Happy Christmas!

How’re ye, lads? It snowed this Christmas eve and Christmas morning, for the first time in years, we’ve been told, so it almost feels like home! (we must have brought it with us) It was so nice to wake up on Christmas morning and see the little Irish kids (and some of their parents too) out throwing snowballs and having a great time. We had to shake the dusting of the white stuff off of our backyard palm tree, and it probably won’t last long, but it was very magical.

Everything here is going great, working at the pub is a very interesting introduction to the culture, and the work as a Personal Assistant is terrific as well. We went out last weekend to Blarney Castle to kiss the Blarney Stone, which is rumoured to bestow upon the kisser the gift of the gab, and we are hoping that it will help us join in the Irish banter as the night wears on at the pub. In case it doesn’t, Mike got us a book for Christmas called “The Wit of Irish Conversation”, which we will be keeping in our Guinness apron pockets for moments such as: “Will ye go for a jar?” (would you like a drink?) to which we will reply “I’m on the dry!” (No thank you), unless we are off shift in which case we will reply: ”A few pints wouldn’t go astray at all!” We also got a short wave radio for Christmas, so we are hoping to tune in the CBC maybe, but so far we haven’t been able to find it between the Chinese and Romanian programs.

Another treat we received in the mail was our Polish friend, Kinga’s (stayed with her in Gdansk, see entry for October 13, 2004) English version of her book about hitchhiking the world for five years. If anyone is curious, her website about it is http://ledbydestiny.com.

For all those who have asked us about whether cork trees grow here in Cork, we have researched the topic and they do not, they come from the Mediterranean coast, as far as we can ascertain. ”Cork” is the anglicised name from the Gaelic name “Corcaigh”, which means marshy place, which is what the city is built on we have noticed. Sometimes we get half a foot of standing water in our back “garden”, and the rivers come dangerously close to street levels downtown. In fact, parts of the city flooded just a few weeks before we came! Our community is actually what used to be Douglas village, the Gaelic name was "Dubhghlas", which was the name given to the river meaning "dark stream".

Unfortunately, there are no candy canes and no egg nog here, but we are enjoying Turnip Puff, Boxty potatoes, mince pies and apple cider, and wearing our lamb’s wool sweaters and stoking our coal fireplace. We have had a lovely Christmas, even though we have missed everyone at home so much! We want to wish you all a very happy Christmas, and a great New Year!

Our Pub

Here is the address of a write-up on the pub we are working in, with some photos. http://www.irishmusicbars.com/cork/southcountybar.asp enjoy!

Yeah, we finally got jobs!

The last three weeks in Cork have been good, but not nearly so much to report as when we are travelling. We had another roommate move in, another Canadian studying whales here for a couple of months, and we are hoping to go whale watching together next weekend. So, we can have a Canadian Christmas with the three of us, even if we can’t be at home. Our other roommate went back to Sweden for the holidays. We have been spending most of our time looking for work, and of course after two and a half weeks of not hearing anything, we get four job offers in the last two days. So, we are much happier being able to choose, instead of feeling unemployable. We went to the neighbourhood pub for lunch the other day, and it was such a cute, and authentic looking place (at least by our standards: traditional music playing weekly, the old man behind the bar greets every customer, the interior is all dark wood with drinking quotes calligraphied on the walls and covered in knickknacks) that we thought it couldn’t hurt to drop off our CV’s. And the next day the manager called us, and now we are both working in an Irish pub, just like we had always dreamed for our time in Ireland. Now Mike can become a master pint pourer (we’ve got to study up on the art of Guinness pint pouring – I think they might offer courses – jk). Mike is also working in the pub’s café, and Carli-Ann is also working as a Personal Assistant with a physically handicapped university student. We had just gotten some temp work lined up finally as we got these other offers, so for a few days this week we are working in the kitchen at the Pfizer Pharmaceutical plant here. Yep, you guessed it, in the Viagra factory. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! We’ll keep everyone posted as to our impressions of the operation. We were getting a bit bored waiting for jobs to call us so last weekend we decided to go on an adventure and hitched to West Cork, the west part of our county, which is also the west coast. It was so beautiful, low rolling hills, green sheeped fields (the crows sit on the heads of the sheep and preen their wool, so funny looking) and rugged coast line. We took a ferry out to the most southern point of Ireland, Clear Island, and hiked around. We got goat milk ice cream from the local goat farm, and met a French girl who was staying there and WWOOFing it (Willing Workers on Organic Farms: you volunteer to work on an organic farm for a couple of weeks and your room and board is free, a great way to travel a country and get to know the people), which reminded us that there are plenty of ways to travel if we are creative enough. I think we will try it when we pick up and go again (not till the fall now probably). We spent the last morning hiking up through cow fields and over electric fences to abandoned ruins of castles and watchtowers from clan times on high ocean cliff tops, and the view was stunning of course. It is so nice to get out of the city, and we are going to try to do it as often as we can, if our work permits us to. Hitching here is so easy, we were laughing. Seven out of eight rides we only waited less than five minutes, and we met some great people, who widened our perspective of the country and culture. We learned about the market for acupuncture in Ireland, where to find a hurling game in our community from a mom and her young sons (a sport only found in Ireland, played with sticks and a ball), the design of a typical Irish cottage from a German architect who had been living here for 30 years, all about litigation and immigration issues, and we were taken to a little-known ancient stone circle (more about that later). There is no better way for the two of us to travel here, and we are looking forward to more weekends out of the city! Christmas is coming up soon, and it will probably be pretty quiet here, but we will be thinking about everyone lots!