Northern Ireland

Hey all, happy spring! We actually saw lambs being born here, and the trees are all a'blossom. But we hear the temperatures have been warmer in Edmonton lately!

We have been doing good, travelling whenever we get a day off of work. We hitch-hiked up and through Northern Ireland for a week, and it was a great trip. The scenery, especially along the Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Coast was amazing, plus the people were so friendly (to us, at least, as impartial foreigners!) and tourism is not so prevalent here as in the Republic, so we were still a bit of a novelty. Belfast and Derry were such interesting cities, and the historical conflicts are still so recent, that everyone has something to tell you about it, and hitch-hiking is the best way to hear a huge range of views on all subjects. All the roadblocks and everything have been taken down in the last few years, but the political murals from both sides are a...colorful way to learn about the conflict. And the only violence we encountered on the whole trip was when an old IRA man in an 18th century bar, where the seeds of the Irish Independence movement were sown, smacked me on the head for calling the area "Northern Ireland", instead of "Ireland", but it was just with a roll of posters and a good dose of humour. Interesting place...

We are looking forward to the premier of the "HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy" movie, and going to the Netherlands next week to meet the Germain grandparents on their tour for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Holland, and then to Germany for an Engelman family reunion (mostly all family we have never met before!). Then we have a day in London with more newly acquainted family members, and then back to the grind in Cork.

Photos of our trip to Northern Ireland and of the traditional Irish music sessions at our pub are now posted too!

Take care!

Happy St. Paddy’s Day! now that we have recovered....

The blog has been a quiet space the last couple of months, because we have been working alot to save up money for travelling, and like in any country, that doesn’t make for such exciting news to write home about. But we have been saving up some interesting bits of our experiences, now that we have some time to update (and new roommates with laptops we can use!)

We went to Spain for 9 days in February, and had a great time. Kathryn is teaching English in Murcia, near the south-east coast, and it was really good to see someone from home. I don’t think we stopped talking, except to sleep, for the whole 3 days we were visiting her. We flew in to Alicante for a couple of days, and were intensely excited to see the blue ocean and sandy beaches and palm trees, even if it was a little too cool to appreciate them properly. But refreshing to see some sunshine and blue, open skies, after four months shuffling about under Ireland’s low hanging grey sky and chilling, damp winds. It was a little scary to practice our Spanish again, especially since the accent here is very different than in Latin America, but everyone was very friendly and helpful, and by the end of our trip we were rattling off in very enthusiastic Spanish, however broken it might have been. We enjoyed sampling the tapas and sangria and mediterranean cuisine, and the clubs stay open till the morning, so there was never a lack of places to go.

Hearing that Granada was one of the most beautiful places on earth, we hopped on a bus for the 4 hour or so bus ride for a few days visit. It began snowing as we climbed into the Sierra Nevada (which means ‘Snowfall Mountain Range, so we should not have been surprised), but it did look strange to us, seeing a white covering on sand coloured cave dwellings and olive groves. Then the bus stopped as it got dark, and we waited in a traffic jam for several hours, as our fellow passengers, all university students returning to studies in Granada after a long weekend, got more and more excited and the bus driver rambled off things in a quick Spanish that we could not understand. After about four hours, we asked the girl beside us what was going on, and were immediately taken under the wing of everyone as the poor Canadians who did not know what was happening, but were still remaining ‘tranquilo’, a high compliment to receive from Spaniards, I think, who are known for being quite relaxed. The highway that crossed the remaining 50 kms between us and Granada was snowed in and had been closed, a freak occurence in this part of the world, and the Red Cross was going to come and rescue us and take us somewhere to sleep for the night, as they could not get it cleared until the morning at the earliest. (Perhaps they had to import snowplows from Switzerland, hence the hold-up?) No one was allowed to take their luggage with them from below the bus, as the emergency vehicles could not accomodate all the stranded passengers and their suitcases, which did not impress the students, and the poor bus driver had to spend the night in the bus to guard the luggage! So, many hours after we were supposed to arrive in Granada, we were driven, four at a time, in fire trucks and ambulances and rescue vehicles through a fairly typical Canadian snow fall, to a nearby hotel in the village of Guadix, that was swamped with 1000 other tired, hungry, stranded travellors. We spent the night sleeping on the floor of the hotel ballroom, sleeping under a tablecloth, but were thankful that the hotel bar had sandwhiches and coffee enough for everyone. We bought a big jug of sangria to share with our new friends, who were absolutely doting on us, and when one guy pulled out his laptop and put on ‘El Senor de Los Anillos: The Lord of the Rings’, we thought, this just might be better than if we had made it to Granada that night, being just the two of us, foreigners walking around alone in a strange city. After all, had we not come to Spain to meet new people and have some Don Quixote style adventures? The next morning, a reporter came from the local newspaper, and on page 8, the story the following day read:

‘Mike and Carli-Ann Engelman, Canadians, were spoiled by their companions, who made every possible effort to keep them informed the whole time. Some were singing ‘Oh Canada’, and everything (that part wasn’t true, but captures the spirit of the atmosphere anyway). The two Canadians were travelling to Spain, looking for the nation of sun and beaches. Carli-Ann showed a Spanish guide book which pictured marvellous settings of sun on the beach.’

