the boats for the set tour up and down the lake, and end at the other dock/souvenir shop for the walk down the other stairway to the park entrance. I am the only anglophone tourist present, so we get on a boat half full of Koreans. Sam doesn’t have much to translate of the tour babble, even though the boat’s guide rarely shuts up for more than a few seconds. Apparently she’s telling us how this peak looks like a rabbit, and that one like a monk. Apparently this is very common all over China.

At two picturesque spots, there are small barges moored, and these are all part of the show. The first houses a woman in traditional garb who comes out and sings for the passing tour boats. Everybody applauds and takes pictures of her. The second one has a man who sings. Our boat does not pass close enough to toss money to them; they’re paid as part of the ticket price.

Once we get down the long, long stairway back to the level of the park entrance, the path cleverly goes through a long gallery of souvenir shops - no shortcuts! - before bringing us in front of the waterfall. There’s a path alongside the lower part of the falls that leads up to a pagoda next to the bottom of the main falls. I have to see everything, so I go up.

Mistake!

If you just stay at the bottom you can stay in the fiction of the natural scene. Well, even there you have to try and ignore the cut stones and all the cables for the lights and suchlike. But you can do it. Go up the path, and all the artifice of the scene is laid bare. It’s like Disneyland.

That’s all for the lake. Time to pick up the luggage and head for the city about 40 minutes away, where we have lunch. From here we take the longest cable car in the world (8 km) up to a different bit of the Zhangjiajie mountain area, for a short walk around and then a look at a natural keyhole formation between two peaks. Sam is immensely proud of this keyhole. Just last year a formation of jets flew through it. And then some American in a wingsuit flew through it. And a famous Chinese singer went up to the site and discovered religion. She’s now China’s most famous Buddhist. Now they are building an incredible elevator that will whisk tourists up there in just minutes, avoiding the 990 steps now necessary.

Sounds great.

6. Zhangjiajie mountains

2011-12-03T11:15:00.000+01:00

After lunch we’re off to the Zhangjiajie National Forest. The entrance is impressive, flanked by a gigantic bus parking lot (mercifully relatively empty) and faced by a bustling row of souvenir shops. You have to buy tickets to go into the area, or have a permit to live or work there, which is one of the ways they control tourism.

Which is a really good thing, after all.

Like in the Yellow Dragon cave, there are paved walkways and fences everywhere, and no going off on your own. I love to go off on my own. It’s a constraint to always have to stay with Sam & Louis, to never get away and just explore what catches my fancy. But if we were allowed to just go anywhere, the millions of people would soon have the whole countryside trampled into nothing. There would be nothing left to tour. It’s this, or nothing.

Ok, I’ll take this.

I kind of like Chinese landscape painting, the ones where the mountains are all vertical and the trees are hanging on sideways and the tiny houses are stuck on with stilts. But I always thought that was an exaggeration.

Not so! The real mountains are right here in Zhangjiajie. They are that steep. The mist really does make them mysterious. You really could put a rope bridge between this peak and that one.

Today the weather is fine. Louis is very very happy it isn’t raining for his one-day tour. We spent the heavily overcast morning in the cave, and by afternoon a lot of it has burned off. Though it isn’t exactly clear, the sky is a lot bluer than it was in Guangzhou.

It’s too bad Sam doesn’t give us more time to walk the trails. Right at the centers where the tour buses stop there’s a great density of tourists and an array of souvenir shops, but we see signs for trails that go 1 to 5 km. Probably down the longer trails you could get a moment or two with no other people in sight, but we don’t have time for this luxury if we’re going to finish the programmed sights by sundown. And Sam promises that the next sight is even better, so off we go.

At one stop he gives us 25 minutes to wander as we please, and after rushing from one viewpoint to the next for photos I find myself with 5 minutes to haggle over souvenirs. I’ll discover later that I should have done all my souvenir shopping out here in the sticks where things are much cheaper (especially jade - this is one of the main areas where jade items are made), but for now I pick up just two bracelets, and a metal statue of a horse that I can’t resist. Before leaving Guangzhou, Laisheng told me I should start bargaining by offering about 20% of the asking price, but the vendor’s first price is to me so ridiculously cheap that it’s all I can do to not jump at the deal right off. I offer half, and we end up at about 2/3 of the initial price. I’m happy. The vendor has made a handsome profit. Everything is good.

Sam has different advice for bargaining, though. We come upon a stand where a woman is selling books of her husband’s photography. They live here, and he’d be at the shop if he weren’t out with the camera. They’re nice books, and I want two. According to Sam, 20% off is really pushing as low as possible. He’s more on the vendor’s side than mine.

Near the end of the afternoon we have a choice between heading back down to the base of the peaks for a tour through the forest, and staying up on top longer & visiting an authentic ethnic minority village. It’s a tough choice, actually, because if we choose the village, by the time we get to the forest the sun will be awfully low. And I do love nature more than towns.

But we choose the village. Go on, a little culture!

Just a little. We see not so much a village, as a museum. We’re taken through a series of dioramas depicting traditional village life as it was a generation ago. I’m sure if we saw their real homes they’d be full of modern stuff. They things they’re producing the old way, they produce not to use, but to sell to us the tourists. It’s a strange situation, this village-turned-zoo. You can even buy popcorn! Which I did, just to taste. They serve it sweet. Otherwise it’s just ordinary popcorn.

Down at the bottom, at the end of a ride on the world’s tallest elevator, is a wonderful area with paths leading down two of the narrow gorges between the limestone peaks. Near the parking lot, vendors line both sides of the path, but farther on it’s nice and peaceful. Not many people are left in the sinking light, and when Sam gives us 20 minutes to wander, I zip down the path along a stream, noting the vendors - yes, I’d like some jade from this place, a scarf from that one... The path is enticing, and doesn’t seem to end. On and on I follow the happy stream, looking up at the sun on the peaks, hoping for a more open view through the thick trees. Eventually I figure my 20 minutes is more than up, and I’m right. By the time I get back, the sun is gone, the vendors have all packed up, and Sam & Louis are just about the only ones hanging around the parking lot.

Then it’s back to town for dinner. They eat very early in China! We go to a local restaurant, a huge place full of people, very loud. There’s a wedding being celebrated, and most of the crowd is there for the traditional 3 days of feasting. Lunch was deliciously spicy, but frankly a little strong for our tender tastebuds, so Louis and I ask for just a little less hot this time.

The space here is more like a meeting hall than a restaurant, and there’s a sort of stage at one end where some people are sitting at a table covered in painted scrolls and paints and stuff. It’s a local artist showing his work (and nodding off a good deal of the time), and his family is there to help with the selling.

In fact, I quite like one of his paintings. It’s a serene scene of bamboo, with a couple of small birds. The colors are just perfect; mostly black and grey or green-grey, on an ivory background with just a splash of red on the birds. Subdued but not excessively. Exactly the sort of zen thing I need in my office.

How much?

350 yuan.

Hmm, that’s, er.... (about 40€) Hey, that’s a deal for a beautiful painting about 18 inches by 40 on a silk scroll with its own beautiful pattern and all. But I will bargain! 350 is much more than it’s worth in China. Though with Sam being more on the vendor’s side than mine, we end up at 300, but ok.

For the evening’s entertainment I’m invited to attend a show of traditional ethnic minority music and dancing. Really spectacular! Ah, no thanks. It’s been a long day, and I’m looking forward to a long, hot, bubbly soak in my luxury bathtub. Besides, Louis is off to the airport so I’d not have anyone to commiserate with at the show.

5. Scenery

2011-12-02T16:59:00.000+01:00

Some scenery shots to tide you over until I get more story written.

4. Zhangjiajie

2011-12-01T12:49:00.000+01:00

This is a 3-day tour. Yeah, right!

BIT, guys; don't ever, ever travel with BIT unless you want to pay far, far too much for far, far less than promised.

Day 1 consists of meeting at the convention center at 5pm. Not in the lounge of the hotel, where there are comfy places to sit and wait, no. Meet in the main convention welcome hall, where there is nothing at all to sit on. It's a vast, marble, empty space here. There is a snack bar, which appears to be open, in spite of the display cases being devoid of edibles. Three people man the register, and when I take one chair and lean my baggage against another, they are quite happy to sell me a bottle of water. So I sit and sip, and read the increasingly irritating travelogue book I brought for waiting. The book is just a hair from being annoying enough to ditch half-read, but I didn't bring anything else. It's so lonely here that after several minutes the server brings me a cookie, on the house. How sweet!

At 4:50 I start wandering around, wondering if my guide will be early, wondering if there's anybody else going on this tour, since the only other people around are arriving for events at the convention center. Ah, here's my guide, a tiny Chinese girl of 20 or so who speaks passable english. I can understand what she says, but her vocabulary is so limited she can't say much. At any rate, I won't be touring anything with her but the route to the airport. We're waiting on a second traveler, a colleague from the breast cancer meeting. Waiting. Waiting. Aha, he's waiting for us over at the hotel lobby!

Off to the airport for a 9pm flight. We'll be at our hotel in Zhangjiajie by 11. So the largest single block of time we have today is spent hanging around the airport. Gee, cool. I do notice an "Italian" coffee bar near our gate, and the coffee there is not bad.Better than the usual Chinese stuff. An Italian coffee bar that serves noodles and the usual Chinese snack fare. Strange.

Another thing about BIT's tours. They never tell you anything. Our guide takes us to the ticket counter, cutting ahead of the crowd though nobody seems to mind, gets us our boarding cards, and says See you when you get back. We don't know how long the flight is. We don't know the name of the hotel. We assume we'll be met at the Zhangjiajie airport, but this is not mentioned explicitly. We don't know the airline, flight number, or time of our flight back. We don't know the name of the hotel we'll be staying at on our return. Just go. Just remember: if you say Yes to anything, consider it bought.

We are met by Sam, a skinny 30-something guy in jeans and a tattered jacket. His english is excellent even though he's never been to an anglophone country. His image isn't quite up to that of our shiny new minivan and suited driver, but he's a great guide.

Three memorable things about the 40 minute drive though the dark countryside (isn't there a city of a million people just around here?): The driver drives the Chinese way: in the middle of the road until something makes you get over. There's a China Giant Salamander Museum lit up in neon (but it's not on our itinerary). We overtook an emergency vehicle with its lights & sirens on. Normally, you see such a vehicle and you let it go on its way. But this one, which was going our direction, was travelling more slowly than our driver was happy with, so we just passed it.

The new hotel is even more luxurious than the convention center one. Which is probably just a very nice hotel, but my standards aren't very high. This one is newer, the carpets thicker, the sitting area more comfortable. The breakfast buffet is even larger.

It's just me and Louis for the tour, and Louis has to go back a day early. He got caught in a trap: a flight back to Paris on the 22nd at 0:20. A few minutes after midnight. This does not count as the 22nd! We get back to Guangzhou the 21st at 11:50 pm. Half an hour to catch his flight. Can't be done. So I'll be on my own for the "third" day of the tour.

Sam's not meeting us until 10, so after breakfast I go out for a stroll around the town. I'm confused as to whether this small town of 50,000 or so is Zhangjiajie of if that's the city nearby or the name of the whole region. It looks a lot like a ski-resort town, with a dozen huge modern hotels charging western prices surrounded by small buildings and shops comprising the rest of the town. The locals and the visitors definitely do not mix. In my walk around, I see nothing of interest to an outsider. There's not even a souvenir shop. Tourists must stay sealed in their hotel, going out only to board their buses and be whisked to the sights.

The local people are out having breakfast in the numerous small shops along the main streets. Typically there's some kind of grill with a frying pan, and a place for steaming dumplings. The Chinese seem to eat for breakfast pretty much what they eat for lunch or dinner. Elsewhere I've been, the menu for the morning meal is quite different than that for later ones. Not here.

Walking around, the town reminds me of North Africa. The sidewalks are broad, because so much business is done there, and it's dirty, the tiles cracked or missing, weeds growing, trash strewn about, dogs hanging around. Aside from the hotels, the town is very poor. The apartment blocks aren't even painted.

The sky is somewhat bluer than it was in Guangzhou, but the haze is still thick enough to obscure the jagged mountain peaks in the distance. And not a far distance; just a few kilometers. It's pretty thick in the morning, but the sun might burn some of it off by afternoon. So it's just as well that our first stop is the Yellow Dragon Cave.

This is the largest cave known in China, and one of the largest in the world. Discovered less than 20 years ago, the Chinese quickly developed a roaring tourist trade here, with miles of concrete walks and iron handrails and thousands of lights inside. Louis and I thank goodness for Chinese discipline, because such a fragile site as a cave, with all it's wonderful limestone formations, would quickly be trampled but for their willingness to stay on the path.

A different kind of degradation is well on its way in the cave, however. With thousands of visitors a day and lights on, everywhere & all the time, it's becoming quite green inside. Not just algae in the ponds and on the damp stalactite and stalagmite surfaces, but leafy plants around the light fixtures.

Cave pictures never really come out without a tripod, but here are some anyway.

A boat ride from one cave part to another is part of the fun. That's my companion Louis in the front row.

After the cave it's time for lunch. Sam takes us to a local restaurant, not to one of the hotels thank goodness, and we have some very spicy food. Delicious! Hot peppers seem to be just another vegetable here, there are so many in there. Yes, we are in Hunan province! It's a welcome change from the mild Cantonese fare in Guangzhou.

From the restaurant balcony.

And that's all I've typed so far.

3. Seeing Guangzhou

2011-11-29T08:52:00.000+01:00

Today I was to take a 6 am bus to the airport on the way to visit Tibet. But alas, the tour operator didn't tell me they needed my chinese visa three weeks in advance in order to get the special permit required to go there. They said they needed it, but not that there was this strict deadline, and naturally I procrastinated in getting everything done, and didn't have my visa anything near like 3 weeks in advance. So TIbet is off. Instead, I've arranged to visit the Zhangjiajie national forest area, and we don't leave until 5. I may relate the hell of getting this arranged later, but for now let's look around Guangzhou.

My map cites the 6-Banyan Pagoda as a sight to see right in the middle of the old town. Let's go for it! This time I pay attention to the signs for exiting the metro, which tells you what places of note are nearest each exit. But you know how I get turned around. There are so many turns involved, this way and that, that there's no way to know which way you're facing once you get out into daylight. And there are no more signs once you're outside, nor is even the sun an indication because it hasn't yet burned through the thick haze.

I took my chances and went one way. Then turned right at a promisingly green area down the block, which turned out not to be the Pagoda, but People's Park. This being Saturday, all the People not manning shops are out in the park. And that's a lot of them. They're playing cards or mahjong or some other game at the stone tables. They're bouncing things off their feet. They're having picnics. They're practicing tai-chi to loud pop music, or reading the newspapers posted on long bulletin boards. At the bottom of the park is Guangzhou Point Zero. Happily marked with a large compass showing me that I should take a hard left to get to the 6-Banyan Pagoda. Thank you!

It still takes me another half hour to find it, though, because it isn't actually called that. I wander around the tiny lanes off the main road, full of handpulled carts and miniscule shops and Chinese people everywhere, thinking this pagoda might be some small ruin of interest to tourists. You never know. The Chigang was pretty well ignored, in spite of its nice park. After coming more than once to streets I know are too far, I notice a brown sign directing traffic to the Liurong Pagoda, off somewhere to my right. So I go that way, thinking one pagoda or another is just fine. The beggars get denser as I get close, and it turns out that the temple is a major attraction, for visitors and locals alike.

I have a pocketful of 1 yuan bills and coins, change from getting metro tickets, and I hand these out to the men with amputated feet, paralyzed arms, or other disfigurements that prevent them from working. There's no social security in China, only your family and what you can get. The yuan is 8 to a euro and this makes me realize that I am really rich compared to these people. Not many are yet profiting from the swank hotels and tourist restaurants. In a decade, perhaps. The alleyways I just perused in my search for this pagoda are crammed with people just squeaking by, selling mangos or hoses from shops just 10 yards square. In the temple, offerings will be to the Buddha. I'd rather make my offerings here on the street.

The Liurong Temple is an important center of Buddhism. Hundreds of people have come to the complex today, which covers an acre or more and includes a dozen buildings and shrines. Scattered around the grounds are six ancient banyan trees, revered by the original monks here and most of which have been replaced by descendant trees. So it is the 6-Banyan Pagoda, in a way.

There are only a few tourists. Most everybody has come to pay their respects to the giant bronze Bodhisattvas, pray for luck, and enjoy a peaceful day out. And it is peaceful. There are a lot of people, but they're calm. There's no shouting, no pop music or worse, no hurrying.

I feel strange with my camera, and I know I should put it away but there are not actually signs requesting no photography and nobody appears to mind a few shots.

