So much has happened since leaving Ireland, I will just write briefly about our last couple weeks there. The second farm we stayed at was lovely, a historic Irish estate built in the late 1700s. We lived with an Irish family who had bought the estate, worked on restoring it and now opened it to the public come and visit. It was a totally different experience living with the family as opposed to just one American as on our first farm, and I loved the taste we got of that life.
Before leaving Ireland to fly to Paris, we stayed with Julia's mom's friend on her sheep farm in the Wicklow mountains, possibly the second most beautiful part of Ireland. June and her sister Tessa, lived together and ran the farm but were between the ages of 54 and 60-something. I was so impressed with how much they still did around the farm even though sometimes it felt like I was doing farm work alongside my grandmother and she was putting me to shame, flipping sheep on their back to treat them and riding an ATV to herd them. It was so enjoyable to stay with them and try our hand at herding and de-worming sheep. Super exciting, I know. And way easier and less gross than it sounds.
Last week we said goodbye after a month in Ireland and flew to Paris for 4 days there. We saw the sights, were duly impressed with the Eiffel tower, and wonderfully not overwhelmed by the Louvre. In a funny way, it kinda became our go- to spot as the only place with free internet we could find was in the Starbucks below the museum. Best email-checking experience ever. After that, we took a night train to Nice on the Mediterranean sea. That was rough, but we can sleep sometime when we're not in France, right? Nice was beautiful, the people a bit stuck- up but just the temperature we had longed for all those rainy days in the UK. We took a day trip to Grasse, 20 miles north of Nice, the perfume capital of the world, and an under appreciated amazing little town. We bought perfume and our last nutella crepe and prepared for the 10 hour/4 local Italian trains trip to Venice the next day.
I now cringe when I hear the phrase "local Italian train" as it conjures up memories of standing in a cramped walk-way of a train car with not enough room for 2 people to pass without becoming well acquainted with each other. Being dropped at little more than abandoned stations IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE Italy and with 6 min to figure out our connecting train. For 3 trains we didn't have time to make reservations so if we found an empty seat eventually an angry old woman would be yelling at us in Italian about how we took took her reserved seat. Then it was back to the walk way.
Within 20 min of arriving in Venice we were being screamed at by the 16 year old working the safety gate of the water bus and I was becoming incredibly disenchanted with Italy. For the rest of our time there and here in Rome, I have felt like a bad schoolchild, prepared to be yelled at by anyone, at any moment for some egregious error I am unknowingly committing. Maybe it is just cultural, Italians are loud, animated and expressive in every conversation they have. And I've watched way too much TV about the mafia.
Venice was totally worth it though, as romantic and cliche as you can imagine. Julia and I forgot our map the first day and wandered the streets instead, just seeing what there was to be seen. Sometimes a sidewalk ended in a canal or you had to go the most round-about way to avoid the water, it was beautiful and unlike any other city. Our hostel was on an island across the Grand Canal from the main part of Venice which meant a boat crossing had to be made twice a day, there and back. A single pass ticket costs close to $10, an absurdity, really, which means we were looking at paying $60 just to get back and forth for our time there. Fortunately, we found a website saying that they had been kindly allowed one stop without having to pay, a kind of unspoken rule. The first day we stupidly asked the man running the water bus about this. He looked annoyed, like he wished we had never asked and said we must pay full price. He went looking for change for our bills and by the time he returned, we were across the canal and he didn't have enough change so he let us go for free. Sweet, $10 saved! Taking this into account along with the fact that our first ticket had never been checked, we had never seen anyone else checking tickets and the fact that some random girl on our island told us it was perfectly acceptable to not have a ticket for just one stop, we decided to take our chances with our one stop rides and stop asking for tickets. Moral of the story, don't by a ticket for $10 for one stop on a water bus in Venice. And I typed that whole story put because I was so exceedingly happy that we had accidentally figured this out that it was my third favorite part of Venice.
We've been eating delicious gelato every day, but you know..when in Rome. No, actually, that was a completely useless piece of information, I just really wanted to use that phrase, and we are indeed now in Rome.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
Late for Dinner
At the risk of sounding like Rick Steves after a visit to Ireland, I believe Julia and I stumbled upon one of the best kept secrets of the Irish west coast- the tiny town of Doolan.
Many would know the famous Cliffs of Moher connected to Doolin (consequently the same used in the filming of the cliffs of insanity in the Princess Bride) but for some reason the town itself seemed small and untouched. It was made up of 3 hostels, 4 pubs, 1 chocolate shop and 1 gas station which also served as "the best grocery store in town". And it was totally charming.
Our original reason for being there was to see the cliffs and in doing so accomplish the one thing I most wanted to do in my life. I started to get the impression, however, that my picture of walking through miles and miles of fields of long grass until we came to the very edge of the country and a 700ft sheer drop would actually look more like taking a bus to a barrier with 7 million other people, looking over the edge and snapping the same picture that comes up whenever you google "Cliffs of Moher". I was prepared to be severly disappointed in the fulfillment of my life's dream.