The article continued on, detailing our make shift movie theatre, how the students were missing important exams, and more forlorn stories of the complications of 1000 individuals being stranded. So that was our 15 minutes of fame, and we made it to Granada the next afternoon, and after surveying the pretty town with the stunning Alhambra palace/fortress and Islamic architecture and winding streets up the steep mountain face, we decided it was definitely worth the effort. We even saw an invigorating, intimate flamenco performace in a modernised cave up the mountain the following day, after touring through the Alhambra’s gardens of fountains and pools and its harem (abandoned for many centuries, obviously). We came back to visit Kathryn, and her large circle of international friends, for a few more days, and toured Murcia’s nicely non-touristy sights, and came back home, without the hoped for tan, but with a few stories to share.

We arrived home to find we had two new roommates, and the Swedish girl and the baby had moved out, which she had been planning to do since we moved in in November, but never had gotten up the momentum until now. Heiko and Torsten are electrical engineering students from Germany, near Frankfurt, here for 5 months, and are as enthusiastic about seeing Ireland as we are. They brought a car, so we can do some better day trips now than we were able to on the bus before, and we have had alot of fun so far, especially checking out the colourful St. Patrick’s Day parade and the traditional music sessions in so many of the pubs. We both had to work at our pub on St. Patrick’s Day, but what better place could we be, in an old world pub, adorned with sprigs of shamrocks, serving green beer (I thought that was a tacky North American tradition! But who knows where it originated really), listening to the yarns of all the old Irish men with a mischevious gleam in their eye. There were three seperate tables singing ballads at the end of the night as we were trying to shoe them out the door!

Last weekend, to celebrate my birthday, we decided to go out to Galway on the west coast and climb Croagh Patrick, a mountain that is now a holy pilgrimage for thousands of Irish Catholics. The story goes that around 500AD, St. Patrick climbed this mountain (767m), which is no Mt. Logan, but was a good 4 hour hike, especially slipping back down the gravelly slope, and offered us gorgeous views of the the bay opening into the Atlantic, 365 emerald islands below and the mists trailing in and over us to the purple-heathered peat bogs across the mountain pass. He fasted for 40 days and nights, and then from this mountain top did his famous snake banishing act for all of Ireland. At special times of the year, the pilgrims climb the mountain to the chapel at the top (which we were not impressed to find was closed for the season when we finally crested the ridge, dusty and sweaty), and do things like walk around certain piles of stones seven times saying three Hail Mary’s, two Our Fathers, etc. We did notice however, that all 12 or so of the fellow pilgrims that we encountered on the trail were all wearing proper footwear, contrary to the tradition of doing the hike in barefeet. I guess they were not quite sinful enough to warrant such extreme self-punishment, and I would not be brave enough to challenge the torture that the mountain slope’s chunky, serrated gravel could dish out!

Hitchiking back to Galway that evening was nearly as much of an adventure, as we got a little panicky when we were dropped off in the pitch black, desolate, silent, chilly, Irish country-side, thankful that there are no dangerous wild animals still roaming the hills, at least. But it was only 20 minutes later that we got a lift, and he gave us his phone number in case we did not make it out of his town that night, which was a very reassuring gesture. We got lifts in a Jaguar, with North Dakotans, and with three great Austrian kids who are here studying social work. We went for a pint with them later, and now we have places to stay in Galway, Sligo, Dublin, and Austria! Nearly every Irish person that we got a lift from had climbed Croagh Patrick at least once at some point in their lives, so the variety of ages and physical statures reassured us when we were worried that it might be too strenous for us.

