What Has Alex Been Up To?

Short answer: A lot of everything.

I have now taken 2 weeks of my class Understanding Ireland. With the class, I've been tied up for about 3 hours a day in lectures, and have taken some field trips to historical places around Dublin.

Place 1: Croke Park and the Gaelic Athletic Association Museum. The Irish like their soccer and rugby just fine, but they really love their Gaelic sports. The big ones are Gaelic football (a strange combination of American football, team handball, and soccer) and hurling (a super fast and rough sport where the players use a hockey stick-type thing). These sports have all of the bone-crushing action of hockey and ultimate fighting (maybe that one is a stretch), but without the pads. There is a really interesting history that ties together the GAA and nationalism through the last 150 years or so, culminating when British soldiers rode tanks into the park and massacred some spectators and a player.

(More light-hearted) Croke Park is HUGE!! They made an effort to prove to us that it is. Biggest stadium in Europe, biggest amateur stadium anywhere, etc. We were there right up next to the pitch 2 days before the All Ireland final in Gaelic football. Sweet!

A few fellow Americans from TCD and I next to the pitch at Croke Park

A spectacular chandelier at Croke Park made of Waterford glass in the shapes of the balls of Gaelic Football and Hurling (called a sliotar, pronounced almost like a vulgar word for crapper)

I've also been working on school work a fair amount, which can be described as anti-fun. I spent a few afternoons in the Berkeley Library (named after the TCD alumnus for which the CA city is named), which is a horrible environ. It is Neo-Brutalist architecture and is like spending all my time in the basement of Mallinckrodt at Wash U. I got to research about Patrick Pearse (Irish revolutionary) and reflect on my visit to Kilmainham Gaol.

Good transition to the Kilmainham field trip, if I do say so myself, which I am. We walked there (a trek) last week. It was where a couple hundred years of Irish dissidents were held, from the days of the 1798 Rebellion (that scared the shit out of the British, so much so as to dissolve the Irish Parliament. I sat through an amazing lecture on this episode on 12 Sept, wherein the lecturer wanted to make it into a movie trilogy) to dissidents in the Irish Civil War after the independence from the UK. We saw the gallows and unmarked graves of the Phoenix Park Assassins, the Invincibles. This was a vicious jail, where kids were put behind bars for stealing bread for their starving children, and other poetic injustices occurred. It was very moving to be in the yard where the founders of the Irish Republic were shot in the middle of the night.

In front of the plaque commemorating the death of the signers of the Proclaimation of the Irish Republic. Not an occassion to smile.

Inside the Gaol, which was an innovative Victorian jail. It used heady metaphors about God and looking into light to reform the prisoners. It was a panopticon prison, where you were always being watched, or at least could always be watched.

Ufta, that is a depressing bit. Now for more less depressing.

I've been hanging out, cooking, and getting settled more. I made some awesome pork chops with mustard cream sauce the other day. Tonight I'll do some chicken and pasta with fresh tomatoes.

I have visited a couple more amazing places: The Trim Castle and Hill of Tara.

The imposing stone structure standing tall over County Meath. As scary looking as the Anglo-Normans who lived in it.

4 of the 5 men in my flat. Greg, Victor, Alex, and Ethan. Not pictured: David. He was off doing something somewhere.

So Trim Castle was very nice. It was a beautiful day in Ireland (weird? yes) and I could see for far and wide over the River Boyne and east-central Ireland. It wasn't as impressive as Hill of Tara, though, even though the Hill is actually just a bunch of grass in the the Irish equivalent of Bumblefuck, Iowa. At this site, there have been religious and political gatherings for the last 5,000 years or so. There were passage tombs and neolithic relics to the Pagan gods, the gates and monument which the divine King of Ireland had to scale, an early site of Irish Christianity, and Daniel O'Connell's most famous monster meeting (where he spoke in a booming voice to between 300,000-1,000,000 Irishmen about being free). It was also a working sheep pasture, where my instincts from a former life kicked in (I suspect I was a herding dog at some point in the past, maybe a border collie, maybe a Shetland sheepdog, maybe an Australian shepard). A friend from Amherst and I were close to cornering a sheep before I slipped and almost landed in sheep shit. As my TA said:

Where there be sheep, there be sheep shit.

The Irish cuss a lot, and so I do. Sorry?

It was a very relaxing and peaceful place to be.

I wasn't posing here, but I was plotting.

I really love this country. Now that I have been out of Dublin for a bit (both on my trips to Trim and Tara, and to Galway and the Aran Islands - story to come soon), I am really in tune with the mood here. As I explore the city and find the places in which I feel comfortable and settle in to my routine, I am feeling a very-hard-to-describe energetic mellowness.