Fresh food is piled high in front of the statues. Pyramids of apples (taped together to keep them from falling), six-packs of bottled water, oranges, and mangos are the most popular. The bodhisattvas are not the only ones enjoying lunchtime: the multitudes enjoying lunch from white styrofoam containers remind me that the map of the site did indicate a cafeteria. Ah yes, there it is. You make an offering and then step up to the window, where the monks dish out a good portion of rice and a ladleful of mild potato & vegetable curry. Just the simple food to go with the calm.

Not many monks are visible. There's one in grey holding a laughing court next to the world peace fountain. I have no idea what he's saying, but the crowd is smiling and joking with him. Across the path, another monk in saffron watches the first with amused respect.
After the Temple, I make my way through the throng toward the most-touted of the city's parks: (whose name I forget!). Even more than People's Park, Guangzhou has come out to enjoy their Saturday. They are gathered around the famous Five-Goats statue. The story is that millenia ago, five celestial goats came from heaven and showed the people how to cultivate rice. The Five Goats are still revered, though ordinary goats are still dinner.

Down the hill from the Goat statue is supposed to be a flower garden, though I don't see many flowers. Not the right season, apparently. Instead, I notice that the wooded hill is crisscrossed with little trails, often leading to a tiny clearing with a couiple of stumps for seats. Many people have brought hammocks that they string between two obliging trees for a post-prandial siesta. Elsewhere in the park are two ponds with paddle-boats, a theater, an amusement park, a sports complex, a museum, and various monuments. Most of that I'm happy to skip. What I'd like to find is a good place for some panoramic shots of the city, or even just a look at the city (which is huge, but without an aerial view you really don't get the idea of more than the immediate neighborhood). We're on a large hill, after all. There should be a view somewhere, but the abundant trees obscure everything. Which may be just what the Chinese like - to pretend for a moment that they're out in the wilderness.

I hadn't planned to go in the Guangzhou Museum, but it appears to offer from its upper balconies the best opportunity for a view. At 10 yuan (less than a dollar), even if the museum is a wash, what the heck. And it's a nice enough little museum.

It's only midafternoon, but at this point I figure I should get back to the hotel and check my email before my guide picks me up for my tour of Zhangjiajie.

I was supposed to go to TIbet. I should even now be on the second of the two flights required to get there. But the paperwork didn't get through in time, and they suggested this other tour, which I stupidly said Sure! to before enquiring about the cost. Since it was my fault the Tibet tour was cancelled, they're not refunding a single cent of the pre-paid bill. The way the agency presented this other tour, I thought it was instead of the other (and the difference in price vs the higher-priced Tibet tour would just be lost, ok). But nooooo! Without even mentioning the price anywhere, they were charging me full price for the new tour too! Hey, waitaminute! So I had been trying to negotiate something better, seeing as my flight home wasn't for another 4 days, and could not be changed. I needed to do something with that time, and hang around this smoggy city of millions for that long would drive me nuts. We settled on my not paying for any hotels and on getting a free one-day tour of the city for my last day in China (this new tour being one day shorter). I got screwed, big time. Perhaps I could wriggle out of this new tour, which was apparently uncancellable the instant I said Sure. But it would take a lot of effort, the help of real negotiators, and anyway I really wanted to get out of town.

That's BIT, guys. Don't ever go with BIT: they rip you off.

2. BIT's 4th World Breast Cancer Congress.

2011-11-27T16:25:00.000+01:00

Sounds grand. The convention center is gigantic, with luxury hotel to match.

One thing I noticed about the organizers, though, was how they kept trolling for new speakers even after the deadline for signing up had passed. Long after. And how the schedule kept getting more compact. How I was originally slotted into Section 18 of Chapter 1, Molecular Oncology of Breast Cancer but on the final final schedule I was advanced to Section 4 of said Chapter. Other Chapters simply disappeared altogether.

The registration desk in the morning isn't exactly thronging with eager congress-goers. Must have picked up their materials yesterday. At the Group Photo on the spacious front steps of the convention center there's room for a serious convention, but only 60 or so people show up. Who bothers with these things anyway? YJB isn't here. Somebody else figures the photo is for invited speakers only. Ah, yes, must be it. Only the elite.

We find our way to a rather modest meeting room, and about 100 of us space ourselves out comfortably to listen to the Keynote Session. This can't possibly be all of us. Well, no; YJB is still not in sight, that's one more. Perhaps many others are lurking in their rooms getting their presentations in order, or recovering from jetlag. Although, the room won't even seat more than 150 so we must be close to all here.

It's one of those small, cozy meetings, then. The kind you can really get to know people, and develop friendships and collaborations. That sort of meeting can be much better than the huge ones where you remain anonymous, pal around only with people you already know, and run from one simultaneous session to another trying to get to the talks that interest you. It could be that sort of meeting but for two things.

First, the organizers tried to cover everything under the sun as long as it's breast cancer. So most people here have very little to do with your particular domain. The natural affinities are stretched very thin. It's good to be exposed to new things at meetings, but this is most fruitful when there's a bit more common ground to start off on.

Second, this gigantic venue. We're rattling around like a handful of peas in a 50-gallon drum. This gives a strong impression of being unimportant, alone, inadequate. Strung about all this empty space inhibits our finding that coziness of a good small meeting.

It's understandable that the invited speakers are rather few in number ("invited" being a relative term; most of us still had to pay the majority of the fees), but we're in Guangzhou, a city of 20 million. Where are all the students? The post-docs? The young clinicians? Local people who don't need the fancy lodging or endless buffets three times daily? Where's the poster session? I heard talk of a poster session in the introductory talk - on the second day four tiny posters appeared next to the coffee table outside the meeting rooms. That was it, the whole poster session. They didn't even merit four poster boards, but had to share space crammed onto two easels.

Ah, the meeting rooms. With the Keynote session over, we split into four rooms for various simultaneous sessions. Four small rooms, but still more than adequate. I like a modest-sized room. It's not as intimidating as a huge auditorium. But some speakers traveled all the way to China to talk before just a dozen other people.

The second day, the woman before my own talk had 10 people in her audience. Two moderaters who of course had to be there, two people working on their computers in the back row, one chick typing on her phone, and me just there because I was next. Some of the four remaining were actually listening. Now that is just too sad. That kind of situation makes you want to ask 'should we do this, or just skip it?'.

To top off the shrinkage, two of the sessions were combined into one at the last moment, just to group people together and make the thing fill up the time before lunch. And there would be no coffee or tea for the coffee break. Just a break.

Contemplating the lameness of the situation while loading my presentation onto the host computer, I figured I would just look at my friend Laisheng a lot, because I knew he'd be attentive. But lo and behold, if didn't the room fill up as the no-coffee break ended. People paid attention. There were two or three even nodding and mouthing 'yes, that's just the thing'. And I had questions! Four bona-fide, tell-me-more questions. And afterward, people came up and talked to me and asked me stuff. And I asked them stuff. We used each other's first names. The meeting was beginning to gel. A bit.

Then we all dispersed into the cavernous restaurant for yet another go at the buffet. And this time I sat with a woman from Iran, somebody who earlier commisserated with me over the absence of anywhere to walk to, instead of with YJB (whom I didn't catch sight of anyway).

It's not over yet - there's a mainly clinical session in the morning that a lot of people are apparently planning to skip in favor of a turn around the city - but I guess in spite of my disappointment over this being neither a larger, more animated, event nor a small intimate gathering, it was worth coming. Seeing my ex and future grad student Laisheng was great, and we hope to work out a way to bring him back over to France to finish the project he started. Preparing my presentation forced me to take the time to get this batch of data in order and consider what needs to be done to make it a good publication. And the interest of my fellow congess-goers showed me that that's worth doing. There really is almost nothing in the literature comparing breast cancer in developed vs developing countries, and the little information I have is indeed a big step forward. There's motivation for getting my colleagues moving on our project again.

In the morning the conference has indeed shrunk again. They decide to combine the two parallel sessions into one because some of the speakers have not bothered to show up. We start off with just 37 people, going up to 48 with some very late arrivals, but that's it. I had thought to blow off the morning too, but it's just too depressing to give a talk to an empty room so out of pity for the speakers I stayed.

The Russian speaker gave the strangest presentation. He had a girl stand next to him at the podium, a young blond with a big smile, and her job was to press the button for the next slide. Never mind that his hand was closer to the keyboard than she was, or that he had to interrupt himself to say 'next slide please' every time. Then there was his talk itself. He would go a minute or two without changing the slide, speaking in a very heavy accent, but the slides didn't contain anything to help us understand what was going on. There were no diagrams or explanations, just naked graphs of data that must have been explained in the flow of words, but who could follow? At one point a chart said that 107 % of the cells were dead. Wow! They're good, these Russian scientists!

By 11 the whole thing was over. I tried to be reasonable at the buffet at lunch (in view of a formal dinner with our Chinese colleagues at 6), but you know how buffets are. A taste of this and a spoonful of that, and your plate is piled high. To compensate, a good walk around was in order.

The convention center is just a few hundred yards from a metro station, so getting to town is not all that difficult. The ticket machines and the metro map are pretty easy to navigate as well. So I carefully noted the name of my station (Baiyun Culture Square) in order to find it again later, and off I went. On my very lame tourist may provided by the concierge I saw "Chigang Pagoda", sort of off on its own away from the dense old town I'd explore in depth later.

The metro station, just 5 minutes walk from the convention center. In the middle of a huge vacant lot!

merging from the metro station I found myself on the bank of the Pearl river, in the shadow of that modern pride and joy of Guangzhou: the collosal TV tower. They are very proud of this tower. They love it far more than some old pagoda. The TV tower figures prominently in tours and postcards and everybody wants to take you there.

Feh on TV towers.

Oooohhhh Aaaaahhhh !!!!!! TV tower!!!

Where is this darned pagoda?

It takes a bit of wandering around - but that's the point of the excursion, isn't it? - before I spy the pagoda's top peeking above some trees in the distance. Thank goodness it is so tall, because you'd never find it otherwise amongst all the 20-30 story apartment blocks.

On one side of Chigang is a neat little park, with a couple necking on one of the benches, happy to have the place to themselves. Except for the stranger with the camera, that is. The pagoda itself is in a fenced-off area dense with bushes and trees. Around the other side is vacant lot with cars and buses parked, and the entrance to the compound with a smart modern building and an elaborate gate. The gate opens for an arriving limo, but I don't dare sneak in. Doesn't look very welcoming.

The Chigang Pagoda at last

Back at the metro entrance, there's a prominent notice: no combustibles, explosive, or poisonous materials, please. As if people just randomly bring their explosives on the metro every day. Of course, this stuff is always in the fine print posted somewhere for those with far too much time on their hands. Naturally, no poison allowed in the metro. But what person really intent on bringing a load of sarin or some packets of C4 onto the train will really be dissuaded by the rules? Sorry, Joe, the terrorist attack is off; our weapons aren't allowed. There's another sign for No dogs, No smoking, No balloons... No balloons?

You decide - which is better?

China: Arriving

2011-11-27T09:42:00.000+01:00

The convention center & hotel

Here I am in a plane, skipping Tuesday. After dozing for more than eight hours, I tried to peek out the window. Outside it's midafternoon, and even at our starting-point it's not so very early in the morning. But the steward makes me shut the windowshade. All the way. Because the other passengers want to sleep.

Hmmf.

Should we really pretend it's the wee hours now, when we'll be landing in just 3 hours and it'll be evening already? Shouldn't we accept our night being short and get to work on tomorrow?

Apparently not.

Eventually some brave soul on the other side of the plane, the side with the Himalayas going by, is not told to put her windowshade down, and they start creeping up all over.

There's a lot of empty territory down there in western China. Looks a lot like the US between the Rockies and the Sierras. Not a town for miles. Dry, brown ground, either flat or folded. Then we get into cloud cover, nothing to see at all. About 5 local time there are cities noted on the map and the clouds thin out to a few decorative cumulus, but I can't see much of anything. Roads? Towns? Geological features? It's all hidden by a featureless haze, like the country below is out of focus. Only the occassional riverbank assures me that the in-flight map isn't lying and we're out over the sea.

Another hour goes by, and the smog thins and towns become visible in the fading light. There's a very large fire burning on three long fronts somewhere in China. Then it's dark and we're over Guangzhou, a city of some 20 million, and it's amazingly dark down there. Perhaps we're just coming in over a thinner part of the city. The major streets are brightly lit, but the blocks they mark off are nearly dark. We get right over them before noticing whole forests of 10- to 20-story apartment blocks, the light from the windows is so dim. Every once in a while the plane banks and we get a view that's rather like Los Angeles on a smoggy night. Long straight avenues, crowded freeways, blocks and blocks and blocks of buildings.

Even the airport is a lot like LAX, both in the architecture and the crowds and the lines and the balmy temperature outside. The passport line is a lot slower, though. And like LAX, nobody cares what baggage you walk off with. Outside it's a honking traffic jam. Naturally. The people make a tight jam too, trying to get their baggage carts through the throng to the curb where drivers are allowed to pause and pick you up. No parking and waiting - they'd be mobbed for that. So we have to wait 20 minutes for our driver to go around again and get back to us. Nice of our colleagues to come pick us up! Everything is quite orderly, really. Just too crowded.

They take us to a luxurious hotel right near the University hospital, in a rather interesting neighborhood, my boss assures me. There are plenty of shops and restaurants around, and the subway is right there. But it's the wrong hotel. Our hotel has almost the same name, and it's attached to the convention center, which is half an hour away, near the site of the old airport. Yep. In the middle of nowhere fun. If you could find a way off the grounds on foot, there's nothing but freeway and industry around.

A flowering tree on the hotel grounds

The fabulous view from the front steps of the convention center.
The city can barely be seen through the smog.

A handful of birds brightens the day.

More later!

The Source

2011-11-11T12:03:00.000+01:00

Look! Look! There it is!!!!

Oh, sorry. That's a bit of floor.

But you can see a part of it, on the left, just peeking into the frame.

Ah, that's better.

Here we are. The geeky technician is showing the big heads of the project how to program our brand-shiny-new X-Irradiator! There's Mr Double-Strand Break Repair in the foreground, followed by Mr Mitochondrial Repair; and that's Mr Particle Physics Guy in the back. And me Ms Hereditary Cancer Risk Factors behind the camera.

Come the first of the year, we'll have our very own facility for the experimental X-irradiation of whatever will fit in the cabinet.

Just look at that lead door. Weighs a ton!

Er, actually a bit less. I think the whole apparatus comes out to a ton-point-two or suchlike.

And this is just the temporary installation of the X-ray generator. Just wait until next year, when The Bunker is built and the neutron cannon is delivered. Yep! Yep! Our very own neutron source!! Now that's irradiating in style.

I can't stand it

2011-11-08T09:15:00.000+01:00

That's it. I'm done. Giving up the Jam.
I just don't have time. No time for a blog where in one of the comments to the current post, there are 9 spelling or grammatical errors in 26 words. Just an example. Perhaps some people find that normal, even cool, but for me it's not a pleasure to read.
I actually like works that take language in new directions, or use dialect to achieve a particular voice. But it's like violence in movies - if it's an essential part of what there is to learn, ok. If it's just gratuitous, no.
So I'm moving on. The balance has tipped. This phase has run its course. In a year I might find a poetry group that's more my style, and pick it up again. Or maybe not - there will be something else by then!

Ciao!

Out there.

2011-11-07T09:13:00.000+01:00

Last week's Poetry Jam poem was something of a dud, I admit. This one at least has the advantage of being shorter. On the theme of Windows:

Out there,
the rain lashes
Out there,
the wind is angry
Out there,
the traffic snarls
I watch,
sipping cocoa.
.

Last of Oct

2011-11-02T13:26:00.000+01:00

The weather was beautiful Monday, and the lab was closed so I took a few hours and went for a walk in the hills above town. You can't have a Tuesday holiday here without everyone wanting Monday off too. With the schools closed for the week, it's hard to keep the moms at work. So when the boss is okay with being closed, we're just closed.

One of my favorite stands of trees. I'd love to get a wider shot from this side, but stepping back would mean falling down about 15 feet.

I wasn't the only one out for a stroll in the sun. This popular trail is a regular highway of hikers. Even the pasture with the stand of trees, which is a steep scramble up the last bit of hill off to one side of the trail was full of people - a mom looking at a picture book with her young daughter, a man and some kids wandering around, a random dog probably attached to somebody down the path. No cows, at least. I've never seen the cows up there, although each time I have to be careful of fresh cowpats so I know they're regular visitors.

Still some blackberries in the brambles. A bit past their prime, though the one on the right was okay.

There's one kind of tree (what kind is this one?) that puts on a great show of Yellow, but it's plagued with Black Spots. Which are kind of interesting, aesthetically, but I don't imagine the tree appreciates them much.