The following day, we took a ferry out to the Aran islands, which have some of the most ancient remains in Ireland. We rented bicycles and cycled around the largest island of Inishmoor, on its tiny lanes lined by stone walls, some of which are thousands of years old, sectioning off every bit of the flat island. The craggy limestone and bluestone create a spectacular moonscape, and for most of the afternoon, our only company was a few horses, cows and a couple of goats. We went into a pub for lunch during a rainstorm, and there we overheard our first conversation, between two elderly men in tweed, all in Gaelic. We have heard the Irish language on the radio and on TV (think Sponge Bob Square Pants dubbed in Gaelic), but never in person, so we were impressed; there are not many Gaeltacht communities left in Ireland. We walked around a magnificent Iron Age stone ring fort, bordered on one side by dramatic cliffs over the Atlantic, and surrounded by a defensive forest of sharp stone spikes, photos of which we had seen before, so it was great to see it with our own eyes. By the next day, our legs were pretty sore from the activity, and we were happy to be back home.

The only memorable weekend from January was when we went to Killarney National Park to do some hill walking, which is a very popular activity here, following paths that have been used for centuries, and creating a crazy, niche market for over-priced woolen socks. We walked along the shores of the famous lakes of Killarney, that enduced in us a bit of nastalgia for the Rockies, past a crashing waterfall, through a red deer sanctuary (sadly, we didn’t see any), through oak, holly and yew woodland that sparkled in dewy brilliance as we got our first dose of vitamin D in weeks, and through low mountain passes amidst the grazing sheep. There was a traditional Irish stone cottage as a resting point about halfway through the park, that was just like out of a movie. As we got closer to the next town, we glided through a woodlands of mossy trees, and the forest floor was rolling with large boulders that were covered in a carpet of moss and shamrocks so thick that it looked something out of a Dr. Suess illustration. We have never seen such a variety of landscapes between two towns, and our camera simply could not capture the magical feel of the warm sun filtering in through the dewy trees, the purple mountain horizon, and the streams trickling between rocky hills and the lush, green valley floor. Now we know where the legends originate from of people getting lost in the fairie country, where time passes by at a different speed, for it felt like we could have stayed there forever.

So, we have more plans of seeing other parts of Ireland in the coming months, and if anything exciting happens, we will blog it. We are planning on leaving Ireland mid-August perhaps to see a bit more of Europe, and then on to Britian for the following year, and are looking forward to having visits from several family members! Hope spring is blooming in your part of the world, and we are sending lots of love across the ocean, especially to all the new moms we know who are about to have babies!

Slainte!

(pronounced ‘sloncha’: Cheers, or health in Gaelic)

Holidaying in Spain!

OK, it has been over a month since we updated the blog as nothing particularly exciting was happening over here. Our jobs at the pub and as a personal assistant are going fine, and we are working alot. We took one weekend away to go to County Kerry to do a walk through the National Park, but apart from that, we have mostly been pouring pints and making cups of tea. But, it has all paid off because now we have landed on the Mediterranean Coast and are taking a 9 day vacation in Spain!

We flew into Alicante on the south east coast and we are now in Murcia visiting Kathryn who is here teaching English for the year. The weather is sunny, and we feel like we are finally starting to dry out a bit after 3 months in an Irish winter, although it is not quite nice enough to swim in the ocean. But it was so refreshing to sit out in 20°C sun in a plaza drinking cafe con leche for three siesta-ing hours, cathedrals and arabic architecture towering over the palm trees around us, with Kathryn and her international friends. The trees lining the boulevards are loaded with giant ripe oranges ready for the picking (by ignorant tourists - they taste like car fumes), and the pigeons flocking about the squares are all white doves! Spain is known for late nights and sangria (can be bought in the grocery store in juice cartons for pennies) and tapas, and we are enjoying all of it. I think we will go to Granada for a few days early this week, so we will update again if we have any Spanish adventures. I picked up a children´s book called `My First Quixote`so that we can practice the language more, but everyone here simplifies their speech so it is easy to understand. (Hey, if we could travel in Poland, we can travel anywhere!)

We are hoping that as spring blooms in Ireland we will take more time off to see the country and travel a bit, but we do appreciate that working at the pub keeps things lively and we have met alot of people, even if we haven`t picked up the accent yet. Hope that spring comes soon to Edmonton and everywhere else! ¡Adios!

Rainy January

The weather here can be very depressing, as we were well warned before we arrived. But some moments are bright and warm like a late spring day in Edmonton with rainbows...and then it can be storming again within minutes. The wind was gusting up to 100km/hr last week, crazy. But we can cycle all year long here, so we aren't complaining too much.