Thankfully, one of the guys running the hostel we were at gave us the low down on the "back door" hike to the cliffs. He drew us a helpful map on notebook paper and included 1 gate to walk through, 1 gate to go around, 2 waterfalls to cross, a hill to surmount, and a village to pass through. He failed to mention however, that THIS WILL BE THE MOST AMAZING EXPERIENCE OF YOUR LIFE!
So, instead of a 15 min bus ride with 25000 of your closest tourist friends, we hiked for 3 hours along the edge of the shoreline as it rose from sea level to 700foot sheer face cliffs. Every view was more amazing than the last. The crest of every hill more breathtaking than the one before it. We walked through miles and miles of long grass usually inches from the very edge. Someone in the 1800s upon seeing the cliffs wrote that there was some sort of "strange intoxication" one felt looking over the rim and I can still feel that when I picture the spot that Julia and I stopped to eat our lunch. We crested a small hill, looked over the water and 300ft rock wall to our left and agreed it was the ideal spot for our picnic. Just in case, I ran up the next small hill and crept to the edge. It was liking slowly pulling back a curtain on a blindingly gorgeous day or maybe that scene from Star Wars when you look down from Anakin's apartment and see space shuttles cross crossing for miles below you in space.
Sea gulls looked liked cotton balls on the lowest rock ledges and hundreds of them calling to each other bounced and echoed all around to create a continous chorus. The rush and thrill of taking in such beauty and such danger is exactly what I would call strangely intoxicating. Julia remarked that she knew there would be days ahead when she would wish she was in that moment and place again and I agreed.
Sitting in a coffee shop on the coast overlooking the Irish Sea, I'm reading The Hobbit and loved this passage as it describes Bilbo Baggins response to Gandalf when he tells him how hard it is to find someone to share an adventure with: "I should think so-in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and I have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them."
I find this view of adventures not at all in line with my own, but there is something to be said about the comfort of your own home. Thing is, I never consider what I love about my own home until I'm on an adventure away from it.
Many would know the famous Cliffs of Moher connected to Doolin (consequently the same used in the filming of the cliffs of insanity in the Princess Bride) but for some reason the town itself seemed small and untouched. It was made up of 3 hostels, 4 pubs, 1 chocolate shop and 1 gas station which also served as "the best grocery store in town". And it was totally charming.
Our original reason for being there was to see the cliffs and in doing so accomplish the one thing I most wanted to do in my life. I started to get the impression, however, that my picture of walking through miles and miles of fields of long grass until we came to the very edge of the country and a 700ft sheer drop would actually look more like taking a bus to a barrier with 7 million other people, looking over the edge and snapping the same picture that comes up whenever you google "Cliffs of Moher". I was prepared to be severly disappointed in the fulfillment of my life's dream.
Thankfully, one of the guys running the hostel we were at gave us the low down on the "back door" hike to the cliffs. He drew us a helpful map on notebook paper and included 1 gate to walk through, 1 gate to go around, 2 waterfalls to cross, a hill to surmount, and a village to pass through. He failed to mention however, that THIS WILL BE THE MOST AMAZING EXPERIENCE OF YOUR LIFE!
So, instead of a 15 min bus ride with 25000 of your closest tourist friends, we hiked for 3 hours along the edge of the shoreline as it rose from sea level to 700foot sheer face cliffs. Every view was more amazing than the last. The crest of every hill more breathtaking than the one before it. We walked through miles and miles of long grass usually inches from the very edge. Someone in the 1800s upon seeing the cliffs wrote that there was some sort of "strange intoxication" one felt looking over the rim and I can still feel that when I picture the spot that Julia and I stopped to eat our lunch. We crested a small hill, looked over the water and 300ft rock wall to our left and agreed it was the ideal spot for our picnic. Just in case, I ran up the next small hill and crept to the edge. It was liking slowly pulling back a curtain on a blindingly gorgeous day or maybe that scene from Star Wars when you look down from Anakin's apartment and see space shuttles cross crossing for miles below you in space.
Sea gulls looked liked cotton balls on the lowest rock ledges and hundreds of them calling to each other bounced and echoed all around to create a continous chorus. The rush and thrill of taking in such beauty and such danger is exactly what I would call strangely intoxicating. Julia remarked that she knew there would be days ahead when she would wish she was in that moment and place again and I agreed.
Sitting in a coffee shop on the coast overlooking the Irish Sea, I'm reading The Hobbit and loved this passage as it describes Bilbo Baggins response to Gandalf when he tells him how hard it is to find someone to share an adventure with: "I should think so-in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and I have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them."