And naturally, the path is sideways. Blogger used to load photos in portrait format if it decided that's the way it went. So it was hit&miss with a lot of abstract things. But now it's made up its mind to be entirely consistent and never, ever load anything but landscape formats.

Liftoff

2011-11-01T15:14:00.000+01:00

I didn't have anything in particular in mind when I proposed this week's Poetry Jam themes of The Day Before, or Why so Saintly. If I find some minutes to write properly, I'll tell you tomorrow why I prefer All Souls Day to All Saints, but that's another topic. Waiting for the bus, though, I did come up with one about that faraway (maybe) day when humanity steps forth from its birthplace.

Liftoff

There were cheers
and anticipation
Valves were checked
and rosters
itineraries
lists
stocks
Gone over the good old way,
by hand and with eyes
And again in the computers
Backups
doublechecks
double treble backups
lifecraft stowed.
Everything we knew about
we went over again.
Everyone we knew
we hugged and kissed
and shook shaking hands.
We recorded ourselves
and said This is who we are
But who were we convincing?
...
3
2
1
*******!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!********
How were we to know
just how all would be different
with no Earth under our feet?

what would you do?

2011-10-20T18:18:00.000+02:00

So, say you're writing a book chapter, and you have a colleague with whom you sometimes write these chapters with, and you're not writing it in your native language. Say furthermore that your writing style tends toward literary flourishes and parentheses within whole parenthetical paragraphs, not really the clear and direct scientific ideal.
Your colleague is, however, a native speaker and something of a grammarnazi, and for a few chocolates you can count on her to put the text into shape. And to rein in your wilder speculations.
Do you:
A) plan out the chapter with her and keep her informed both of your progress and of the looming deadlines
or
B) don't bother the colleague with boring information, wait until the reminders start coming from the editor before starting, and then the day before it's "really" due, ask your colleague if she might have a few spare minutes to look over a couple of pages?
Hmm?
What would you pick?
.

5-ingredient Jam

2011-10-14T18:26:00.000+02:00

and now, for the Poetry Jam...

I heard a laugh, and turned.
A shadow like a ghost
faded hastily behind the edges of the laundry.
Sheets fluttering in the dying breeze.
Was it coming for me?
biding its time,
steeping me in anguish,
Or was it just the beer?

If you haven't thought twice already...

2011-10-12T16:50:00.000+02:00

Travel alert for U.S. citizens, courtesy of CitizenInfo, Paris
(a service of the American Embassy)
Do not go to Yemen today.
They will not welcome you there.
Put off sailing around the Horn of Africa if you can help it,
with your sleek happy yacht full of expensive stuff.
A backpacking trek across wildest Iran is perhaps to avoid,
we cannot go saving you one by one.

Love II

2011-10-10T18:31:00.000+02:00

Another one for the Jam, for once I finish a more or less serious poem before the theme is gone & replaced by another.

Those halcyon days, when it was just me at the bench,
doing my experiments,
trying to get some answers.
Late nights
long coffee conferences
Results
Knowing things nobody knew.
Hopping from one discovery to the next
into the unknown.
The exhaustion
The disappointment
the exhilaration.
Going ahead by the fruit of my labors
and of the days spent thinking.

Then it was decided I was proficient at that.
And instead of doing it all myself I gained
other hands to do it for me.
And then more, and more,
a whole rugby side.
Pushed away from my bench
by this new position of Leadership
I wither in my office
directing, evaluating, but not getting my fingers wet.
How much I love my life of Before.
.

Love poem

2011-10-08T15:02:00.000+02:00

A post for the Jam, at last! This week's mission is a love-poem.

.
She's so black!
So fluffy
She allows me to scratch her chin.

a night in Paris

2011-10-03T18:19:00.000+02:00

It must be admitted I'm not the young traveler I used to be. Used to be I'd find the cheapest digs possible and always carry a large towel with me, for use as a towel but also on occassion a blanket. Never did go so far as to carry my own sheet around, though there were times that would have been nice. I don't like sharing my sleeping space, so I avoided hostels unless I was with friends, going instead for cheapo-but-private, even if the bathroom was down the hall.

It was last Monday day when I found out I was expected to go to this meeting in Paris on Thursday. Fine. But there was this other meeting in Lyon on Wednesday, and I thought it a better idea, instead of getting up horribly early both days (with an exceptionally early meeting here on Friday as well), to just take the train to Paris from Lyon and spend the night there. Good plan.

I've never had a problem finding a hotel in Paris. Sure, sometimes it takes a few tries, and sometimes I have to walk a bit to find something in my price range. But there's always something. Wednesday evening I arrived at 7:30, looking forward to a nice walk, then setting my stuff down, and spending a quiet evening with a book and a glass of wine, just relaxing.

So I set off in the direction of Bastille, skipping the low-end places close to the station and the high-end places scattered about. I walked a bit farther than expected, and turned toward the Latin quarter and on toward the Pantheon, then the Odeon neighborhood with my preferred bookshops. Still nothing. Hmm. No matter. The evening is young and warm and there are plenty of hotels in Paris.

After a detour toward Montparnasse I figure I'm getting far from tomorrow's meeting place, and turn around, taking the metro to a the far side of my starting point. Plenty of hotels around Nation, right? Sure, but still no vacancies. As I walked back toward the Gare de Lyon, checking every hotel on every side street, my standards went down, down, down, just as my price limit kept rising.

Nothing.

Back at the station it's 10 pm and I eat the pear purloined from my buffet lunch. So much for a glass and a book! at this point I just want a shower and bed. At the Ibis on the corner they practically laugh when I ask for a room, and snigger when I inquire whether there might be something, somewhere, anywhere, this is a big chain isn't it? can't you ring up some colleagues for me?

There's a hostel just around the corner from the station, and when I passed it before I did so thinking - no way. No way am I ever staying in a common room or setting foot into the common shower.

I make more enquiries, and consider taking the shuttle out to the airport where there are thousands of rooms. Talking to some more hotel people that the airport is usually full up at this time of night too. What a disaster to go out there and find myself stranded.

Back at the hostel they do have a bed, in a room for three and there's only one other person so far.

I am now so tired and discouraged (mostly discouraged, I have been to a lot of hotels this evening and nobody even had a suggestion of where to go, when usually the concierge will ring up his buddies and find a place down the street. I'd happily walk another half hour if only I knew at the end of it there was a bed for me!) that I take the hostel. Sheet & towel extra, but they're freshly laundered.

omg.

Maybe 15 years ago I would have been fine with it. My roommate is a woman my age who missed her train, somebody with a job and kids and a house, not a vagabond traveler looking for somebody else's luggage to pick through. The beds are not very comfortable, but alright. It's terribly hot, past 90°F, so the window is open to the noisy street. The bathroom, er, I go down to the bar on the corner for a cup of tea just for the priviledge of using their bathroom. The shower, well, a shower in the morning is a must. And I must say, the shower on my floor was in much better shape than those on the other floors. Could have been worse. And I did cheat a little by taking my pillowcase and using it as a bathmat. That kind of made it bearable.

I think the hostel experience would have made for a decent night's sleep (the shower was the very last thing in the morning), if only we didn't acquire a third roommate at 1 am. Or if the first roommate didn't have to get up at 4:30. Or if the other one had been able to get back to sleep after that and thus did not attempt to read by flashlight in a miniscule room covered with brilliant-finish paint. When I told her to please stop that, she decided to get up, repack her abundant luggage with its numerous crinkly plastic bags, and then spend an hour in our sink area on the phone to her friends. Hey, chick, there is no insulation here. Can hear every word. I could practically hear what her friends were saying.

I did survive.

I'd better not be doing that again.

the trials of being Natalie

2011-09-30T17:33:00.000+02:00

The cat, she is Out
she was out all night
and out this morning
early when I left to catch my ride.
Out.
She likes to be out.
She is well-served today
because I'm not coming home tonight
I'm even now on a train to Paris.
The cat is out.
She was out all day yesterday,
coming in for just a snack in the evening,
and all day today,
and she'll be out all day tomorrow
until at last I arrive
on foot from the station
exhausted
too late for the last bus.
She will be so happy to see me
and to rediscover the Others
who judiciously stayed In with the catfood
She will shiver with joy
and shake her tail
and demand caresses
until it's time to go Out again.

How’s that for teamwork ?

2011-09-27T16:55:00.000+02:00

Or, why my life is too full for blogging these days.

The new law of the land dictates that all medical biology labs should fuse into these huge, centralized structures, and that these superlabs must obtain ISO accreditation by 2016.

Errrr, uhhhh.

But, the government is still undecided as to whether it will allow ‘reference laboratories’ to exist. These would be specialized laboratories doing very specific and onerous tasks requiring particular expertise, such as genetic analysis.

Ah.

Accreditation is still required, but the domain of expertise is much more limited.

Well, we can handle that.

But the gov still wants us to regroup as much as possible, so my cancer genetics department will still have to fuse with the general genetics lab across the way, and also with the path department that’s started doing somatic genetic analysis.

Errr, well, just tell us what the perimeter is, and who to work with, and what the general structure is going to be.

That last part is still a black box, but highly placed people are apparently considering the subject.

Oh, and don’t let things slide until 2016. A dossier with a part of our activity ready to accredit on the spot as well as a detailed plan for the rest is due by next October.

Oof !

This isn’t news just today. We’ve been pondering for a while now.

In the meantime, the path guys have been doing their somatic mutation work on my guys’ machines, sharing lab space and all, and we get along pretty well. We’ve set up a common Quality Group to develop the necessary documentation of our methods and etc. At the detail level, the merge is already beginning.

But at the department head level and above, no news.

So it was with some surprise that we learned that our path head was part of some committee put together at the national level to assess how different hospitals were dealing with the whole thing. We weren’t invited to know what that group was all about. We weren’t sure what was expected of us when a trio of auditors showed up to look us all over for a day. But, great ! we’re happy to address the subject and maybe get somewhere.
Everybody says that it’s clear that Genetics and Pathology are going to merge into a Bio-pathology superdepartment. It’s clear we will have lots of overlap in our daily work. But the organizer of the day fully expected the genetics people to get up and leave after the introduction to the meeting when it was time for the path presentation. ?? here I am at the table, and I'm still not invited to see what's going on?? I hope I was polite enough in begging to stay (at any rate, I did, and so did my colleagues, and I can tell you we learned some things). And none of the path people came back after the lunch break for the genetics presentation.

Um. If we're a single team, why the walls of silence between the diverse parts? Some ideas of who should know what need to change here. At least that’s my opinion.

bitching & moaning

2011-09-23T12:57:00.000+02:00

Sometimes things just don’t grow in the directions you hoped they would.

Take the Poetry Jam. Back in the days when TFE was hosting the Poetry Bus on his blog, I really liked the group of people who would come around every week with a poem. Eventually I felt a part of the gang, and proud to be so.

Then TFE gave up organizing a weekly thing, and the Poetry Bus blog is just a site with news about the next issue of the P-Bus magazine - it isn’t a place for poems. I was one of the people who didn’t want the Bus to die, and the first to offer to administer a new place for us to gather for a weekly prompt. I still don’t understand why it was forbidden to have any sort of Poetry Bus reference in the name. A state secret, apparently. TFE said he could not be involved with any new blog that was obviously a derivative of the Poetry Bus. (Although, naturally, just such a derivative was exactly what the rest of us wanted.) (And you know what ? TFE has not once participated in the Jam. So why did I bother to accomodate him ?)

At any rate, Poetry Jam was born, and at first many of the Bus riders came over, and it was kind of like the Bus, only Jam.

But now most of our participants are new people I don’t know and whose writing doesn’t grab me. Some use cutesy pseudonyms and probably dot their i’s with little hearts.

I’m one of those curmudgeonly people with a special button in my pocket for the vaporisation of people who dot their i’s with little hearts once high school is behind them.

The Jam just doesn’t have the group-of-friends feel to it that it had at the beginning. It’s cool to have 80+ followers, but when we had 20 I knew them all. I find I’m only posting a poem now and then, not because I don’t have time to get one out, but because I just don’t care. And I’m cherry-picking the links I visit, favoring certain names I know, skipping others, judging new names by their names and how many lines they take up when all I want is their name and not a novel on the Linky.

I suspect, with no particular reason to than a glance at who's linking up each week, that some of my favorite fellow former Bus poets may feel the same. Because they're not there either.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe the creative outlet of Poetry has let out all the accumulated stuff that needed to be said in poems, and it’s time to close the taps and let the pool fill up again.

image vs flesh

2011-09-18T16:37:00.000+02:00

the impact of sunlight on my bare skin
the wind messing my hair
sand between my toes
I want to be there.
No flat photo will do.

This for the Poetry Jam. Join the jelly here!

a clue is left on the doorstep

2011-09-16T13:28:00.000+02:00

Well, I wrote that about the gas on Tuesday, in the gap between swimming and bridge, relaxing with a glass of kir on Clermont’s main square. This lounging at a sidewalk table with a cold one and some peanuts, watching the people go by and musing on whatever, is surely the reason why philosophy is such a Big Thing here. To the point of having Celebrity Philosophers (as the Economist referred to Bernard-Henri Levi not long ago. Even so, I wouldn’t recognise BHL if he was sitting at the next table.)

But anyway.

Wednesday night I got home early and my evening guest arrived later than expected, and so I was messing around thinning the weeds in the front yard. At one point I went far enough to the right side of the house (where my unused driveway is. I go over there, what, once a month ? not even ?) to look up the steps to my official front door. Which I never use, seeing as it’s far more direct to open the pedestrian gate next to the mailbox, get the mail, and go straight up the steps to the kitchen door.

But what was on my front steps ? Some paper. Now, how did that get there.

I’m used to having bits of trash in my front yard, blown there from the passing trash pickup or littered courtesy of my neighbors who park in front of my house. But whole sheets of paper, and up over the low wall that screens the steps ?

Aha ! It’s a notice from the gas people that they were here and they changed the meter, and here was a booklet explaining how to relight the gas. Rather worse for the weather, having spent more than 3 weeks outside, but still readable. It would have been nice of them to stick it in the mailbox instead!

I’ll try it tonight.

the latest thing

2011-09-15T18:14:00.000+02:00

I could be classed with the strange people.

Those of you who’ve known me for a while, in person, know this already, naturally. Writing on the children. Locking the boss in his office. Segregating the peanut butter from the jelly.

I should really figure out how to turn the gas back on at the house.

They came around the other day to change the meters in the neighborhood, and when I got home, no gas. Not that I noticed for a couple of days. I rarely use my gas stove in the summer months, and I sometimes go swimming and take my shower at the pool. Summer --- Pool?

So another shower at the pool, and then it was the weekend, and then I went away for a week. And then I came back but discovered that not having hot water at the house meant lots of good exercise at the pool. I can do my 2000m without stopping now.

At any rate, it’s hard to believe it’s been 24 days already.

Yeah, 3 weeks without a major utility.

Reminds me of the time I went a month without electricity. It was early summer of my first year here, and I hadn’t paid my electric bill and I thought I’d been cut off. It was too embarrassing to run to Olivier and ask him to help me (my french was pretty rudimentary in those days), and what with it being light out so late in the evenings in June, and not really needing my fridge (being too poor also to fill it properly), I just let it go for a while.

So I paid the electric bill, and I hadn’t been cut off - O explained they give you quite a lot of slack. But I still had no electricity until finally I discovered the fuse box way at the top of the stairs where I didn’t think I should ever be looking for one. But yeah. Tripped during a thunderstorm.

Honestly, there must be a valve somewhere, something to light, a matter of a few seconds work. I might look into it tonight when I get back from the pool.

The comfort of pillows

2011-09-12T17:59:00.000+02:00

This weekend's Poetry Jam theme concerned Pharmacology, and just around the same time I read the suggestion that we do a 9/11 theme. So. Normally I wouldn't do either of these, feeling I had nothing to say, or nothing adequate, or just not wanting to go there at all.
Aw, get some courage!
All is not sweetness and light in the world of poetry!
Wasn't I just thinking after the Always Looking Up, and Humor weeks, that that was enough of that?
Just can't be pleased, can I? (reminds me of somebody here at work... the advice is for me to stop trying so hard to accommodate...Might write about that, but some colleagues are readers...) So I've been thinking, in busses and between tasks and suchlike, and here's the (somewhat premature, but it's late Monday already and look what happened to my Looking Up poem - still simmering) result.

The Blue Comforter

The fog is going out
The morning is getting on
and finally the mist starts to disperse
Already the near branches of the oak tree reach out
and become real.
I can see the leaves,
one by one.
Come, Sun!
come shine
come warm the earth from its long night
burn off this thick haze
and let me see my city.