Not too much new here now that we are settling in to a place instead of trotting between cultures...for New Year's Morten visited us from Berlin and even though Mike had to work at the pub on New Year's Eve, we went to visit him and have a taste of the Irish craic (pronounced 'crack': an Irish word with no proper translation into English that is an atmosphere of laughter, good conversation, music...basically a really good time, but the Irish have a proper word for it! That just shows how much fun we have here!). The next day we went to Dublin to visit our friend Caroline for a couple of days and show Morten the capital. That is a great city to party in, but we are glad that we live in Cork. Cork is smaller, safer, quieter, friendlier. But Dublin is great to visit, especially now that we have friends there that we met through the hospitality club when we went through the first time. New Year's Day in Dublin there was as much barf on the sidewalk as there was dog poop, and that is alot. Bit of a hazard.

Then we took a bus to Galway, a student town on the west coast of the country. We rented a car and drove around Connemara, which is supposed to be the most beautiful part of the country, and it was stunning. For anyone who has seen 'The Quiet Man', that is where we were. We saw dolmens (2000BC burial tombs with one rock perched on top of others like a door frame) and early Christian monastic stone beehive dwellings (the farmer chased us off his land though because it was after dark and he was convinced that we were going to leave the gate open and let his sheep escape, as they did the day before). And the weather was so miserable, that we were the only ones crazy enough to be touring the countryside, so we had each of the ancient places all to ourselves! The Cliffs of Moher were amazing, we hope to get some photos online soon. But the wind was blowing so strongly that the little streams that were running down the cliff faces were being blown back and into the air 2 meters, and we thought that only in Ireland would we see waterfalls flowing up.

Now that we are back, our work schedules are settling into a regular routine, which will probably consume most of our time, but we are going to try to get out of the city as much as we can. Ireland is definitely a different culture than Canada, but in other ways it is so familiar (especially compared to traveling in Japan or Mexico) that we almost forget that we live in a new country. So that is when we know we have to get out of the city, even just for the day, to see the magical place that we are living in for a short year.

So, we might not update as often in the next bit if we do not have much to say, but think of us drying pint glasses behind the bar, a rugby/soccer/hurling game on the screen behind us, a group of old bearded men playing an accordion, a fiddle, a flute, and a guitar to our side, setting the atmosphere to the proper Irish tempo, and us struggling to understand the accents of our customers. Not much to picture to the Personal Assistant job, so we can leave the imagery at that, or us chasing rainbows on our bicycles, bouncing off the pot holes of the bad Irish roads. No gold yet, but we are still hopeful...take care!

False Alarm....we are not moving again...

OK, we have come to a cool arrangement with our landlord and we are not moving again, which is a releif because it is alot of work. We will update when everything is confirmed. Work at the pub is going good and it is good to be earning euros...hoping to go to Spain in the spring maybe and take advantage of some of the cheap intra-European flights...write more in a few days! See ya!

Moving Again

Hey kids, we are going to be moving again in a week or two because the girl we are renting the place from is leaving, so if you are sending anything in the mail, hold on till we get another place. And only phone us on Mike's mobile, too please.

We had a good New Year's, our friend from Berlin came out for a week so we gave him a whirlwind tour of Ireland: Dublin, Galway, Connemara and the Dingle Peninsula. We'll write more about it later, but we are doing good, nice to be settling in with our jobs...talk to you later!

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!

We have a home

We found a home! We went to look at our first place today, and it was perfect. It is a cute little house shared with a nice girl from Sweden and her baby daughter. We will post some photos after we move in (we move in tomorrow). And a bonus...it has a dishwasher! We've never had a dishwasher on our own before! Also, there is a back yard, but they call them 'gardens' here. If you want our address (to send us packages ;), e-mail us. See ya!

We have arrived in our new home city!

We have finally arrived in Cork City, on the south coast of Ireland, where we will be beginning our work abroad experience. We had intended to settle down much sooner than this, but once we started travelling, it was hard to stop. There is so much of this continent to see, and we have big plans for after we work in Ireland, but for now we are focused on different priorities: becoming part of our new Irish community!

We arrived in Dublin on November 10 after spending a relaxing and much appreciated week with Gren and Beryl in Cheshire, UK. In Dublin, we hooked up with a load of kids from the hospitality club from all over the world: France, New Zealand, Poland, Ireland, and other places, and they gave us a ton of advice about working and living in Ireland. Our sweet host from France, Caroline, helped us to get a cell phone (we cracked under the European cell phone pressure - not only does everyone have one, some people have more than one!... anyone who wants our number, send us an email) and she helped us get Mike's long-anticipated new bike (that just might be better than the one that was stolen in Canada! - we are using three locks now, hope we keep this one for a bit longer than the last one). We went to see the Book of Kells and of course toured the Guinness brewery, and we had so much fun getting acquainted with Ireland's pub culture. It is just how we imagined it: nearly every night there is a pub exploding with traditional music, while Paddy (red curly hair, wool knit sweater, rubber boots) drags his chair up to Mike and they cheers their Guinnesses and toast to the rainy weather. OK, that was only once so far, but we anticipate this to happen many times over the coming year.