I find this view of adventures not at all in line with my own, but there is something to be said about the comfort of your own home. Thing is, I never consider what I love about my own home until I'm on an adventure away from it.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Don't regret it, would never do it again.
One day I may have internally processed enough to write something meaningful about my last two weeks. When I was on the phone with someone from back home, I came to the disheartening realization that I may describe and explain and tell stories about our time at the first farm but I won't ever be able to make anyone feel what I felt or understand the nuances of the absurdity.
Sunrise Farm was an organic farm indeed where everything was recycled (including the toilet paper) and nothing wasted. I found myself tearing apart the components of my yogurt cup every morning to be recycled 3 different ways and living in fear of what would be said to me if I left anything uneaten on my plate. I was shown the pee-toilet and told it gets dumped in the blueberries to fight a leaf-eating fungus. I nodded and (shaping up to be the worst WWOOFer ever) made a conscious decision to never use the foul smelling pee-toilet and to avoid eating the blueberries as well.
On work days we worked hard-weeding the garden, chopping wood or building a compost heap. On Fridays we baked in the bakery and on Saturdays we sold at market in the tiny town of Mount Shannon on the edge of Lough Derg.
We made friends with others our age in the town and the other WWOOfer on the farm, Eileen from Boston. We spent two extremely enjoyable evenings with them in the local pub, peppered with live traditional music, Eileen's alcohol-influenced version of a Janis Joplin song and our German friend's glocenspiel-a mini xylophone. After one of these evenings, we had been promised a lift home from a very nice Japanese man. Unfortunately, he was both a bit small and overly-cautious and so after 1 beer consumed over the course of 3 1/2 hours, he declared himself too drunk to drive. We found ourselves standing outside of the pub, in the cold, an hour after it had closed while he downed pints of water in an effort to "sober up". I'm telling you, when a not-drunk person thinks they are drunk, there's no telling when they will think they are sober. I am thankful we made it home eventually.
All this sounds normal enough, I suppose, but it wasn't the farm work or activities that made it so strange, it really was the lady who owned the farm. Didi was 60 years old, never married, from Vermont and had lived a transient life working for the Peace Corps in her youth and as a volunteer in other countries- Haiti being the most recent. She sounds lovely, and really she was at times, but mostly she was used to being in charge and never having to live with someone else in any sort of equal relationship. She was incredibly controlling, in every detail of what we did and made her wishes known through biting side comments and passive communication. If she though you were incompetent, she had you wash dishes or pick greens from the garden instead of the more complicated work of baking or cooking etc. This never happened to me but I watched with frustration as it happened to others. Our relationship shaped up to be like boss to employee instead of teacher to learner or even just as a community as I had hoped.
Didi also seemed to live in her own, alternate reality. As far as I understood, she was a higher-up spiritual leader in her religion, which she often referred to as the Yogis (something close to a modified Buddhism), and thus she was called Didi. There's lots of Didis, I don't know how they tell them all apart. Her day involved lots of ritualistic meditation and yoga and strict ideas about how to feed oneself. Few of her ideas about nutrition or how the body works would be found in any medical textbook and I found it increasingly harder to bite my tongue and not argue with the things she said. I continually wanted to say "just because you want something to be reality does not make it reality!" But, clearly, I didn't.
Once, she told me the Yogis cured cancer. And once she made cream of broccoli soup but instead of cream or milk she had used pasta with tomato sauce ground up with boiling water dumped on it. She told me this was, in fact, a milk substitute. Pasta with tomato sauce ground up and mixed with boiling water is, in fact, NOT a milk substitute and so Julia and I (being the worst WWOOFers ever) found ourselves dumping that soup in the river one day while Didi was in London. (In our defense, it had been sitting out all night.)
She had us sing-chant a blessing over our food every meal, a Yogi phrase in a different language which essentially meant "There is love in everything". This did not sit well with me and so I stopped participating even though it was incredibly awkwardly obvious that I wasn't singing. Problem was, she had a CD which had nothing on it but this phrase sung in a song 12 different ways over and over again and she must have had 14 copies of it because we listened to it in the kitchen, the bakery, the car and anywhere else that had CD-playing capabilities. In a fitting way, it was the last thing I heard when she dropped us off at the bus station to head on to our next farm.
When we left for our trip, I expected that I would learn a lot and know God more deeply, but not in the ways it has happened this far. In the midst of the spiritual heaviness that I felt at the farm, I was forced to go to Romans and the basics of Christ and the meaning of his life and death and our salvation. Didi and two other girls who came for a spiritual retreat participated in structured meditation and strived to become some sort of better or more spiritual person. I turned it all over and over in my head trying to figure out their source or motivation or even the ends of what they believed. It was exhausting. One day I climbed the highest hill I could find and could see 360 degrees, all around me. It was breathtaking. Suddenly I felt the weight of freedom in the absence of requirements to do or be or earn. I now more fully and powerfully understand that idea that it is in Christ that we live and breath and find our existence and it is through him that we have freedom-freedom from the law, rituals, strivings and anything in our power to do. That is incredible.
