Playing Catch-up (Part VII)

I'm not sure if there's any point to me writing because I don't know if anybody even reads this. Whatever, though, at least I'll have it all for myself in the future.

Today Bonnie and I returned from 6 wonderful days in Spain... if I ever get up to date with this thing, I'll be able to write about that in detail. But we had a great time. I also bought "Deathly Hallows" in a crazily crowded bookstore in Madrid at 1:01 AM and, well, yeah. Wow. :) More on that later, hopefully.

Anyway, back to that first weekend in Dublin. On Saturday we went to an outdoor market in the trendy Temple Bar area and ogled fresh, organic fruits and vegetables and lots of delicious cheeses breads and such. We bought some chives and spinach, and I also bought a book at the book market down the street. I think that the rest of the day was free, so we didn't really do too much else besides walk around the city. On Sunday, we all went to a the hurling semifinal! That was really cool. We got to see a Gaelic football game before the match started, which was interesting. Hurling was not *too* difficult to follow if you didn't try to focus on the rules. There's a sort of field-hocked type stick and a tiny little ball and players can carry it but have to bounce it after five steps or something, and it's really quite violent; we saw more than a few guys beating their fallen opponents over the head with their sticks. I personally was rooting for Wexford, but Kilkenny won - booo. Actually, they pretty much crushed Wexford and moved on to the finals, which will be held in September, I think.

On Monday we had class and two guest lectures, one on Irish history (a whole lotta history packed into an hour and a half!) and one on the Irish langauge and Culture. Both were really informative, but I loved the stuff about Irish, as you might expect. The lecturer himself was also really great; he allowed his lecture to change based on our interests and was very flexible, which we all really appreciated. Later on that night we went to Trinity to listen to some traditional Irish music, which was great. The players were mostly Trinity profs who've known each other and played together for years, and one of them got up and did a sort of traditional dance on the tables. They took turns talking about all of their instruments and the sort of evolution of traditional Irish music.

After classes on Tuesday we visited Kilmainham Jail, a rather infamous place. Many of Dublin's most well-known political prisoners were kept in Kilmainham, and quite a few were executed outside its doors. There was a really neat exhibition type thing set up with information, and then we watched an audiovisual (surprise, surprise) and were given a tour. The place was pretty depressing, for the most part, except for the newer, Victorian wing that had been designed to let in more light than the darker, older, stone cells. It was kind of depressing to learn that at some points in time, people would break the law simply to get *into* the jail because they knew they'd at least have food and shelter there. When living in super crowded conditions in a cold, damp, hard cell is better than being a free person, things have reached a rather dire point.

Wednesday included more classes and the second half of the guest lectures, which were, again, very informative. We learned some simple phrases in Irish and now I have a desire to go to a gaeltacht (an area were Irish is spoken fluently and is pretty nearly the first language) and learn it. Failing that, maybe I'll try to teach myself. Anyway, that night we went to a poetry reading where 10 poets from the latest edition of an anthology read some of their work. I hadn't heard of any of them, but it was nice to have a break from Joyce. Ho hum.

We were supposed to go the Joyce center after class on Thursday, but Connie realized how burnt out everyone was and decided to make that expedition optional. Needless to say, we were all verrry thankful about that.