We were stoked to begin cycling the 250 kms from Dublin to Cork, along Ireland's east coast, seeing as this was intended to be a cycling trip and we had barely even gotten on a bike in the last 3 months. The first three days were gorgeous, tough, but worth it. We cycled over the Wicklow Mountains to the south of Dublin (we kept seeing those mountains on Dublin's horizon and prayed that we would be skirting around them, but our cycling guide book had bigger visions for us). The misty peaks were blanketed by a huge bog; almost no other people, just old stones, green cliffs, and purple, brown and green heather and moss, and we watched the clouds tumble down into the valleys below, dotted with sheep and stone fences. I only fell headlong into the bog once, and considered myself lucky as it was probably the best place in the country to fall: the "Featherbed Bog". Our second morning, we visited the misty ruins of an early-Christian monastic city from the first part of the previous millenia, and met an old man; he had wine corks in his ears and a twinkle in his eye and as he zipped past us on his old, green bike, we could only attribute his odd spryness to leprochaunacity. Every field is green and lush, and fences in sheep or sometimes cows or horses, and in the dusk we startled deer and grouse from the ditches. We reached the coast that day at Courtown, and the next day cycled past thatch-roofed, white-washed stone houses, and stopped on the beach where they filmed the opening scenes of "Saving Private Ryan".

That night we slept in Wexford, and stayed for three days as Mike's knee was bothering him a bit, so we decided to take a break. It was a neat area and we visited a little, traditional fishing village and watched the fishermen preparing their boats on the harbour, skirting around the giant seal lounging on the dock.

As Mike's knee needed a little more time to heal (it will be fine, just a little over-worked), we ended up taking a bus the remaining distance to Cork. Now we are staying with a great hospitality club couple who are helping us get set up in our new city. We are excited to be getting a place and we are scoping out the job market and feeling quite positive about our prospects.

Take care and we will keep everyone updated as our situation unfolds!

P.S. Check out Paul's journal as he tramps about Asia: http://www.paulcoyle.com/

Irish Cycling

Hi, we only have a minute but just to let everyone know that we made it to Dublin safe and we stayed with some new friends from the hospitality club who got us well acquainted with the important parts of living in Ireland (going to the pubs, Mike bought a new bike, going to the pubs, caved in and bought a cell phone, going to the pubs). We began cycling from Dublin to Cork a few days ago and we have seen some beautiful views of the ocean, mountains, bogs and lots of animals and tiny valley villages. We are taking it slow as there is so much to see but we are having a great time and will let everyone know when we arrive in Cork!

Heading over to the Emerald Isle

Tomorrow we are flying to Dublin to begin our working abroad experience and we are excited (but a bit nervous, of course)!

We have had a wonderful, relaxing week with Gren and Beryl and their family, touring the north west England region. Gren has taken us to see the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, and we got a view of the Granada studios where they film Coronation Street. Today we toured the Wirral Peninsula, took a ferry across the River Mersey from Liverpool, and had a great view of Wales over the River Dee, the sun streaming in (for the first time in a week) through the clouds. We have been cycling a bit (although Mike still has to get a new bike in Dublin), and Mike has been perfecting his computer skills designing a couple of web pages. And the highlight of our time in England has been the Bonfire Night Party at Gren and Beryl’s son and daugher-in-law’s, Peter and Jane’s, last Saturday. They threw a great party and set off dozens of fireworks of all sorts from their back yard, as is the tradition. Everyone here does it, so at any given time, there are fireworks exploding out of three or four yards in the neighbourhood at once, all evening and even for a few days before and after the date. It was a great celebration.

We will let everyone know when we have settled down in Ireland, wherever that might be. Wish us luck as our hope is to cycle across the country from Dublin to where we decide to set up for the winter, and are a little nervous about the weather and sinking into a bog or getting washed to sea in a flood. Hope we don’t chicken out!

We added a few more photos to the Britain section on our photo site.

See ya later!

Back in the English Speaking World

We have arrived safely in England and are staying with Mike’s family again, Gren and Beryl, in Chester, between Liverpool and Manchester. Since we updated last, we checked out the capital of Slovakia (photos), Bratislava, then travelled through the Czech Republic (photos), went to Germany for breakfast on Wednesday (to our favourite city, Berlin and to visit Morten), and flew in here. Today we had our first experience with haggis, a traditional Scottish dish of organ meats and grains baked in a sheep stomach, served with whisky and neeps and banged tatties (turnips and mashed potatoes). Oh, we are brave travellers.