Sunrise Farm was an organic farm indeed where everything was recycled (including the toilet paper) and nothing wasted. I found myself tearing apart the components of my yogurt cup every morning to be recycled 3 different ways and living in fear of what would be said to me if I left anything uneaten on my plate. I was shown the pee-toilet and told it gets dumped in the blueberries to fight a leaf-eating fungus. I nodded and (shaping up to be the worst WWOOFer ever) made a conscious decision to never use the foul smelling pee-toilet and to avoid eating the blueberries as well.
On work days we worked hard-weeding the garden, chopping wood or building a compost heap. On Fridays we baked in the bakery and on Saturdays we sold at market in the tiny town of Mount Shannon on the edge of Lough Derg.
We made friends with others our age in the town and the other WWOOfer on the farm, Eileen from Boston. We spent two extremely enjoyable evenings with them in the local pub, peppered with live traditional music, Eileen's alcohol-influenced version of a Janis Joplin song and our German friend's glocenspiel-a mini xylophone. After one of these evenings, we had been promised a lift home from a very nice Japanese man. Unfortunately, he was both a bit small and overly-cautious and so after 1 beer consumed over the course of 3 1/2 hours, he declared himself too drunk to drive. We found ourselves standing outside of the pub, in the cold, an hour after it had closed while he downed pints of water in an effort to "sober up". I'm telling you, when a not-drunk person thinks they are drunk, there's no telling when they will think they are sober. I am thankful we made it home eventually.
All this sounds normal enough, I suppose, but it wasn't the farm work or activities that made it so strange, it really was the lady who owned the farm. Didi was 60 years old, never married, from Vermont and had lived a transient life working for the Peace Corps in her youth and as a volunteer in other countries- Haiti being the most recent. She sounds lovely, and really she was at times, but mostly she was used to being in charge and never having to live with someone else in any sort of equal relationship. She was incredibly controlling, in every detail of what we did and made her wishes known through biting side comments and passive communication. If she though you were incompetent, she had you wash dishes or pick greens from the garden instead of the more complicated work of baking or cooking etc. This never happened to me but I watched with frustration as it happened to others. Our relationship shaped up to be like boss to employee instead of teacher to learner or even just as a community as I had hoped.
Didi also seemed to live in her own, alternate reality. As far as I understood, she was a higher-up spiritual leader in her religion, which she often referred to as the Yogis (something close to a modified Buddhism), and thus she was called Didi. There's lots of Didis, I don't know how they tell them all apart. Her day involved lots of ritualistic meditation and yoga and strict ideas about how to feed oneself. Few of her ideas about nutrition or how the body works would be found in any medical textbook and I found it increasingly harder to bite my tongue and not argue with the things she said. I continually wanted to say "just because you want something to be reality does not make it reality!" But, clearly, I didn't.
Once, she told me the Yogis cured cancer. And once she made cream of broccoli soup but instead of cream or milk she had used pasta with tomato sauce ground up with boiling water dumped on it. She told me this was, in fact, a milk substitute. Pasta with tomato sauce ground up and mixed with boiling water is, in fact, NOT a milk substitute and so Julia and I (being the worst WWOOFers ever) found ourselves dumping that soup in the river one day while Didi was in London. (In our defense, it had been sitting out all night.)
She had us sing-chant a blessing over our food every meal, a Yogi phrase in a different language which essentially meant "There is love in everything". This did not sit well with me and so I stopped participating even though it was incredibly awkwardly obvious that I wasn't singing. Problem was, she had a CD which had nothing on it but this phrase sung in a song 12 different ways over and over again and she must have had 14 copies of it because we listened to it in the kitchen, the bakery, the car and anywhere else that had CD-playing capabilities. In a fitting way, it was the last thing I heard when she dropped us off at the bus station to head on to our next farm.
When we left for our trip, I expected that I would learn a lot and know God more deeply, but not in the ways it has happened this far. In the midst of the spiritual heaviness that I felt at the farm, I was forced to go to Romans and the basics of Christ and the meaning of his life and death and our salvation. Didi and two other girls who came for a spiritual retreat participated in structured meditation and strived to become some sort of better or more spiritual person. I turned it all over and over in my head trying to figure out their source or motivation or even the ends of what they believed. It was exhausting. One day I climbed the highest hill I could find and could see 360 degrees, all around me. It was breathtaking. Suddenly I felt the weight of freedom in the absence of requirements to do or be or earn. I now more fully and powerfully understand that idea that it is in Christ that we live and breath and find our existence and it is through him that we have freedom-freedom from the law, rituals, strivings and anything in our power to do. That is incredible.
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