I stretch and yawn and the day makes progress
while I brush my teeth
up & down 100 strokes
and pour my coffee in its usual mug
and pull on my clothes
undies, socks, pants, t-shirt in order.
It's going to be a nice one.
Nice and sunny and I'll take a walk around the park and down to the library.

I look outside
Miraculously! the sky is clear,
the birds are singing.
And a plane
so clearly,
clearly visible
in the light blue of the morning,
streaks by and I must have I must have Where is the fog? Where? where bring the fog the merciful fog where is the bottle with its packaged mist to hide everything to help to block out the sky and let me cope get through the day.

More wandering about Stockholm

2011-09-09T17:57:00.000+02:00

Things are still crazy-busy at the lab, so I'm just going to post pictures, not some long-winded story like I like to do. We were walking along one of the many waterfronts when we came across these mailboxes for the houseboats moored just behind me here.

A bird. Yep, lots of birds in Stockholm. The water is pretty clean, and there are lots of green spaces, so there are lots of birds.

This one island was pretty much all park, with a few museums and some historical homes that were sort-of museum, sort-of somebody's home.

What self-respecting park would be without a swingset?

As you know, I must swing whenever I see one. Makes me think, if I get out the door early enough I should stop by the park in Romagnat tonight...

Lighthouse boat!

Luis went over to check out the motorized thingy randomly crisscrossing somebody's yard. It's an automatic mower! Like those self-guided vacuum cleaners for the house, only this one cuts the grass for you. It had so much territory to cover, though, that the result was kind of patchy. And you can see its tracks all over.

Here's Luis kindly setting up a Maurice Moment for us.

And then it was about time to go back to our hosts for dinner.

I had just the one full day in the city, and we never did go out for a proper meal (only lunch in a sandwich shop), so there will be no going on about the food. Though I will say that the Peruvian fare in different people's homes was a treat.

The next day was a nice, quiet one: five hours on the train to Copenhagen watching the countryside go by and thinking about nothing much. Then a leisurely lunch at the airport. Once in Paris I decided again to take it slow and not rush to make the last train home to Clermont (which I had a 50-50 chance of missing even if I tried). The cats were under Marc's care for another day anyway. So I splurged on a nice hotel just down the street from my favorite Paris bookstores and savored my night in.

Ciao!

Stockholm boat tour

2011-09-07T17:28:00.000+02:00

Downtown waterfront

In Stockholm last week we had just one full day to see the city. What you get when you arrive at midnight one day and have to leave on the 8 am train the next! My friends stayed on for the whole weekend, but I had to get to my flight in Copenhagen, stop in Paris, and then get back to my kittybits. They miss me so.

Old sailing ship now a youth hostel. Interesting digs!

Other friends had recommended taking one of the many boat tours around the many islands that the city is built on, and that turned out to be a great idea. We took a 2-hour tour of the principal sights, which had very nice commentary broadcast. Sometimes I hate that because the sound is awful or the talk just lame or boring or annoying, but this one was really good. Not too much, not too little. And the guy didn't try to crack bad jokes.

Some of the other passengers on the tour.

It was nice being in the boat for the few minutes that it rained, but shooting photos through the only moderately clean windows was a drawback. And you could only really see one side of the channel or the other at any time, but fortunately there were so few passengers you could go back and forth at will. The ten outdoor seats at the back of the boat were firmly taken by a bunch of beer-drinkers, but I did stand out there a few times.

Reclaiming more land for Stockholm

A bit of passing graffiti. I didn't get many graffiti pix this trip, but there was some awesome stuff out there.

One of the many many many marinas around town. Waterfront apartment blocks have their own docks.

Some of Stockholm's thousands of boats float no more...

BAD! That means indoor swimming pool.

The superhuge cruiser dwarfed anything else we saw.

just a peek

2011-09-06T19:31:00.000+02:00

I was in Sweden for a few days last week, visiting friends. No time to blog since getting back, but I'll give you this preview...

Mev with her companion Luis and her Mom welcoming me to Lund

A walk around the university campus showed just how beautiful non-french schools can be!

One of the main shopping streets

These groups of yellow chairs were everywhere, in preparation for the Humor Festival

Train to Stockholm coming! Time to go.

A day in Dieppe

2011-09-01T15:15:00.000+02:00

Not quite the promised Mostly Sunny, but the patches of blue over the seapass for a pretty nice day here on the Normand coast. It isn't raining! What more could I ask for?

I arrive a bit after one, having been delayed half an hour by a broken rail near Paris. The connecting train from Rouen to Dieppe patiently waited for us (happily, or most of us on the train to the coast would have had to cool our heels in Rouen for two or three hours - enough to wreck any day-trip)

So it's time for lunch. Past time. The pleasure port here is conveniently lined with restaurants, however. Half of them are open, though whether the closures are due to the end of the high season and the Tuesdayness of the day, or to some general economic depression is unclear. At any rate, I am here to do my part to help out, and am looking for a fixed-price menu with as many different sea creatures on it as possible.

Aha. Here at the place with the bright yellow awnings I can have both a fresh seafood platter (4 species) and a sort of fish stew (4 more) at a reasonable rate. And they're still seating new tables for lunch. Just my day.

The bigorneaux are my favorites. This is perhaps partially because you have to actually go to the coast to get these black-shelled sea snails. They're fresh from this morning's low tide, nutty tasting, and not at all gross, even raw. Oysters are on offer, naturally, but they're really not my thing and they're happily absent from my plate, which is completed with salmon, shrimp and a spiny langoustine. The Dieppe-style stew isn't one, in fact, but a collection of small pieces of fish in a creamy butter-lemon sauce, all very fresh and divine.

Straight off the boat fresh seafood is one of the things I've been craving. The other is a nice walk along the coast. Time to get on with it!

The tide is way up. The beach curving away west toward Fecamp and Le Havre is steep and stony, and the white cliffs dull under the heavy cloud cover. It isn't easy to walk along the beach - the rocks are smooth and range from pebbles to the size of a child's fist, but they're deep and with the slope you keep sliding down at every step.

Families and couples are scattered up and down the waterfront, laying out on their towels fully clothed, insisting on a last day of summer. Every fourth souvenir stand is open, catching passersby with their gaudy wares. A beachfront bar is open but has just two tables occupied with people sipping hot tea and coffee.

I walk past the edge of the town past where the cliffs begin, but not too far, thinking I just might see something of the town before train time back to Paris. But there's nothing like strolling along a mostly deserted coasline, wondering at the cliffs on one side, the receding sea on the other, this narrow strip of land in between full of colorful and intruiging shapes, a sailboat going past close. After an n-ieme photo of seagulls on some emerging rocks I turn back and discover that the tide is uncovering sand at last. Such a pleasure! Much smoother to walk on than the rocks.

Even so, once back at the secured swimming areas (yes, a pair of lifeguards on duty at each one, despite the utter absence of swimmers) it's time for a rapid glance at the quaint old town with its new shops same as every other town's, and to the station.

Planespotting

2011-08-31T18:06:00.000+02:00

I do have a "serious" poem in mind for this week's Poetry Jam, but it isn't ready yet and it's almost time for the next theme. So the silly one while I get my act in gear for Always Looking Up:

At 10:38, the Air France to Paris CDG lifts off and magestically turns northward
At 10:39, the Air France to Paris Orly lifts off and magestically turns northward
looking exactly the same.
You wonder: why are they two?
They fade into the hazy distance
as the Lyon-Bordeaux crosses their trails
much higher up,
linking the eastern cumulous group
to the western cirrus.
The Paris-Toulous weaves its strand
into the contrail tartan
before the high breezes
disperse them.

The Waterman

2011-08-27T11:20:00.000+02:00

I am going to buy a pen today.

Oh ! Momentous news ! you say.

Well, hey, I plan on buying myself a really nice pen. Not some by-the-dozen bic or biro. I like having a special pen.

Around here, a Mont Blanc pen is the classic graduation gift, and that got me thinking about having a really nice writing instrument. I like to write, and I like to write with something very smooth and fast, proper liquid ink that doesn’t take too long to dry. I’d been through a lot of cheap fountain pens since college, but this time I figured I’d get a Good one. Not a Mont Blanc (I don’t like their style), but a pretty one.

That was ten years ago, on the occassion of my getting the job I have now. My little self-congratulations.

Lapis lazuli blue, with gold trim, a Waterman. I bought tiny six-packs of inks for it, in various colors but always ones I could read. The inks go all together in a wooden box in the spare bedroom, so I never know what color I’m loading next. Sure, some you can’t help but have an idea, but I try not to look. The best part is the 2 or 3 pages where the old ink in the nib gradually runs out and is replaced with the new color.

Two weeks ago, lounging at the bar at the foot of the mountain, nursing a beer and writing up the day’s events while waiting for the shuttle bus to show up and take me back to town, I set the pen down on the table, uncapped, when the waitress came by. While fishing for change in my pocket, it rolled off the not-really level surface, and did a nose-dive onto a rock.

Its golden nib was bent, and it writes no more.

My pen !

My deep blue pen.

I’ve been around to the various pen-knowledgable in town, and they all tell me the same story. This particular model was phased out years ago, and the nibs are not standard size. You can’t just get a new one. You have to send it to Waterman, and they’ll think about it. They’ll see what they can do. The poor nib is really bent out of shape, and the woman at one shop made it worse trying to bend it back - it can’t be fixed.

That pen was with me to Marrakech, Iceland, Romania. It’s been to deserts and beaches and mountaintops and the choking heart of the city. It’s written holiday cards and birthday greetings and thank yous and endless, endless journal entries. It’s been lost for weeks and given up for gone, but always found again.

I miss it. I’m off on vacation Monday, and I don’t want to leave home without it. I have a nice enough ballpoint (dropped from some doctor’s pocket, I found it on the ground at a meeting, the nicest pen I never paid for), but it’s still a ballpoint. I can’t write my journal with that.

It's time for a new pen.

Five things I must have for fall.

2011-08-26T09:54:00.000+02:00

I was reading the New York Times yesterday, normally a source of news and information. There was an article on 5 essential things for Fall, and not wanting to be caught out without an umbrella or a new school notebook or something, I took a look.

First, a turtleneck.

Er, if there is a piece of clothing I just cannot abide, it’s the turtleneck sweater. Aside from doing nothing whatsoever to make me look good, their neck-binding/choking/strangling/stifling quality is a definite NO all year round. Cross that off and get a new shoulder bag to tote my lunch to work in, now the old one has unravelled so much.

Second, wide-leg corduroy pants.

For real! It’s a must-do once again to go shushing down the corridor to the sound of corduroy. But alright ; I admit, it’s not so much the fabric itself as the extraordinary price tag that makes these pants a must. I could get those pants, or do my entire month’s shopping instead. With nothing to eat, I’ll be able to walk silently around the office in my fabulous pants. Cross that off and get a guide to mushroom hunting so I can go out and collect the good ones without poisoning myself.

Third, Givenchy gold-band pumps.

Yes, I want to walk around au point all day. My feet will love me. My achilles tendons will never be the same. These are not meerly heels, they’re 6-inch heels. With a gold band across the top of the foot, naturally. I’ll put them next to my hiking boots in the closet, and we’ll see who wins. Cross that off and get some new swim goggles, ones that will keep the pool water away from my eyes, rather than trapping it next to them.

Fourth, Burberry’s mod coat.

Uh, Mod. Anything with "mod" in it should have been abandoned decades ago. The coat is clunky and ill-proportioned; the neon orange color reminiscent of some drug-soaked spring that I never experienced and see no need to. Yeck. Cross that off and get a collapsable umbrella that will actually hold up against a slight breeze.

And at last, a Miu Miu dress.

Now, this I could actually wear. "Austere 40’s chic." Not so bad, really. A nice drape to just below the knee, fitted but not draconian waist, beautiful print fabrics.

All set for fall shopping!

Hey, you! Live gently

2011-08-22T16:55:00.000+02:00

Brian's theme for this week's Poetry Jam is Will Write For... a cause of some sort. I'm not a big cause person (like I'm not a quotation person, but that doesn't stop me participating in memes), perhaps because I'm afraid of getting started. Throwing myself into a cause - can't just dabble in these things; it's not serious - somehow should mean I'm committed to it. And I know that either the committment would either eat up my life, or I wouldn't be committed and it would just be a joke.
I know! I know. It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing deal.
But somehow it is. I have yet to find the right balance.
Anyway here's my Awareness poem.

This blue marvel

Was here long before you.
It gave rise to everything that is here.
It breathes
and shifts
and coughs with the swell of the tide.
We forget that the landscape is not fixed
that cliffs should crumble and fall
and shorelines advance or retreat
and that rivers may change their routes.
We try to be stronger than the forces that
move continents across the seas
and raise mountains from plains.
With our engineers
and our concrete
and our hubris
we try to stop the planet from shifting in its sleep.
In that we fail.
Instead we succeed in scraping bare the delicate living crust
replacing meadows with suffocating asphalt
chasing down animals to the last of their kind.
Will we learn to live gently on this earth
Before there is nothing but ourselves left of it ?

Friday Shootout

2011-08-19T09:00:00.000+02:00

Hey look, it's the Friday My Town Shootout! Long time, no post!

But I happened to see today's theme, and decided to come back, at least for a while. And it is...drumroll... Matching.

Er, what?

Yes, yes, you match up a photo to your favorite quotation.

Ah. I'm not really a quotation person. Some of you out there keep whole rolodexes full of nifty quotations in your heads, ready to pop one out for any occassion, at any time, proper attributions and all. Not me. I'm sure at some point some clever person said just exactly the right thing, and it would score me a lot of points both in the appropriate repartée department and the culture and knowing my history departments to come up with one and lay it out here.

Accompanied, naturally, with an illustrative photograph. The Shootout is about Shooting pictures.

In lieu of all that I give you my favorite quotation below. It's my favorite not because it's all that great, but because I hardly ever get to say it. Still looking for that perfect moment. And this sort of is one, so here you are.

Back off, Bub! I'm a scientist.

There you have it folks. The one line worth keeping from that lame mid-80's SF flick Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension.

Click here for the full shootout.

underground

2011-08-16T12:50:00.000+02:00

It was not a great year for potatos here at number 5.

They started off alright, poking their leaves up in the spring, both newly planted bits and unharvested sleepers from last year. Then in June we had a few killer days. Hot, hot hot. Water as I might, the plants just cooked in the sun. Some of them straggled on, puny and thin and never flowering, limping through July and finally fading away in August.

The senescence of the leafy plant is supposed to mean the tubers are ready. (they'll not get any bigger - without leaves to pull in more energy from the sun, they're just marking time until next year) So I went out there with my fork to see what was what, at the least to stop the weeds from overtaking the patch.

It's so fun to turn over plain dirt, and see golden nuggets among the clods. Gold!

There's food in the earth!

Not that there's a lot of potato down there. Many are the size of peas or marbles. The largest are just 4 inches by two.

But it's really neat to have my very own taters, waiting for me to look for them under the ground. I'm going to scrub them up and make dinner.

100 words: Summer (again)

2011-08-12T08:46:00.000+02:00

Yes, again. Shame on me for complaining about an excess of clouds !
Am I nuts ? I have 8 weeks a year to do with what I will. I have the means to travel. Or stay home and tend my tomatos and my cats.
I have the luxury of time. Whine about a spot of rain ? My house doesn’t leak. Noticably. I have 3 umbrellas. Three !
How many in this world don’t know what Vacation is, have no word for it in their language ? How many toil every day, every day they can, just to live.

100 words: summer

2011-08-11T09:59:00.000+02:00

Where is it ? My season of sun and relaxation ? Of relaxing there is some : with everyone off for two weeks here and three there, work is quite relaxed. Assorted crises aside !

But where is the sun ? May was dry and hot and got gardens going early. July, however : sweaters all day. Rain and gloom. Autumn before its time. My lawn hammock has stayed in the cellar, dissassembled. Barbeques cancelled. Long hikes not taken.

Summer come back !

I have a week off before school restarts. Should go to Morocco; make up for lost rays.

Evening Jam

2011-08-10T12:41:00.000+02:00

Monday's Poetry Jam theme is Evening, and for once I've got one early.

In the northern summer
when evening comes late,
so very late
the children go in before the light is full gone
and I have the swings in the park
all to my peaceful self.

That summer season

2011-08-08T17:55:00.000+02:00

I was looking at the photo at the bottom of Poetry Jam, a photo I took in my kitchen just for the Jam kickoff, and had to laugh: this past weekend I bought a new 6-pack of jars so I could preserve pasta sauce in easy, cooking-for-one quantities.