We are glad to be back where we can ask strangers for directions and actually understand the answer. We will see how that bit goes when we arrive in Ireland next week though!

The Czech Republic was a super interesting country, loads of culture, art galleries, castles, beautiful countryside. We stayed in three places: Olomouc, Cesky Krumluv, and Prague, of course. Our favourite memories of Olomouc, in Moravia, were finally seeing wild hedgehogs rustling about in the fallen leaves in a park that used to be the moat around the castle, and cycling out to a lake in the country where we saw wild swans flying, and they looked just like angels! We went for a drink in an old airplane that has been grounded and made into a bar, where the communist elite used to frequent in the 1970’s. I was very proud of Mike for ringing the doorbell on a communist airplane in the dark in a foreign country; it felt like a situation that could turn out a number of unpredictable ways.

Cesky Krumluv, in South Bohemia, was a gorgeous tiny medieval town. Our highlights were riding horses (guided by little Czech girls) in the autumn hills overlooking the river that wound around the little eighteenth century red-roofed village and castle, squeezing our way into a little pub that was shaking with the energy of a gypsy band, and partying with all the friendly kids at the hostel.

We had a great time in Prague too; the architecture is amazing. Along with all the regular tourist stuff, we went to see jazz, and an excellent marionette show (it was all in Czech, and we were the only ones there over 5 years old who weren’t escorting their kids but there were 15 different characters, 8 different sets and we were very impressed). To celebrate Halloween, we went out to a church in a little village that is decorated with the 700 year old bones of 40 000 people, many of whom died from the plague. It was pretty gruesome, especially the way the bones are organised into chandeliers and crests and crosses. Strange.

We added a bunch of new photos onto our photo site, including some of the bone church, some more of Poland, and Mike made a good photo map of our travels so far. By the time we log on again, hopefully we will be in Ireland and close to getting jobs and a place. We can’t really imagine how it will all unfold, but we are sure it will be interesting.

Keep in touch!

Carli-Ann and Mike

Slovakia

Dobry Den! We have been in Slovakia now for almost a week and we love it! There are almost no other tourists, a very low crime rate, everyone is very friendly, the temperature is hanging in at +14, and the prices for nearly everything are low (Mike is thrilled that beer only costs $0.85 for a half litre bottle in the bar!) What a great place! Too bad we have to leave so soon, but we hope to come back to this region of Europe to continue exploring after we have worked some in Ireland.

We stayed the last couple of nights in a little village in the Mala Fatra mountains where the autumn leaves were such brilliant colours. Outside the village, we watched a shepherd herding his sheep (although the dogs were really doing most of the work), saw many wild swans on the lakes, wild pigs on a closed ski hill, and hiked up (500 m up) some jagged peaks for beautiful, misty views of the valley. We spent the previous few nights in a Slovakian city called Kosice, where we were the only ones poking about in a medieval torture chamber.

It has been fun working in a totally new language again, and we have ordered some Slovakian mystery items in restaurants, but nothing that has turned out any worse than deep-fried cheese. Most people here think we are from Germany, and speak to us in broken German, which doesn't really help things much. We usually manage to communicate somehow in a chaotic combination of English, a few words in German, Polish and Slovakian we have picked up or might understand or can look up in our small 5 language dictionary, maybe a bit of Spanish and occasionally using some of Mike's sparse French, but mostly using wild hand gestures. This has given everyone some good laughs (think a young Slovakian girl who also speaks German asking Mike what time he wants breakfast, reading off a prepared English cue-card. He responds "Nine" (as in "o'clock"), she hears "nein" (no) in German , she asks "Nicht?" (none?) and he responds "No, no!" which confuses her more. Of course, in the end, finger and hand motions clarify things and it sorted itself out as it always does, despite our great surprise).

We have also been meeting lots of other backpackers on our travels, who have given us some good laughs, and great advice about places to visit, and hostels for when our hospitality club hopes fall through occasionally. The last guy we met was travelling around with a reindeer skin pillow from Finland! Our backpacks are filling up with completed journals (I am almost finished my second one) and warmer clothes for the changing season. We have socks from both East and West Germany and Slovakia, sweaters and boots from little villages in Poland, and some novels that we should really be trading in soon for some new ones. We carry more books than anything else!

We hope to put some more photos on our site soon, but not all the computers we find make this an easy task. Keep checking back though!

