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)