There's not an empty jar in sight this time of the year. Many of my jars are living at friends' houses for the moment. Some of them will come back and be refilled. Some won't, and the friends will get new ones. Most of the jars are in my kitchen filled with stuff. One has roasted pine nuts, another has bay leaves. One's in the freezer full of pesto. The rest form an impressive array of toast-topping. There's ginger-peach, raspberry-peach, burlat cherry, griotte cherry, and a lingering collection of last year's apricot-berry, blackberry, and blueberry. Far more jam than I can eat before needing yet more (and more!) jars for the fast-approaching blackberry season.

Though, with all that in the cupboard, I could skip blackberry jam. I could.

Yeah, right!

Not making jam is not a solution. I'll just have to round up the empties at the friends'.

Fade to black

2011-08-07T10:44:00.000+02:00

This week's Poetry Jam task, set by Chris of Enchanted Oak, is to write an elegy for something we have lost, whether it be a loved one, lost youth, innocence, anything. I was thinking of something along these lines for next week's prompt, and I'll just have to find another, now! Anyway, my poem about a lost friendship:

Farewell to Iris

I don't know what I did.
I don't know what I said.
If indeed it was anything at all to do with me.
But you could have left me a message
Stop calling
Give up.
And I would have stopped
Instead of lingering.
Instead of believing our mutual friends
who said you were just very busy
in their effort to be kind.
I have given up now.
For a long time
I imagined that if I met you in the street,
I would feign delighted surprise, as if it had only been a week,
and then drop you in my turn.
Or I would warmly greet your husband,
and act as if you were absent.
Or any of a hundred scenes.
I hold my grudges as tightly as my friends.
Now, I would just pass on by.
You, just another face in the crowd.
Perhaps this has already happened,
And I didn't even notice.

Bellenaves

2011-08-05T18:07:00.000+02:00

Good idea: take a day off, & take a train somewhere new.

Bad idea: 7 am train. I don't get up that early for work!

Good idea: 9 am trains. Hey, France, trains at nine are early enough for relaxing vacationers, and still early enough to get you somewhere with time to explore before lunch. So schedule some, please.

Today's random destination (within, of course, the limited selection of "trains leaving early and getting there not too late, with a train home again in time for bridge in the evening, going someplace I haven't been before") is Bellenaves. The season is late for sunflowers. In most fields they're starting to weigh down their stalks and look down at their feet, not the sun, but my train rounds a few bends where bright yellow fields are still blooming not very far away. Will have to find a trail that goes to one!

Bellenaves: the road into town from the station.

The station is a bit out of town; in fact, it's in the next village over. Which way to go first...

You are now leaving Bellenaves.

Sunflowers must be this way, somewhere.

There is a lot of nice countryside in this direction, but the gorgeous sunflower fields remain stubbornly on the other side of a gorge with no easy way across, and the road keeps turning the wrong way and not taking me around a bend to golden yellow glory.

So I turn around to look for a better road.

Apples are ready early this year. I swear this one made me think this was a plastic-apple tree!
No retouching has been done!

On the way back I pass a neat little dovecote in an empty field.

Treasures in Bellenaves: a 12th century Roman church. Roman, they say. You can tell it's French by the chicken on top.

There's a panel out front detailing the sights of this church, from the façade featuring Jesus washing the feet of the apostles to the special stained glass portrait of Mary inside. I gather that the interior is still mostly decorated head to toe, but it's closed so I don't get to see it. Stained glass from the outside is just boring.

The second treasure in Bellenaves I saw from the train on my trip to Montluçon this spring. A nice castle in town, turrets and all. The village website promises it's open for visits in July and August (except Mondays). Today is Tuesday, but no luck: closed for repairs. Alas, there's no good view of it from outside the tall gates and walls.

So fine. A tour of the countryside is in order. The clock on the church says it's 10:35, so I've got two and a half hours.

There's a nice map posted in town, with all the roads, streams, sites, and hiking/biking/riding trails in the area. I take a quick sketch of the route I've decided will take me past the bright flower fields, with a couple of landmarks, and take off.

After 10 minutes or so, consulting my little sketch I wish I had added a few more roads. And then it hits me - I have an all-new camera with a screen that works! Just take a picture of the map.

Too late now.

I did find some sunflowers. And I had some really great long shots of the fields, and one with a silly scarecrow in the middle and all, and then I played with the rapid-fire function shooting a pair of hawks in the air, but 87 of those photos have mysteriously disappeared in an accidental deletion.

Though I did get a shot of the sketch of the map!

pics of Puy de Dome

2011-08-04T17:28:00.000+02:00

Here are more of my adventures with the new toy. It's pretty much like the old toy only a lot lighter, which is great for a nice long hike. It's about time I got out and about this summer (hikingwise, that is - it's been so rainy and I've been playing cards so often on Saturdays, that not much walking has been happening).

So I went up to my usual place, looking for blueberries. It's early in the season for them, if the season were normal this year. But in fact it's too late. It was such a warm spring they all got going early, and then in my usual patch they graze sheep occassionally and sheep love to eat whole blueberry plants. I discovered there were a few left. Just enough to tease.

J'espère que vous allez bien

2011-08-03T12:16:00.000+02:00

I received a nice little postcard in the mail the other day. Sylvie had sent a beautiful image of Chaves, Portugal and its arched roman bridge across the river. She wrote about how nice and warm it was there, and how they would finish their week of vacation in Porto. Then she gave her good wishes for our health and signed off with a kiss.

Like thousands of postcards circulating around this earth.

I went out in the yard and read it out loud to the trees and the sky. The card was addressed, you see, to the former tenants of my house, who have not lived here for more than five years. In fact, I think they have both passed away.

It left me wondering, when I die, who will be sending me postcards years afterwards? How do we tie up all those loose ends?

The Replacement

2011-08-02T18:54:00.000+02:00

So the new camera body came in the mail the other day.

(who am I kidding? it's been nearly two weeks. I'm just that far behind on blogging.)

so I went and tried it out, with just the regular lens, at the rose garden in Clermont.

The macro function seems to work well.

Just imagine if I had the +7 adapters attached... there'd be maybe two raindrops in the whole image.

Later I'll see if I can get the cats in action & try out the continuous shooting button.

P-Jam 67

2011-08-01T13:26:00.000+02:00

Today's Poetry Jam theme by The Bug is about being 67, whether that's future present or past. I admit to not being terribly inspired this weekend, but I did play bridge at the club on Saturday, and we did win (again! who'd'a thunk it?). My position there as young pet to be cooed over and coddled will eventually fade away, and I came up with this.

Bridgeaddict at 67
When you're retired, you can play bridge at the club every afternoon of the week except Sunday. Monday is Chamalières. Tuesday is Desaix, going back for seconds in the evening. Wednesday and Thursday are Lafayette. Friday is back to Desaix, Saturday Lafayette. Like clockwork, you make the rounds. Even Sunday's there's often a tournament somewhere, and if not, you can always fix up a foursome at home.
The Tuesday evening game is the best. The young people come to that one after work, and you can talk about something else for a change. You've got to encourage the young people to come, for who else will be filling the clubs in 20 years time?
20 years ago you were one of them. One of the Young People. It's curious how the time goes. One day you're the belle of the ball, the marvel everyone wants to partner with. You weren't that young, admit it, but with this gang, not-retired-yet is plenty young. It was a pleasure to come to the club then (as it is now, but of a different kind). For the workday you were the oldest, the boss, the stick in the mud. Tuesday nights you were the kid, the adventurer, the learner.
You mocked (gently, slightly, and never out loud) the bluehaired women living from tournament to tournament, counting their master points, then. Today you are one. Trump that.

Ireland, Part 11

2011-07-29T17:16:00.000+02:00

Then we all packed up our things, went to the airport early, and went home.
The End

hahahaha!
thought this was going to go on forever, didn't you?

Part 10b, Dublin photos

2011-07-29T08:56:00.000+02:00

There are some spots with really great graffiti around town.

A nice little park, with peices of art all around the edges. The colorful buildings are part of Dublin Castle.

A different side of the castle. Much more dignified and castle-like, but I prefer the colorful version.

A Tax Museum! The only museum we went to in Dublin, and then just because it sounded so unusual. It was pretty neat. There was a tax on bachelors. And one on dogs.

Winding around the city center there's some kind of self-guided historical tour. These panels in the sidewalk tell you where to stop, and there's always a pointy item showing where to go next. We were apparently going backwards along the route, but found five or six panels just at random.

The old market hall still handles fruit&veg. Only now with forklifts and trucks.

A long, long graffiti.

The front end of the same, with character.

You never know what you'll find enshrined in bronze.

The Hogeye Navvy concert audience at the library started out with pretty much just the groupies on our tour, but eventually filled out to contain just as many locals.

Carole and Ken took advantage of a last opportunity to dance on the trip.

At last, Ken got to call a contra dance!

Part 10, Dublin

2011-07-28T18:39:00.000+02:00

In the morning I’m up much earlier than PubGuy, intending to do the stuff he’s not interested in on my own, then meeting up for lunch before a tour of Dubalin together and the Hogeye concert at 6. The phone book and the internet agree on the existence of three yarn shops in town. Not very many for a knitting sort of country. I’m sure I can hit two before lunch, and the third is really not very far, not far at all I swear, from the medieval quarter we’ll tour together.

The first one is a real knitters shop (that means a big shop with both high-end and more affordable yarns, lots of patterns and books, tables and chairs you’re welcome to occupy for ages, and a schedule of classes posted). Springwools is out in the suburbs, which online kind of scared me because I couldn’t figure out how far it was - could be all the way to Wexford, you never know. But it mentions bus service from three of the Dubin city lines, so how far can it be ?

I take one of those nifty double-deckers. When I have time that’s one way I go see a city - just hop on a bus and go where it goes. I’d love to sit upstairs, but I don’t know what my stop is going to look like and there’s no map. No list of stops. And if nobody is getting off and there’s nobody waiting, the driver just whips on by before you realize there was ever a stop there. The driver promises to give me a yell.

Which he does, and after only ten minutes, and he even asks me just what I’m looking for. How lucky can I get : he actually knows the very place, and I would never have found it without his direction. It’s tucked away in a light industry/warehouse area, way at the back of a shared parking lot. Easy to miss. Once inside I understand the choice of neighborhood, because the retail area must take up just a small part of the business. Mostly they do mail order and stuff.

Ohhh, I could take half their stock home with me !

Must.....exercise.....restraint......The luggage is only so large.

They’ll ship.

Don’t tell me that !

Here’s our brochure of summer sales. Our website in on there ; you can order from anywhere.

This is dangerous. In fact, I’ve found their website before but I don’t like to buy yarn I’ve never seen and touched in person. The colors are never quite right, and to knit a thing I have to touch every inch of it. And now I’ve seen it, and touched it, and it’s all good.

Escaping Springwools with only moderate damage to my wallet and space still in my luggage, I take the bus back to town, sitting upstairs this time, and spend an hour strollling about the high-end shopping district. My second target doesn’t open until 11:15 (boutique-yarn indeed !)

They have some nice things, but nothing from Ireland. It’s more the Italian-Japanese-American fare you’d find in the States. What interests me most here is the collection of books of shawl patterns (plenty of patterns at Springwools, but in fact there were so many it would take ages to decide on anything). I’m keen to knit a huge wrap of some kind, a project that will take me all winter to make and result in a really special warm wearable. I’ve got just the yarn for it now I’ve been to the other shop.

So from here I leave with a pattern book, just full of things I’m eager to get started on.

It’s noon : time to meet the Brotherman. He’s « not hungry », having closed down the Irish breakfast buffet at the hotel just an hour ago. I’m ready to eat, and our street is full of small fast-food and takeout places. Indian ? Fish&chips ? Burritos ?

Burritos ?

I haven’t had a good burrito in ages. So we do. And it’s quite good, with tortilla chips made right there, and an array of fresh salsas. Funny how many nachos one can eat without being hungry.

I don’t feel too bad about my eat-local rule - this is still food I can’t get where I live.

Now for Dubalin town. We figure we’ll wander up through the medieval quarter, around the castle, across the river to the third yarn shop, down around Trinity College, and eventually to the library where Hogeye is playing at 6. I’ll just give you the photo-tour of most of that.

In fact, I'll give you the photo tour tomorrow because I just found out I wrote this post on the wrong blog, and all the uploads have to be done again. RRRRRRR

Part 9, Back to Dublin

2011-07-27T18:44:00.000+02:00

If it’s Tuesday, it must be time to head back to Dublin. Or Dubalin, as it is in all the songs.

Checkout time at the cottages is early, because Francis has to go somewhere this morning. It’s not a bad thing ; it gets us on the road at a decent hour with lots of time for stops and sightseeing along the way.

Between here and there is a freeway that’ll get us there in 2 hours. But there’s a green spot on the map just off our route, nearer the coast. Let’s go ! Wicklow Mountains National Park it is.

It’s a different kind of territory up here on the heights of the pass between the coast and the interior. Not a tree for a mile around on the windswept hills. One thing we haven’t gotten used to yet in Ireland is the smaller scale of everything, and the first van blows right past the parking area at the top of the pass, thinking it was kind of full and not that pretty and we could stop farther on. No, that’s it. Going down the eastern slope you’re quickly back into the forested lowland.

Near the end of the rapid descent there’s a beautiful monks’ tower in view. Let’s stop let’s stop. Of course.

We think we’ve found a little-known treasure, but discover that Glendalough is one of the biggest tourist attractions around. There’s a huge parking lot (only a handful of busses at the moment, thank goodness), a large hotel and restaurant, and plenty of bathrooms.

(overheard at the women’s room, the sound of several children’s voices : Missus Jones ! there’s no paper ! No paper !

Missus Jones : Sorry luvs, just do your best.

Passerby : There’s paper over here.

Missus Jones : ssh ! keep quiet or they’ll all want some.)

What have we here at Glendalough ? Beyond the hotel complex are the ruins of a small chapel, the monks’ tower, and a beautiful but much-trampled graveyard. An active graveyard, too : along the back are polished stones from just last year.

There’s a stream and a wooded valley and a trail to the lower and upper lakes. The walkway to the nearby lower lake is more a pedestrian highway than a trail, but D and I are bad, naturally, and leave the trail to spend a Maurice Moment in the humid calm. It would be lovely to spend a few hours here, time enough to reach the upper lake and beyond.

It’s unclear how long a stop we’re making. Some said 30 minutes because they were hungry and wanted to get to Dublin for lunch. Others found it terrible to stop in such a lovely spot, one we’ll never come back to, and leave without spending an hour. These people passed packages of cookies and apples purchased at the morning’s pit-stop around to the famished. That was all before we dispersed and discovered the size of the site and the qualities of the gigantic hotel restaurant.

Thinking the hour was up, and we will not be last to the vans, D and I get back ti find we have 40 minutes or so more, and look, plenty of tables on the patio. I’ll have a plate of chips and Darrell the root vegetable soup of the day. Soup and fries, how long can that take ? A very long time if your waitress brings your drinks and is then called away and neglects to tell the relief to place your food order. By the time we track her down, it’s to say Forget It.

Dublin. Delighting us tonight at the Unitarian Church are a fiddler and a guitarman whose names I forget but they’re favorites of Mac. The fiddler I really like, but alas he’s forgotten to bring his satchel of cd’s.

It’s very different hearing this music in the clean and uncluttered acoustics of the church. You can really hear it all without the distractions of people moving around, the clink of glasses, doors closing, bits of conversation. But while that distracting clutter is gone, so too is part of the ambiance. It would be nice to have a cider to sip, and to get more comfortable than this creaky church pew allows. It would be neat for other musicians and singers in the room to join in on a favorite old chorus. On the other hand, it is cool to have a good view of the artists and to be able to hear all they’re giving us, without losing any.

After the concert I opt for a last long soak in a tub, while D goes out with the die-hard Session seekers. Only one more evening left, after all - better get the pubbing in while we can.

Part 8, Bumming Around

2011-07-26T19:42:00.000+02:00

Is it Monday ? Yes. An open day on the schedule. One van is going to Wexford and the Heritage Museum there. Another is going to see a stone circle near Limerick, a full day’s outing. Joe and Joanne in the Limerick van say they plan to find a Session for the evening, and so plan not to come back to the cottages until very late. No dropping people off here between the day outing and the evening music event.
The stone circles sound fascinating, but it’s too long a day. D and I have dinner ordered again, and we intend to be here for it. There’s no serving it tomorrow : this is our last night here.

Cottage pie on Wednesday was actually out third choice. Second was lamb chops (which have to be ordered from the butcher and thus take more than one day’s warning). First choice was rabbit pie.
We’re fans of rabbit, and haven’t seen it on any restaurant menu so far in Ireland. Yes, rabbit is in season at Croan Cottages, but it takes even more planning than ringing up the butcher. It has to be shot. That can’t take long - there’s a good half dozen plump & lazy buns in the side yard every morning. Then it has to be dressed, and hung for the rigor mortis to pass. And then it has to be cooked.