Sending all our love from Bratislava,

Carli-Ann and Mike

Krakow

Hey to all of you slopping about in the snow over there in Edmonton! We are in Krakow (no snow yet)in southern Poland and we are heading to Slovakia tomorrow. Couple of highlights of the last few days: finding our own amber on the beaches in Gdansk on the Baltic Sea (!), visiting Auschwitz (Oswiecim) and Birkenau Concentration camps (very intense) and finding good vegetarian food in Poland (it can be done!). Soon, after the Czech Republic,we will have to settle down in Ireland for the winter, but we haven't given up travelling just yet! Keep us updated on Halloween events, I don't think they celebrate it or Thanksgiving at all here so we are a little sad, but can't wait to be emailed some photos! Carli-Ann and Mike

Baltic Sea

Hey everyone, we made it to the Baltic Sea and are enjoying our time staying with a girl here in Gdansk from the hospitality club. She hitchhiked the world for five years (staying vegan no less) with her partner and is currently working on publishing the English version of her book about it. We are helping her a bit to edit it. She is giving us so much great advice about travelling!

The sea here is beatuiful, and you can find amber on the beaches! Though it is very sunny and the autumn colours are fantastic, it is getting pretty cold. But for urban travelling, that is not so much of a problem.

We did so many great things in Warsaw last week with our hospitality club family, like visiting the small, artsy community of Kazimierz Dolny and its castle, churches and monasteries, a gallery featuring the propaganda art of the socialist era, museums about the Uprising of the people of Warsaw during the Nazi invasion (it is the 60th anniversary), a (sort-of black, maybe greyish) huge market where you can find anything from guns to soap, a Polish drag queen show, and we learned so much about the history of Poland. We are glad that we could travel here to hear for ourselves what has happened historically and culturally in different countries, because history is written differently depending on your source.

We are taking it easy now while Mike gets over a flu, but there are still many places we would like to see.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving over there!

Carli-Ann and Mike

Poland

Hi! We have been in Poland, staying in a little village near Warsaw (the capital) since last weekend. We are staying with a wonderful Polish family from the hospitality club who are teaching us all about Polish history and geography, and their daughter is showing us around, including all the current Polish trends.
Last night we went to a Polish pirate bar that was well decorated like a ship, to listen to a Polish sailor band that she was friends with. The whole bar was dancing on the benches and the tables all night and drinking beer from one meter tall cylinders in the middle of the tables that held 5 litres of beer and you filled up your mug from a spout at the bottom. Mike was very impressed with the ingenious design. Carli-Ann drank the most beer she has had in her life, a whole 0.5 litre glass over 2 hours, only possible because it is not taboo in Europe to mix beer with fruit juice or lemonade or cola and drink it with a straw. She is not making it a habit however.
We have enjoyed walking the streets of Warsaw, and we have visited their National Art Gallery and Museum of History, and have been discovering many monuments dedicated to various important moments in WWII and before. The history of this country is so evident everywhere, and we appreciate having good hosts to ask our difficult questions to and to get some new perspectives from. We even cluelessly bumbled right through a Polish music video being filmed on the street, so we might even be on Polish TV!
Our Polish family will be taking us to some other little towns this weekend, and then next week we will be visiting the Baltic sea and then Krakow and the Polish Tatra mountains. Anyone who is geographically keen will probably notice that we are not taking the most logical path around the continent, but rather the scenic route. Mike was joking that we are trying to write our names across Europe.
An interesting fact: dogs in Poland do not say BARK, they say HAU. In Germany, the dog says WAU. In Japan they said WAN. We may not be fluent in Polish yet, but we are excelling in our international dog noises. (They found it hard to beleive that Canadian roosters actually say COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO)
We recently acquired a little, very basic dictionary that has Polish, English, German, Italian and French, so that is helpful to a certain extent. Mike is very brave about trying out new words in stores and post offices and what not, but Polish is a very difficult language to learn. Everything is pronounced very differently than how we would read it.
We put some photos online from Germany, and hopefully we will put some on from Poland too. We will update again when our adventures unfold further! Thanks to everyone who has been keeping in touch with us. It's great to hear how everything is at home!
P.S. We are thrilled to discover that the occasional perogi is filled with cream cheese and berries!

Berlin

Hey! We have been partying in Berlin for the last five days and have had a great time! We hoped the capital would be a fun place to visit, but we were not prepared for how much life and vitality and culture and history this city offers.