The planning is tight - our hosts are not only attending the Tall Ships, they’re spending a day on one, sailing around. So when Darrell and I received our cottage pie the other day and immediately said, how about rabbit on Monday, a whole thing got going. You can’t order fewer than 6 servings, for starters, so we started asking around, who wanted a little culinary adventure. Some said yes ! That will be different !. Some recoiled in horrer. Some declared there was Nothing on the house menu of interest (on the menu : cottage pie, venison, rabbit, lamb chops, your basic country food). Alright, stick to your sandwiches and chips.
Anyway, we had about 8 people interested and decided to order for 6 because some were just wanting a taste.
On our host’s side, wheels were put in motion. Wildlife was shot (Francis told me - there are plenty out there wherever you walk, but take a gun with you and suddenly, none.). Plans were arranged.

When this morning Joe said the van off to the stone circles wouldn’t be back for dinner, we saw all of our fellow bunny-eaters raise their hands for a spot in the van. It was tempting to join them, but we have this uncancellable plan... D and I will just have our rabbit on our own, and the others for breakfast or not at all. Two people assure me they’ll pay for their portions regardless.

It’ll be a nice, relaxing day hanging around. We’ve not been to the nearby Famine Garden, after all, and that Viewpoint Tower sign near Delaney’s Pub sounded worth a look.

So, what about this Famine Garden ? How to plant to prevent famine ? What to plant if you’re having one (plants to eat very quickly) ? A planting of edibles you’ll find all over the place, you just don’t normally think to eat them ?

None of the above. It’s a little memorial garden still not quite finished. Very calm and serene, tucked away in the middle of nowhere, County Kilkenny.

The turnoff to the lookout takes us to a neat hamlet, just a handful of houses near the foot of some hills. We don’t find the famous tower, somehow, but do find something better : a parking area and a trail head for a 2-hour walk up to the summit of the hills, complete with « megalithic tomb ». There’s even a guide for us ! The dog knows the way and every time we’re at a loss to find the next trail marker there he is, waiting. No sheep to herd today ; he’s got tourists.

It’s a pretty little hike between farms and meadows. When we get up to the crest we can see for miles. And what’s up here ? An altitude marker, of course. And the megalithic tomb. They must mean this beautiful circle of stones on the hillside looking northwest.

The others are driving for hours and hours to see a circle. We have one right here.

Satisfied with our outing, we spend the rest of the afternoon hanging around relaxing. Some knitting, some reading, some writing, some napping.

To top it off, the most wonderful rabbit stew. I go out to the garden to gather salad about 7:30, and Francis is out there uprooting a potato plant for our dinner. Now that’s some fresh food.

And wow, is it good !

Darrell has seconds, thirds, nibbles...

Poetry Jam: Temptation

2011-07-25T08:36:00.000+02:00

It's about time I got back in the Jam and posted a poem. Mark's theme of temptation suggested a lot of different options, and last night I finally came up with this:

The chocolate cake with sour cherry sauce
Seconds on barbequed ribs
That gorgeous red silk blouse not on sale

These things I resist

Leaving early when the boss is out
Another sackful of cashmere yarn for another shawl I'll never knit
Six books that will gather dust

These too I tell myself No

Sleeping way, way in on a Monday morning
Ice cream with jam for dinner
Tickets to Venice just for the weekend

All thoughts that must be thunk again.

The digital SLR
that shoots 7 frames a second
and is ready for my macro lens and the long long zoom

This, well, it's for the good of posterity, right?
One must be prepared to document birthdays and travels and stupid cat tricks, right?

I'll take it.

Click here for other tempting morsels at the Poetry Jam!

Part 7b, The Session at Delaney's

2011-07-23T19:55:00.000+02:00

Back at the Cottages there’s time for a rest before heading to Delaney’s pub for music. We’ve been told to get there ‘early’ for the Sunday session, and at first Mac thought this might mean mid-afternoon which is why we made sure to not stay at Cashel longer. But apparently it’s more like 7 or 8 ; just earlier than the usual 9. We go for 8, and get there about 8:30.

Locked up tight.

Errrr Is there really a Session tonight ?

Yes, surely ; just give it time. A while later a couple shows up in a 1920’s roadster that we all ohhh and ahhh over, and they assure us the Session is on. It always is.

Around 9 the door opens and the locals start to trickle in. Inside is a sort of bar & store. In the front room there’s nowhere to sit - you just get your drink at the bar while leaning against it, perusing the canned goods, toothpaste, and dog treats on the shelves. There are little packets of peanuts for those who want a nibble with their pint.

Through a doorway there’s a double room where the Sessions take place. Tuesdays and Sundays. In the first part there’s a large round table in front of a long L-shaped booth to the left, a padded bench under the window to the right, and some chairs scattered around. In the second part there’s more seating under the windows, an upright piano, a drum set, and doors to the bathrooms.

We acquire beverages and make ourselves at home. I have a first whiskey, I forget which (the idea is to taste as many as possible, to see if I like any, and it doesn’t help to forget which I’ve set aside already), but it’s an Irish one. Most people have pints of Guinness, or Bulmers cider, a drink you can hang on to for a while.

Mac forbids us to sit in certain spots. When some of the group was here Tuesday for that session I begged off of, she saw a painting of a session that had just the same people as were playing that night, in the very same spots and sometimes the same clothes. It will surely be the same tonight. You don’t mess with somebody else’s Session.

Slowly the place fills up. Eventually it becomes so crowded I hear later that people were giving up and going home without coming in. By one count there are 52 of us in here, and more at the bar. The door to the bar is supposed to stay shut, but we never once get through a song without it opening at least once. There are two tiny windows, and even with them both open onto the chilly night, it’s hot in here.

We have fiddlers, a gentle bodhrain player, a drummer, guitars, mandolins, harmonica, banjo, a dulcimer, and singers. The barman is the pianist and I hear he dearly loves to play at a Session, but he’s so busy at the bar he never even makes it into the music rooms. There is some pointing, and it seems this one fiddler made his instrument by hand, as well as one of the others. The dulcimer man made his own, too. Now these are musicians !

The old men play first.

Favorite tunes. They are favorites, even the new ones. They are delicious.

In a pause where the regulars ask among themselves -what to play ?- I nudge Darrell that our own musicians have yet to contribute, and he says to Ken Play something.

Oh No !

No, no. You don’t just up and play at a Session. We’re strangers here, and we’ll wait until we’re invited.

Ah. Didn’t know there was such an etiquette to it.

A while later, we are introduced and invited to play, and a fine thing it is. Hogeye does a song, though half the band is still next door in the bar. Then Dean, who is 14 and Ken’s grandson, gets to lead a song on his mandolin. A song I heard him learning just this morning. The cheers are thunderous, and I’m sure he’ll cherish this moment all his life.

The evening goes on. New musicians arrive, some take their leave. People make their way through the thick of the crowd, stepping over guitar cases and around stools to get to the restrooms.

I try another whiskey. Black & White. I like the scotty dogs on the label, even if it isn’t an Irish beverage.

Ooooo.

That’s interesting.

« Burnt », Darrell says.

Like drinking a bit of bog.

More music, more. Eventually we say our goodnight and go out into the refreshing night. Everybody follows us and for a minute I think our leaving poured cold water on the whole affair. But in fact, the pub should have been closed for a good half hour already.

There was much derision earlier, when it took us just 15 minutes to get here from the cottages, because the other night it took Mac’s van an hour to find their way back. But whaddyaknow, at the first opportunity our van goes left when we should go right. The van following has learned its lesson about following Johnandrew, so they get home first.

Part, what, 7 ? Cashel

2011-07-22T19:11:00.000+02:00

Sunday’s plan is Wexford and the big emigration museum there. We’ve had a certain amount of Emigration already, and the thought that the possibility of Shopping might be off today in a catholic country leads us to switch Sunday with Monday - a free day.

Even so, almost nobody wants to stick around the cottages for long (cute as they are). We hear tell of Cashel, adored by some who have been there before. Others who have been there found it interesting but over-rated, and the rest of us now want to find out. In the end, two vans decide to go there.

I’m in the lead van with Darrell, Johnandrew driving. The jumpseats in the back have become our regular place, and we wedge Maurice between the seats so that the second van can see him and know they’re following the right van.

We’re laughing and having and having a great time, and after an hour or two (stopping for a stroll around historic but boring Fethard) we come to yet another roundabout. Great things, roundabouts. An oddity to many an American, too, and some in the group are amused every single time. Our exit from this one is the first left, barely a quarter turn around, so we decide to go wild and go a turn and a quarter. The van behind us must think - what the heck ?? One full turn was so fun, we decide to go around a second time. Wheeeeee !!!!!

I guess you gotta be there for some things.

The following van calls us up on the walkie-talkie to order us to Cut it the Hell Out. Sandy is about to be sick back there. Not Funny.

Duly chastized we drive gently to the next exit, a large gas-station-fast-food thing, where we proceed to have a snack lunch. A shame, really, to have fast food crap for lunch when we’re 1 km outside the town of Cashel, which is having a sort of festival today and everything is open. But we don’t realize we’re so close until we get on the road again. At any rate, D and I stick to splitting an order of chips, hoping for better later. When we’re hungry.

The ruin of the Rock of Cashel is truly impressive. It’s a big church/abbey/priory thing built on top of a huge rock, with a commanding view all around. Patrick was here, and other prominent figures of Ireland’s religious and political past, and now it’s one of the most-visited sites in the country.

On the downside, being one of the most-visited sites means it’s crawling with tourists like us, but you can learn some interesting bits by hanging around the guided groups.

Down on the plain is another of those Cistercian abbeys, much more ruined than the one we toured at Jerpoint. Indeed, they do all have exactly the same layout. In the same orientation. There’s a bit of topless sunbathing going on this afternoon, but that wraps up just as Darrell approaches (we’re not in Italy, after all).

This same kind of ruin from the same period makes me appreciate just how extremely well preserved the Jerpoint Abbey is. Everything is erased here. No carving remains. No details. The stone arcade of the cloister is just a row of blocks ankle-high. It’s all been carted off as ready-cut building stone or as decoration or to museums, and the rest has just eroded away.

It’s a beautiful day for a walk around, and we walk back toward the town, thinking to score a snack at the festival, and hopefully some interesting bread for our breakfast toast. When we get there, we think - surely the main festival must be somewhere near, but where ? In a wide spot in the main road, where it splits to go around a monument, is a cluster of booths selling international wares. The French bread guy gets my business right away, and the kebabs have been recommended to us, but there’s nothing else selling real food.

D isn’t in a kebab-on-the-hoof mood, and happily we spy an eat-in deli open just up the street.

Sandwiches ! Our first sandwiches in Ireland. Thick cut ham & cheese. Baked brie and bacon ciabatta. It’s okay stuff. By the register there’s lime curd and tangerine marmalade. I do love unusual jams, so I get those for souvenirs.

By now it’s high time we got back to the vans. I hate being last to the vans. I don’t much like being first, either, because you waste more time waiting. The ideal is for everyone to be exactly on time.

In wandering around different towns I’ve been keeping an eye out for yarn, and am pleased with the good deal scored on that deep red merino wool found in Waterford. All these sheep in the fields, all these wonderful knitted goods in the shops : somebody must be making yarn. At the foot of the Rock of Cashel there’s a local-products souvenir shop. I’ll just duck in and see what’s on offer. Do I have time ?

Two minutes, D says.

Oh. I can do a 2-minute peek. I don’t have much hope of finding yarn not already knit up anyway.

But they have a whole section !

And it’s classed by county !

What feels best to my fingers is the mohair bouclé from right around here. Good to touch, but the colors are very strange. Bizzarre shades of pink, blus, pruple, lime green... I hear the cashier ask an incoming customer if she can help, and hear D say No, just waiting.

Are my two minutes up ? Already ?

She can barely keep from laughing out loud (not that we would have minded). So I pick two balls of medium silver-grey, and two of grey-green, and that’s it for yarn. And I am the last one back to the vans.

Third part of Part 6, Saturday Night.

2011-07-21T18:53:00.000+02:00

Back up the road, back past Duncannon, up to Ballyhack again. The road along the waterfront gives a great view of the bay and the village across the way. The ferry is just on its way in for a load of cars, and we’re very glad that the line is now much shorter than previously.

Perfect timing, and perfect positioning too. My van gets the first spot in the third lane, so we get the best view all the way across. Getting out of your vehicle is discouraged, because it’s such a short trip and herding everyone back to their places delays the orderly drive off.. But we get out anyway, and in again in plenty of seconds to spare before it’s our turn to file off.

As we near the dock, two middle-aged women knock on our door and ask if they can get a lift to the Tall Ships. Why, certainly ; we’re going just there. Lucy and Margaret are Dubliners on holiday* (unless they’re not : I’ve completely forgotten their names and town of origin), staying at a B&B near Ballyhack, and they were certain of finding a lift into Waterford to see the festival.

Indeed, the road to Waterford is one long line of cars and vans and busses, thankfully moving at a good clip. Signs for the festival point one way and signs for viewing the Great Departure point the other at every side road. What may be a little more tricky for our hitchhikers is getting back in the evening. All cars go to Waterford now : what percentage will be heading to Ballyhack late tonight ? This 40-minute drive would cost quite a lot by taxi.

Our guests aren’t worried. They’ll tackle that problem when they come to it.

On the shuttle from the car park I spy Phil & Carla and Joe & Joanne getting ice cream from a vendor with a cart. Good idea ! Who knew it would be so warm and sunny out in Ireland ? There’s time before the gig - let’s get some. Once we track the cart down, there’s no chocolate left. And no way this is Ben&Jerry’s as advertised ! But it is refreshing. Gone in three minutes.

Today there are a lot more people pausing to listen to Hogeye’s set. There are more people altogether, in fact. Saturday is the real festival day, and I’m glad we saw it Friday when things were not yet elbow to elbow. Imagine waiting to visit the ships today - standing in line would be all you did for most of the afternoon.

After Hogeye Navvy’s bit it’s question of what to do with the evening. The more delicate of us are heading back to the cottages now. It has been a long day of exploring. The others are split between staying in Waterford for food and music (but where, for traditional tunes and not the modern stuff blaring from the other bandstands ?), or heading back to the towns near the cottages where we’ve vaguely heard there will be stuff going on. I take the middle choice and get in the van headed for Thomastown, just a few minutes from my bed.

We’ve heard there’s a big place on the edge of town featuring live music every Saturday, so we go find it. At 9 when we pull into the enormous parking lot we can hear electric guitars tuning. Somebody goes on a scouting mission inside and finds lots of amps, three electric keyboards... this is not our kind of place.

Back to the pubs in town, if nobody’s playing anything we should at least be able to get directions to where they are. And we’re hungry. Famished. The first pub with a lot of cars in the lot has a sign Food served All day. And another sign, Food until 9.

The day ends at 9 around here.

On the good side, the barkeep says they’ll be having live music right next door.

Off we go next door, cleverly named the Next Door. Yes, they are setting up to play, out on the spacious back patio. No, they are no longer serving food.

Music being more important than food, we figure we’ll just drink our dinner. Somebody said Liquid Bread, right ?

First up is a truly amateur trio doing a sort of pop. The kid they’ve got is going to be a really good vocalist some day, when his voice settles, but so far Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues should not be his song.

It’s quite noisy, and trips are made to the van for all the jackets and sweaters at hand. D and I volunteer to scout out the rest of Tommytown, as they call it, for more suitable music.

The first thing we spy is a takeout place still serving food-like substances. We’re sceptical, because of the ancient, mummified sausages proudly displayed in the warming case. The menu lists a hundred items but really boils down to chips, burgers, pizza and sausages, available with any combination of sauce. I figure they must sell enough chips to have to make new ones frequently, so we go for an order of garlic chips and consume it on our stroll about town. They’re not too bad, if you like mayo-based garlic sauce. I wonder - if we had ordered a sausage, would she really have served one of the disgusting things on view ?

On our tour of the two-street town, we find more late-night takeout and a handful of pubs. The pubs with large TVs are packed to bursting with people cheering a football match. Those without are ghost pubs. No music anywhere.

Back at the Next Door the looks are crestfallen when I deliver the no music news. But everyone perks right up when I pass around a note (it’s too loud to converse) saying the takeout place is open. Joe takes orders and off he and Fred go to save us from certain starvation.

After the garage guys finish the opening set, the real attraction of the evening starts up. It’s an Elvis Presley cover band, and they’re quite good. If only they would back off on the decibels, they’d be great. But no. Darrell has taken refuge inside, at a table with a view of an old thriller movie with the sound off, and I join him for noise-breaks now and then.