We stayed for two nights in Nuremburg, visited the Nazi Party Rally Grounds which has a fantastic museum built into it with an astonishing and powerful architectural design where we walk through great glass hallways piercing the building like shafts of light, visited the toy museum, and tramped all over the city, most things rebuilt since the war, both in the old design but modern buildings too.

We then hitchhiked to Magdeburg, (we were actually aiming for Berlin but when a ride told us he was going to Magdeburg, we thought that this would be a good opportunity to see the city my grandma Ursula was born in), a city that used to be in East Germany. It was almost completely destroyed during the war and then rebuilt under the direction of the USSR, then when Germany was reunited, it’s factories closed and now there is high unemployment but still so much history. The ruins and buildings are from so many different eras and there is so much contrast between them. We spent a lot of time just walking around the streets, looking at statues glorifying various parts of their history and exploring parks. It was a very worth while stop, especially because it was so different than all the other areas of Germany we have visited.

We took the train to Berlin and are staying with a new friend from the hospitality club who is taking such good care of us. We have seen so much of the vibrant city, every part of it has the feeling of a place that has been through so much and is constantly reinventing itself. We stopped by Checkpoint Charlie where they documented the history of the Berlin Wall and the various, inventive manners that people tried to escape East Germany, both successfully and unsuccessfully, visited the intense Jewish Museum, another architectural marvel, and we have seen parts of the wall and bought our own tourist chip of it. We have eaten Nepalese and Turkish and Indian and Italian food (we are getting a little weary of traditional German food), checked out an Australian gig, and an awesome club with a fire-breathing dragon on the ceiling (like we needed it to be hotter in there), drank wine while lounging in a giant spittoon-esque empty fountain under a full moon in front of the National Gallery in the Lust-garten, Mike has sampled many good German beers, and we have had great guided tours by our friend through all the artsy and dreary and hidden parts of the city, both eastern and western.

We are planning to go to Poland tomorrow, and then to the Czech Republic hopefully and then we will see how much longer we can afford to travel and how the weather holds out. I have to go buy another sweater and some mittens today, I think.
Still having a blast and we are so excited to be experiencing this part of the world!

Travelling the Bavarian countryside

Hi! We have been busy in the last few days, and it feels like it was a long time ago that we left home, probably because we have been to so many places in the last few weeks.

Neven showed us around his town of Darmstadt, Frankfurt, neaby towns and we saw old Roman walls and ruins from nearly 2000 years ago, and quaint Bavarian towns with sagging, 500 year old houses and cobblestone streets that wind up the hill to the ancient little church. Then we got a ride through a ride-sharing agency (much cheaper than the train) to Munich where we stayed in a guy's apartment for free. He was a member of a hospitality club that is all over the world and you can email different families and ask to stay in their spare room or on their couch, or whatever they have available. It is a great system, they get to meet people from all over the world, and we have free places to stay if we are organized enough to plan a week or so ahead, and get to meet many people.

We went to Oktoberfest with an Indonesian student studying medicine in Germany (Amber and Hardy bailed on Munich and Oktoberfest) and Mike drank a one litre glass mug of beer and ate a pretzel that was one foot across. Oktoberfest was similar to Kondike Days but everything was way bigger and better. The beer tents were huge, with a thousand people in each of the seven or eight tents, all drinking and banging on tables to the live brass band music being played in the centre, and crashing foamy mugs of beer together (Prost!). Many people were wearing lederhosen and funny hats with long feathers sticking out of them. It was very crowded and noisy and the whole atmosphere was drunken (surprise, surpise).

We took a two hour train from Munich to Füssen on September 21, which is a gorgeous little town just 1 km north of the Austrain border, surrounded by huge mountains and rolling green fields with cows wearing bells. We stayed on the edge of a mountain lake and did some hiking in the mountains. We visited a beautiful castle that was supposed to be the inspiration for Disney's Fantasyland castle, and it was gorgeous, every finished wall was painted with murals depicting operatic scenes from legends.

We hitchiked yesterday the 300 km from Füssen to Nüremburg. It took us 6 or 7 rides and nearly 7 hours, but we almost never waited more than 20 minutes for a ride and every ride was very friendly and told us about Germany and Europe and the EU. The "Romantic Road" we took wound through some of the most beautiful countryside and little red-roofed villages in all of Germany. I think our Canadian flag patches help alot.

We spent last night at a hostel in a castle, and it was really neat, except for the screaming kids on school trips staying there as well. Today we are going to see a museum about the Nazis, and soon we will be off to Berlin.

We will put more photos on Mike's site when we find a computer that can download the photos.

Take care and we hope it has not snowed too much already!

Mike and Carli-Ann