Joe and Fred come back laden with chips, both plan and drenched in various flavors or mayo. When everybody has finished eating it’s time to go. Elvis sounds okay from the street, but it’s cold out, and now we’re not hungry it’s not worth it.

Part 6 photos

2011-07-20T18:14:00.000+02:00

Ballyhack Castle

Boats at Ballyhack wait for the tide

Duncannon Fort

Duncannon Jellyfish

Hook Head Lighthouse

View from the ferry

Our hitchikers

And back to the Tall Ships

Part 6, Hook Head

2011-07-19T19:32:00.000+02:00

Today we have a 7 pm gig at the Festival, but people are really done seeing the festival itself. One turn around and you’ve pretty much seen the whole thing, unless you’re hoping to get on another ship. One van goes to Waterford early with a group that wants to see the town (covered in festival tents and visitors) and some bits around there.

My idea is to make our way down the far side of the bay, all the way to Hook Head, where there’s a lighthouse and long views over the sea. Along the way are two castles to admire and most of the drive is marked as a scenic route. We can catch a ferry across the water to get to the festival in time, just for extra fun.

This idea turns out to be so popular that most everybody else wants to go, so it’s another caravan trip. And it’s great. We don’t get going very quickly, which eats seriously into our visiting time once down there, but what can you do. It’s not possible with this group for vans going the same place not to go together. Even later, when time gets pretty short and we don’t know how much traffic has accumulated at the ferry, they still won’t put all the musicians and instruments together and get them safely across while the rest of us kick around the gorgeous countryside and risk missing the gig.

Down the road a bit it is quickly agreed that this is definitely the day to visit Hooks Head. We could have done this tomorrow, when the ships throw off their hawsers and head out to sea. All along our route are signs for the Tall Ships. Tall Ships viewing, This Way. New Ross is clogged with cars going into Waterford. Along the bay coast people are camped already, and more are pouring in every minute. The traffic isn’t too bad now on the narrow roads, but tomorrow it will be an absolute zoo. Want to see anything (except a Tall Ship under glorious sail, admittedly), come today.

Our first castle is at the village of Ballyhack, where the ferry stops. The line for the car ferry stretches up the road half a mile, but happily they’ve made the place a one-way loop for the weekend, and we can drive on the right (for once ! yea !) to go around. Here’s the castle, a discrete, pocket-castle in the middle of the one-street town. It’s so cute ! And exactly like the other tower-castles we’ve passed and will pass. They’ve got one pocket-castle plan, and one abbey plan.

Oh, I know ; castles are not meant to be cute. But it is. This one has been turned into a museum, and you can go up almost to the roof. Like in the other ones we’ve only seen from the outside, there’s a spiral staircase up one corner and a great room on each floor with its fireplace, and very small rooms along one or two of the sides. The first floor has been whitewashed and sparsely furnished to give the feel of the place. The bedrooms along the sides aren’t large enough for a double bed. Up on the roof there’s probably a terrific view of this part of the bay, and this hill with its village.

I’m hoping to see Slade castle, on the other side of this peninsula, but time will eventually not permit this (split the vans, guys !). Thanks to Ballyhack castle and its museum and the great photos on the walls, at least I know what it looks like. Same castle, different setting.

The next sight on the road south is Duncannon. This turns out to be a fort that was used as one right up into the early 20th century, so most of the construction is quite modern. The group decides not to stop, but on the way out of town some people notice that there’s probably not much opportunity for lunch down there at Hook Head, and no significant towns on the way. They’re right, so we find a wide spot to double back to the several open eateries spied in Duncannon.

The vans let us off in the center of the one-street town and go find parking while the rest of us disperse to find sustenance. D and I look into a fish&chips takeout, and decide nahhhh. Around the corner is the main pub of the village, where we find Mac has already obtained a table and ordered. I’ll have just some tomato soup with bread, and a glass of Smithwicks, please, and Darrell gets a sandwich. The service is slow, in spite of the tavern being surprisingly empty. The three tables outside are taken, and two more in here, and that might be a lot for this small a town. But I mean surprisingly empty taking into account the numerous tour busses we saw searching for parking just before us. Any minute the deluge will start.

Once it arrives, the tomato soup is excellent. Well, Darrell says it’s only good. Mac’s fish and chips are nice and light, so we’ve scored a good lunch. Others are not so lucky - I hear « barely edible » repeated many times later. At any rate I eat quickly to have time for walking around, and up the beach a ways before it’s time to pile back into the vans.

It’s now midafternoon, and the smart thing to do for people who want to hear the shantymen on at 5 would be to gather those people and the band in one van that will head for the ferry now, while the other takes its time seeing Hooks Head and various sights before arriving in Waterford just in time.

No, no, we’re all going on south.

South, straight past a fabulously ruined old abbey at the side of the road. On, on we go, down the narrow, winding road between the hedgerows. The hedges aren’t so thick here, and often there’s none at all and we get a great view of the windswept peninsula. None of those tree-tunnels down here.

Soon there are signs for beaches and lots of cars turn off our road there. Nearing the Head we finally can see the sea to our left as well as the bay to our right.. Campers start to be common, and in the final stretches whole tent cities are going up, staking out the best views of tomorrow’s grand sail out to sea.

Indeed, this poor little road will be quite impracticable tomorrow.

Here we are. Lighthouse. Giftshop & restaurant. Museum. Hiking trails ( !! let’s go !!), a car park, and on the green bounded by the shops and lighthouse and a wall a tiny RenFaire, with booths of vendors of local crafts and a place for kids to play at swordfighting.

30 minutes !

Thirty minutes and we really must be back of the vans, and that’s already giving up on hearing the Shantymen. Ah, but the rocky layers down to the water’s edge must be explored ! And the hiking trail along the rough sea coast beckons ! only 3km to Slade castle.

Never mind the castle. Some rockhopping will do, and a view of the sea.

Darrell gets down right to the edge and lets a wave soak his shod feet. Cold ! he says. I’ll bet. The seawater takes the shine right off his shoes, too, leaving a salt crust even after he washes them.

The surface of the earth is so neat here. I can see what’s under the grass - these flat rocks here, jutting out into the sea, covered with limpets and snails. But up on the grassy part, the grass must be a foot deep. It’s like walking on a mattress. Those campers will sleep comfortably in their tents tonight.

Time to turn around.

(must run. photos for this post, and the rest of the day, tomorrow.)

Part 5b, Waterford evening and yesterday's photos

2011-07-18T18:38:00.000+02:00

Kells Priory

Working on Kells Priory

Old cemetery at Kells

One of the Mills

Not my way of making a Black Russian.

Lounging at the Tall Ships

Inspecting the Maybe

Random Street Music

The Colombian ship

Hogeye Navvy in concert

Carole and Ken show us how it's done.

Waterford is laid out in a nice, straight grid, like a proper city. Finding the Inn should be easy. We come to Parnell first, way, way at the end of the town where the river turns right toward the long bay and the sea. Looking at a handy map we see there is no Johnson that crosses it. There’s a John’s Town, and a Saint John. Enquiring of a pair of guarda directing traffic where Parnell changes names we’re directed back to John’s Town, turn right, and it’ll be on the left. The guy knows it exactly.

And so it is.

The pub people are expecting us : straight to the back room with you pirates, no lingering up here with normal people. You’ve got your own bar down there.

In spite of our much longer than necessary route, we are still the first Hogeye shirts to arrive. Two other bands are here, each occupying a cluster of prime corner couches and tables. They’re making tentative musical forays, each testing the others, but nothing’s started yet. I try to colonize a booth, but the empty tables between me and the Vagrants Crew are not to their liking and I’m coaxed up to a table within conversation distance.

Alright. Some wine in hand, a Bushmills for brotherman, and we can do conversation. The Vagrants are from Wales. They carpooled over just this morning, took the ferry, and here they are.

The place fills up. Some more tuning occurs, and a few tunes between the talk. The Hooks and Crookes captains arrive and grab the tables closest to the bar. Hogeye Navvy then occupies the very booths I envied at first, and two or three more groups fill out the whole meeting space. Around 8:45, catering vans pull up to an entrance we hadn’t really noticed and start filling the next room with food.

Now that is good food, and courtesy of the festival organizers to boot. The broiled chicken with gravy is delicious. Baked potatos, salad, cole slaw, and what’s this ? Drink tickets ! Why, yes, I just might have that Drambuie for dessert. Right after this here pint.

There’s enough of us that we don’t all have our plates full at once. Somebody starts something and others join in and the whole room gets into it. Or a solo stays a savored solo, unless a secret signal is given allowing ganging in on a chorus, or a finger indicates a lone instrument may join. By 9:30 there’s a bit of a formal introduction and it’s decided that we’ll go around the room, each band doing two songs ‘typical’ of their style, followed by a general free-for-all.

Mac explains to the room that we have to leave early ( ?? what happened to 12:30 ?), so we get to go first. That we’re going so far, far, very far away to neighboring Kilkenny county generates much ribbing and laughter. The Exmouth Shantymen are next, and I really like their second song, which uses only their voices and the sound of the chains they hold being rattled and dropped. They line up in three rows of three for it, nine chained rowers, plus the captain ? master ? off to the side, and different guys each do the verse of their life. Really neat.

Once we get around the room, Mac gets up and announces we’ll do our farewell song, as we really must go. So we do the song - and I hear comments that this is one they’ll definitely be looking up - Johnandrew announces that, er, we missed the last early shuttle back to the vans some minutes ago and thus we really don’t have to hurry away after all. To much general amusement.

But Mac is set on an early night. We have another set tomorrow, after all. A few songs later it’s announced that our taxis are here for us. Huh ?? Everybody drink up and get out.

Bu......

It’s only 11. The evening is just getting going. There are still drink tickets on the table.

But we pack up and go, and while we’re downing a last swallow and having a last pee, the room starts in on a farewell song of their own, and they all stand and wave us goodbye as we file out into the night.

Almost worth leaving first for.

The best part : while I’m in the bathroom Darrell scores two different cds from the chain gang shantymen. I get one ; we’ll trade at Christmas.

Part 5a, Waterford

2011-07-17T12:30:00.000+02:00

In the morning we have just time for a van-load to hop over to Kells Priory for a look around, before heading to Waterford for the Tall Ships Festival and Hogeye’s gig at 6:30.

The place is huge, and fully accessible to humans and sheep alike. Well, except for the bits with scaffolding where they’re doing some restoration work. There’s no guide today, and no plaques explaining anything. They’ll probably put something up later, once the repair work is more advanced.

It’s a nice walk around, though. The sheep in the south meadow don’t mind visitors. To the north there’s an old cemetery. In a cared-for cemetery sometimes the tall tombstones seem very large. In this overgrown field the taller ones are barely visible, and I bark my shin against one leaning at a sharp angle, hidden by the nettles.

There are two mills along the stream, one right after the other. In this day of renewable energy, I wonder why they don’t use them still. In a modified version, of course, no need for the great wooden wheels and creaking gears. A smaller, streamlined version would do to keep the lights on.

After the mills, the little trail leads through the village of Kells to take us back to the priory parking lot. Here’s a big sign explaining the mills and the Priory with its monks. The Book of Kells was from here, though it now lives in Dublin, at Trinity College. Today Kells is a two-shop town. I buy a bottle of water from one. I have my choice, but it amuses me to go for the Volvic. I can hike to Volvic from where I live. Next to the shop is a pub. I don’t count how many pubs there are, but this one has a sign to tell you what’s in the mixed drinks, just in case A Pint isn’t your thing. I think I will skip the Black Russian : they take a regular black Russian and add whatever other black liquids are at hand - coke and Guinness. No thanks.

Now to Waterford for the Tall Ships. Half the country will be in Waterford for the Tall Ships, they say. Getting ready to go, milling around the vans as the Navvys trickled out of their cottages, we see our hosts also packing up to go. Their boy is admonished to get in the car already, and he asks, what, are they late ?

Very late.

Hundreds late ?

Hundreds and hundreds ! the response. The child runs to his place.

Finally the cats are herded into the vans and it’s off to Waterford. After much pausing for strawberries. And a peek at the livestock. And a pet for the dogs, Poppy and Bella. And a final pee. And a forgotten this or that.

Two vans go to the Red car park. The third has a pass to take the musicians and their instruments down close to the venue. Turns out the pass doesn’t get them anywhere due to street closures for a different event, and they end up parking on the far side of town and taking the Green shuttle in, which puts them on the wrong side of the river. That’s a mile to schlepp the instruments, while our Red shuttle lets us off just a block away. Go figure.

The Tall Ships making their stop in Waterford on their route around the British Isles, up toward Norway and down through the Baltic Sea, are Quite the Event. They don’t stop here every time (next race, Dublin gets the honor), so the town makes the most of it. Aside from being able to visit many of the ships, there’s a carnival and music and food and craft booths of every kind about, filling the quays up and down the river as well as the warren of pedestrian streets in the old town. Waterford town with its towers and old churches and cobbled streets is barely visible for all the tents and excited tourists.

Darrell wants to board ships. I want to score some local yarn. I visit one ship with him, the Maybe, before we part for the afternoon. Strolling down the quay to pick out our ship, he tests a kangaroo kabob from one of the food booths (excellent), a miniscule chocolate cake (excellent) and a Bulmer’s cider on tap. It’s the most popular cider on this part of the island ; every bar has it on tap. As far as we’re concerned, they can keep it.

As we spend 40 minutes in line waiting for our turn at the ships moored at the eastern part of the south quay, we hear Coming through ! Make way ! Coming through ! Three heaping shopping carts are parting the crowd to provision one of the ships. So that’s how they do it.

The music at the stages in this area isn’t at all the sort we’ve come for. It’s all terribly amplified and modern. Apparently different stages have different themes, and all the traditional Irish music is happening elsewhere. More interesting are some of the wandering minstrels - an old man playing a pipe near the Norwegian ship, a fiddler and bodhrain pair loitering near the noisy main stage, other fleeting sound sources unidentified in the crowd.

Walking about the town I don’t see much in the way of yarn, but there is one shop, at last, that I would never have found without asking, and they have a delightfully rich red merino I must have. Alas, they don’t have any of that wonderful mohair that so many of the blankets in the boutiques are made of.

I’m back at the venue for Hogeye’s show an hour before time, early enough to catch the group before them just setting up. It’s sea captains ! Eight old guys in matching captain’s garb and white hair sing chanteys for half an hour, including a few that I’ve heard our group do. The same songs, but different. Words are changed, the tunes have undergone little mutations. It’s strange sometimes to hear a familiar song a different way.

Here’s Darrell. He says he got on the French ship and had a great look around at their navigation gear without understanding a word of it. A go on the Irish drug-buster boat was a success. And the Columbians are partying up a storm. They are - you can hear them from here.

It’s unfortunate there’s no place to sit near the music stages. Hogeye Navvy is playing at a wide spot in the road leading to the carnival ride section and to the really big ships from Russia and Columbia. A lot of people pass by, but very few stick around for more than one song.

Carole and Ken dance one song in the space just in front of the stage, a real toe-tapping jig whipped out there by Deb on the fiddle. It’s a joy to see them dance, tiny Carole light as a bird carefully spun about the potholes by her attentive husband. This does make people stop and watch, those who don’t walk right through the ‘dance floor ‘ eyes glued to their feet on their way to the carnival.

The set continues, hopping from tunes I know to those I don’t. Garry the Shantyman is not with us this trip, but Deb’s voice rings out strongest of the group and carries the day. She could do opera, this woman. When Hogeye’s 30 minutes are up Mac gathers us up for the evening plans. One van is going back right away with those too knackered or young for an evening of pub revelry. The rest of us are to gather at the Wander Inn on the other side of town for a singalong. Music starts at 8, food will be provided at 9, shuttle buses run back to the vans at 10 :30 or 12 :30. Wander Inn at Johnson and Parnell, check. Be there. She waves in a general direction. Find it.

(gotta run - photos and the rest of part 5 tomorrow)

Part 4, Kilkenny

2011-07-15T13:14:00.000+02:00

Next day is a « free » day. D and I have ordered a dish of cottage pie for his cottage, delivery around 8, so that’s dinner plans for 6 of us already. Looking forward to it.

The three vans go off separately. Ours goes to Jerpoint Abbey, which we all ooh’d and ahh’d at on the grocery run. You come around this bend in one of those green tunnels, where the hedges and trees are so close to road, mowed vertically to about 10 feet, and then allowed to close over, and suddenly instead of hedge there’s this magnificant ruin right there. And then you’re past it. Immediately you know you have to stop there next time.

In a spot of luck, a guided tour is just starting, turning a half-hour superficial wander into more than an hour of discovering its secrets. Claudia is one of those great guides : she knows everything about the place, but keeps it interesting and fascinating without going on too long. The tour is just right. Normally I don’t go in much for guided tours, but I’m reminded here I should try it more often.

Then on to Kilkenny town. The big things for our group here are St Catherine’s Cathedral with its monks’ tower in the yard, Kilkenny Castle, and Kyteler’s Inn, one of the oldest pubs in Ireland still going strong.

D and I climb the Monks’ Tower for the view over all Kilkenny. We spy no Viking raiders rowing up the river, alas. Then we skip the cathedral in favor of lunch. Kyteler’s is having live traditional music tonight and half the group wants to stay for that, having dinner there too. We have cottage pie with our name on it coming, so we check out this pub for lunch. Just to say we’ve seen it too - there are some things you gotta do or see, just to keep in the conversation with everyone else.

It’s sometimes not the best idea to eat at a place that caters to tourists (and this entire street is Tourist Row), but the food is wonderful. My tomato-basil soup is spicy and thick, the bread is great, and our shared plate of roast pork with stuffing, spuds, and veg is perfect. At the end we even opt to test the « Hot Powers » drink we’ve seen advertised so often. It’s quite good !

After lunch we tour Kilkenny Castle, what you can see of it. Not much to report. It was pretty strange to enter this one wing that had been rearranged by one of the latter owners into a single huge gallery, and see the wooden ceiling and its numerous crossing rafters all carved and painted. It was just the sort of decoration you’d expect in Viking territory, from the overall the style down to individual motifs. Though maybe I just haven’t seen enough Irish castles with their decorations intact.

There’s no yarn to be found on the main streets of Kilkenny, so we spend the balance of the afternoon walking at random and up the path that goes along the river. Nice and green, peaceful, and walking on the grass feels good on the feet after a lot of pavement. At one point we see a large black dog coming down the path. It comes near, then goes for a dip in the river, keeps on a ways, then turns around and trots back where it came from. Out for his walk without his people.

The deal was whoever wanted to return to the cottages early should meet at the van at 6:45 - 7 pm, and Joe would run us back there. Nobody is sure if Fred was intending to return early or not, but he is inclined to change his mind so at 7:05 we leave without him.

He was never late for a van again.

We’re back at our digs just in time to settle in and prepare a salad when our cottage pie is delivered, piping hot from the oven.

Ohhhh, that is some good stuff. We’re not sure what all is in it. Beef and lamb for sure, but there’s something else - gotta be venison. Gamey, but not too much, only enough to be Not your Usual Food. Just when we’re nearing the end of the main dish, Mac comes in to announce a van is leaving for a Session at the village pub nearby. There’s a village nearby ? Sprung on us in the middle of dinner, only Darrell joins them. I opt for a walk in the soft late evening light, instead.

It’s hard to go walking around here. The country roads don’t have a lot of traffic, but when there is a car, or a truck or a bus, there’s nowhere to get off the road. The high hedges and stone walls leave you just a few inches on either side. In France, I wouldn’t be walking on the road anyway. Hiking paths abound, and the farm roads between fields are generally accessible to walkers. There are even stiles provided to cross pastures. Not here, as far as I’ve seen.

When I get back, nobody much is around, all either gone to the pub or sleeping off jetlag or deep in their journals and blogs. So I do the same for an hour before turning in to my lovely soft bed.

Part 3, Cork

2011-07-14T12:24:00.000+02:00

Our first full day is spent going down to Cork, and we do miraculously manage to get on the road by 9 :20. The two stragglers aren’t at all happy to be told to hurry it up, but the vans go together or they don’t go. We aren’t very clear on where to head once we actually get to Cork. Separation could be fatal.

It’s a couple hours’ drive, straight down toward Waterford, turn right at the big bridge, then straight on to Cork. Now the backs of the vans aren’t full of luggage, Darrell and I make the trip on the jumpseats in the back. There aren’t any seatbelts back there, but there is a great view out the windows. Whoever named this thing Van of the Year had obviously never been a passenger trying to see over the high headrests or out the side windows that are blocked just at eye level by the frames of the sliding windows. Dumbest windows I’ve ever seen. If you’re the unfortunate soul in the center seat, just nod off now.

Anyway, having seen a bit of the spectacular view of the country (to me ; I’ve not been to this part of Ireland before) and small parts of Cork, we find (eventually) space to park. This is in a multilevel lot just tall enough for the vans as long as you don’t mind the sound of the antennae dragging along the ceiling. Height, however, is just one parameter. This is just about the largest vehicle you could manoeuvre in a lot full of steep ramps and tight turns made for typical European compacts. Our driver scores a spot at the end of a row easy enough to pull into, but backing out will take us several tries in front of an impatient but bemused crowd. Look, Ma : No scratches !

One of the differences in the reasons we travel comes to the surface here. One of the group, who has travelled abroad several times, explains that the easiest thing for lunch would be to pop into the nearby Marks & Spencer and grab something quick and cheap from their sandwich counter. Bagels, wraps, they’ve got good stuff.

And I’m sure they do. For sandwiches. But this plus the self-catering, when do we dive into the local cuisine ? You can get a sandwich back home. I like to eat my way across a new country.

Darrell and I decide to skip the Butter Museum where the rest of the group is heading, in favor of fish&chips and Irish stew and a glass of stout at a nearby pub. Murphy’s or Guinness ? We’ll test them head to foamy head. Score 1 for Uhrhammers. And 1 for Murphy’s.

The other reason for skipping the Story of Irish Butter is my camera has suffered a terminal breakdown and I’m looking for a replacement. The photos on the blog are all taken with the point&shoot backup that I only packed for its capacity to record short movies. There’s a Sony boutique on the main shopping street, but they don’t have anything on hand that’s both compatible with my lens collection and affordable, so I guess I’ll just not take good photos of this trip. That’s fine. I’ll just pay more attention in other ways.

Darrell discovering The Real Cork.

After success for lunch and failure shopping, we go off in search of this church where you’re allowed to ring the bells. That sounds cool. It’s right near the Butter Museum, too, so we figure we’ll catch up with some of the group around there too.

Indeed, as we pass a corner café there’s a knocking on the window. A good part of the Navvies have gathered there for lunch or at least dessert, and I’m treated to a hearty round of Happy Birthday. They would have gone on with the Special Hogeye Navvy Birthday Song, but I plead we should do that back at the cottages. Mac says, Oh yes, with the full force of the band present. That should be great.

Now for the bell-ringing at St Shandon’s, just up the hill. It’s half-price today because the top part of the tower is closed for maintenance and you can’t go up there and hear the bells up really really close, or enjoy the view over the city. For 2.50 you get up to the lower level, where eight bell ropes await. A collection of tunes written out in rope numbers is available, including Don’t Cry For My Argentina (apparently written for the bells of this very church), Three Blind Mice, You are my Sunshine, and a dozen others. I choose the Bells of Saint Shandon, and pull the ropes as Darrell calls out the rope numbers. I don’t know what it’s supposed to sound like anyway, but it can’t have been a very good rendition, as the number five bell doesn’t seem to be well balanced and I have to pull on it twice to get it to ring.

Bell number 8 is never called for in the tune, so D gives it a ring at the end, just to hear it. It’s surprising how faint the bells sound from here, just a few yards from them.

Once the 24 of us are gathered back at the mall where the vans are parked., we have our little unparking adventure and it’s off to Cobh (pronounced « cove ») Heritage Site. This was one of the main points of embarcation for Irish emigrants fleeing the potato famine and various other troubles or just looking for a new life in America. It was also the Titanic’s last port of call, and the Lusitania was a frequent visitor. There’s a statue of Mary somebody, the very first person registered at Ellis Island, because she set off from here too. Some in our group have ancestors who made the same trip.

Exhibits at the Cobh Heritage Site.

Cobh is a nice harborside town with colorful rows of shops and then houses hugging the hillside down to the water. There aren’t any big ships putting in here any more, though we can see freighters across the way serving factories. An assortment of small fishing and pleasure boats adorn the marina.

Cobh marina

Getting in the vans to head back to the cottages is another adventure. This will always be an adventure. 3 vans for 24 people, 11 seats per van, 6 possible drivers but each one is assigned to a particular vehicle. You can’t just assume that there will be a ride for you if you wander off. Everybody might think you hopped into one of the other vans. Just now a ride is guaranteed, because everybody is waiting. Impatiently. With their own plans. So people wander off, and when they get back somebody else has wandered off, and others are undecided or change their minds yet again.

Eventually it is decided.

One van is going to stay out late, looking for a pub with music. One van is going back now (it’s 7), stopping for dinner on the way. One van is going back now, stopping at a grocery store and for photo ops. But who is in which van ? Are we sure Fred, who has wandered off, really wants the late van, or has he gone in search of a snack before catching an early van ?

Part 2, Croan Cottages

2011-07-13T18:22:00.000+02:00

We stop for lunch in a very cute town whose name escapes me. It’s nobody’s lunchtime but mine, and the pubs and restaurants (such as there are in such a tiny place) aren’t really serving yet but one place does kindly rev up the kitchen and get some hot sausages going. Darrell and I would rather walk around than sit, rather see the sights than the inside of a pub, so we keep looking.

There’s a ruined « castle » (just a tower as far as I can see), an old arched stone bridge over a stream, and a pub on the far side with its door open and a couple of tables in the yard. The guy inside may be a customer, may be an employee, hard to tell, but he tells us there’s a gas station down the way that does sandwiches. He declares he just ate one, as proof of the existence of this glorious but thus far theoretical establishment. He directs us to this source of comestibles, but looks doubtful when we admit we are on foot. It’s far ! That worries us a minute, though it turns out to be less than a mile altogether. No problem.

I have chicken with brown sauce, and Darrell has ham, and we walk around seeing the town as we eat. We even have time to admire the chapel and mess around by the riverside and discover Murder Street before having to be back at the vans.

The view from inside the van.

Croan Cottages.

Round back of the big house there are five adorable cottages, 2 or 3 bedrooms each, and Hog Eye Navvy has them all for a whole week. We can do all the running back and forth we want, make music, etc, and nobody else will be bothered.

View from near Croan Cottages

It’s a great place, part of a working farm in the middle of county Kilkenny. The countryside spreads out around the place like a patchwork - green below, blue-white-grey above. There are fresh strawberries and lettuce we may pick as we please in the walled garden (no wasting, please !), and a small assortment of livestock. It’s peaceful and gorgeous and self-catering.

Ah, self-catering. There’s no place to eat for miles, so after settling in it’s off to a nearby town for a grocery run. The directions to the supermarket are quite simple, only the town is not laid out simply at all and we’re not used to this right-left thing. We drive a whole block the wrong way on a one-way street and none of the locals watching makes a sign.

Ah, here’s the store at last. Just an ordinary market, not very large. But it takes us ages. There are so many new and strange things to eat. Brands we have never heard of. We must look at it all. And decide ; we have to decide what to take back with us. It isn’t easy.

It’s funny what people bring back. Some stock up as if to eat in every day for the week we’ll be here. Others take only enough for tonight’s dinner and a few breakfasts, counting on eating while we’re away on our day trips. Darrell and I are staying in different cottages, and I peek into each of our fridges.

My fridge :

Salad, vegetables, milk, orange juice, yogurt, fruit yogurt, eggs, 1 Guinness, cheese. Plus apples, bread, muesli, wine, and olive oil on the counter.

D’s fridge :

6 apple ciders, 6 pear ciders, 2 berry ciders, 6 Guinness, jam, lemon curd, butter, ham, cream, milk, eggs. Plus Nutella, bread, coffee, muesli, and potato chips on the counter.

Guess who saw all those different kinds of cider at the store and didn’t know which one to try ! So we got them all, or most of them (some in several copies), and will be having a cider test.

On top of my cottage.

Tomorrow: Cork.

Ireland 2011, Part 1

2011-07-12T18:43:00.000+02:00

I have to admit I kind of like Schipol Airport. When I have a little more time, that is. Today it’s just good for a bit of exercise as I speedwalk through its kilometer-long, shiny-clean halls of shops and bars and restaurants, dodging luggage obstacles and bewildered or bored travellers. It's sale season, though, and all the books in English are calling to me to stop and look.

70 minutes to change flights is down to 40 by the time I clear the passport check, but the bank of ticketing kiosks right after that has no waiting, yea ! When I tell it I checked a bag in Clermont, however, it tells me I have a Baggage Discrepancy. Um, I did check a bag, I did I did. And it has my toothbrush in it. Please somebody here be expecting it and tuck it gently into the underbelly of the only Aer Lingus shamrock jet to be seen. There’s jam in there that must get through.

At the gate with supposedly just 20 minutes before we lift off, I get my boarding pass and am assured that everything is fine. It’s just those silly computers. They’ll send your luggage from one company to another ; they just won’t tell you about it on the way. Now it is time to hurry up and wait.

Tic-toc and here I am in Dublin. Er, not really Dublin, just a convenient and fairly reasonable hotel near the airport. Just what I love on vacation, right ? My fellow travellers are arriving tomorrow bright and early and it’s off to Kilkenny straight away, so it’s airport lodging tonight.

No bother. A pint of Guinness and a glorious soak in the tub, and I’m good for the evening anyway.

Though I wonder if there’s anywhere to go for a walk outside.

Heading one direction, the sidewalk peters out after a hundred yards. The hedges on either side of the road don’t leave any margin for pedestrians, so that’s not the way to go. So much for the small road. Along the much bigger road the sidewalk keeps on, probably all the way to Dublin. There’s even a margin between the concrete path and the traffic. I go about a mile, with an impenetrable hedge on one side and constant trucks and cars on the other, before getting too bored with it and turning back. Nothing to see. I’ll get my exercise lifting that pint.

Tuesday. In the lobby this morning are not quite so many members of some red-shirted American swim team. All snug in their beds recovering from a late night yelling back and forth down the hotel corridors, I think.

Time to go find Hogeye Navvy and company at the airport. Mac said to meet them at 7. Er, that would mean she expects to deplane, hike over to the passport check, get through that and on to the luggage area, pick up all the bags, and make it out to groundside in five minutes. I get there sometime after 7 but with plenty plenty time to spare, not because I think I risk holding the group up, but because I fully intend to find a good cup of coffee and a delectable pastry item for breakfast before discovering the proper car rental area.

Good idea, because Dooley’s car rental kiosk is tucked waaaay back under the stairs, out of sight of the more well-known rental agencies, with nary an arrow to point the last bit of the way. On the way over from the other terminal there are signs. But follow them, and you’ll get down to the space in front of the other rental cars with no Dooley’s in sight. It looks like they’ve packed up overnight without a trace. They haven’t ; they just haven’t shelled out for one last sign saying, Yes, Really, Way down that way where the janitors never sweep and it looks like employees-only.

Here they are at last, slowly trickling through the frosted doors of the air-side area in a haze of jetlag. Some want coffee, some want a restroom, some want to practice wandering off, but once we’re all more or less together it’s off to get our cars. Even with a third of the group wandered off someplace, we fill the sad space under the escalator. It rapidly becomes hot and stuffy down there, so they tell the non-drivers to gather outside, where a Dooley van will pick us up and take us to the place where the cars are, so we can at least wait in the fresh air.

Outside is much better, even if we do occupy a dull strip of sidewalk between a parking structure and the taxi stands. Where are these promised vans ? It takes ages for them to come get us. Long enough that we get worried we’re standing in the wrong place. D and I go on a reconn mission, but the other side of the parking structure is just for city busses. This is the place. And there is a white Dooley van at last. Off to Dooley’s Ford lot for more waiting.

For an hour we shift from foot to foot at the car lot, noticing how many Fords there are and how the rest of the cars are mostly Japanese, counting the red ones and then the blue ones, and then finding out what's in the vending machines down the road, when the six people sharing driving duty show up. But we’re still not ready to go. What were they doing at the airport all this time if not the paperwork to take possession of our vehicles ? All drivers to the office ! Apparently a green sheet of paper has gone missing, and we cannot leave without it. Another hour of waiting around.

We are driving three copies of 2007’s Van of the Year. Blue, grey, and silver. We name them after ships, but nobody agrees which (we know too many that went down - anybody know three that stayed afloat ?). I think mine is the Beagle. People start to get in the vans. And then out again. And then in.

And then, miraculously, we’re driving.

Driving on the left is not too bad. We get to start off on the big roads around Dublin where you just go with everyone else. There’s no occassion to go wrong. Later, when you have choices and nobody setting an example, it’s not so easy.

Apricot Jaam

2011-06-20T19:09:00.000+02:00

Today's Poetry Jam flavor is Summer Chillin', the good idea from Margaret. I haven't found any proper poem words, so this unwordy collection of photos will have to do.