Daylight Rescue Time

In direct defiance of my promise for more frequent updates, I have now let this sit quietly for nearly two weeks. Anyone who actually checks this regularly can blame the brief interlude on Alec coming to visit. Or on me, since it's my blog, but I do have a sort of reason it's lain dormant as of late. But here I am again - and promising a more conventional definition of "frequent" in the future.

In case anyone was wondering, the time difference between Ireland and the U.S. is now one hour less and will be until the first Sunday in November. Perhaps this is common knowledge, but it was new knowledge to me that daylight savings time comes a month earlier everywhere else in the world. Apparently Bush felt the need to shake things up a little in 2006 when he decided that Americans should not "fall back" with the rest of the world in October.

In any case, Alec left this fair city yesterday morning and daylight savings time could not have come at a more... saving time. This is not nearly as blogworthy as some of our travels, but it's most freshly on my mind and so I'm giving it at least a short retelling. Never having intended to fall asleep, we woke up Monday morning at 6:30 and ran the calculations in a horror struck kind of trance. We had, of course, run them before, but we now had to recalculate the possibility of making his 8:00 flight.

A flight to the US, of course, requires arrival two hours before departure - and it takes an hour to get to the airport by bus and ten minutes to get to the front gate to wait for the bus. The original plan to leave by 4:45 was obviously scrapped and the new plan to get there from my apartment in fifteen minutes (they close the US flights for good an hour and fifteen minutes beforehand for some reason) called for either a batmobile or the ability to apparate. While I was frantically thinking of ways to retrieve time, it dawned on me that my phone had not been reset according to daylight savings time and that it was, in fact, 5:30 and the odds of making his flight grew by about 95%. So we ran to the front gates just as a lone cab was passing and its very sympathetic driver promised to get us there in twenty minutes. The Cab of Salvation did not disappoint and we arrived at the Dublin airport two hours in advance after all. So my retelling was not as short as I'd intended but maybe it can convey an ounce of the terror of yesterday morning -- and the fullness of our gratitude for that very essential extra hour.

But flight troubles aside, it was a wonderful ten days and the task of summarizing is really a very challenging one. I suppose I'll start at the very beginning (it's a very good place to start) with Amsterdam - which was, just as Patrice reported, incredible in every way and dripping with the temptation to never leave. We stayed with the cheeriest, if a little eccentric, Dutch family (we opened the kitchen cupboard one morning to find a photo of Fleur Van Heek, wide-eyed and head smashed into her neck to create as many chins as possible) who cooked us delicious foods, left us their museum passes and gave us two bikes to use for the weekend.

Speaking of bicycles in Amsterdam, this was possibly the city's most fascinating element. I suppose I'd heard that bikes are not in short supply there, but standing on the straats literally teeming with bicycles, I began to wonder why the rest of the world is not assembled the same way. Unlike Wichita, where my dad and I have to bike along the pipe line by the zoo and unlike Dublin, where the bike lane is (very illogically) a part of the bus lane, bikes in Holland have their own roads and traffic lights and nearly everyone uses one. So having bikes for the weekend was a definite highlight - it made transportation around the city not only very simple but fun and FREE! The art was, of course, incredible - we saw a demonstration of paintmaking in Rembrandt's house and all the wonders of the Rijksmuseum (particularly Vermeer's The Kitchen Maid, which is far more remarkable in person). I could go on and on about Amsterdam, but in the interest of brevity I'll say that the Red Light District seems to occupy a considerable percentage of the city, the canals and their 1000+ bridges make for astonishing scenery in every inch of town and that somehow, it reminded me a great deal of Vassar. The architecture, fall flora, and slight odor of pot everywhere made it feel a bit like someone took our campus and multiplied it until it was a city in the Netherlands (even the Red Light District was a little reminiscent of Scantily Clad). So obviously, I thought Amsterdam was a little piece of heaven on earth.

We spent our next few days in Dublin, familiarizing Alec with the city, hearing Ann Enright speak at the Irish Writer's Centre (we're reading her in my Contemporary Irish Lit class as well), seeing a Beckett play at the Abbey with Fiona Shaw (woman who plays Aunt Petunia in Harry Potter - she was amazing in Happy Days), touring the Guinness Storehouse and literary museums and watching Irish music and dancing in a pub in town. My first experience with Irish music and dancing was during orientation in Limerick and I remember thinking that it was the Irish version of a Medieval Times Dinner Theatre where they reenact everything as it would have been several hundred years ago. It wasn't until getting to Dublin that I realized it was not a reenactment at all, but a very common pastime for people of all ages. Young people certainly spend time grinding in clubs to Soulja Boy, but they can also be found in abundance watching traditional Irish music and dancing in a pub. That is to say, it isn't simply a part of the past as I'd initially thought, but very much a part of the present.

[Alec, admiring his hero in St. Stephen's Green. Dublin]

Speaking of people and pubs, we spent this past weekend in Cork city for the yearly Guinness Jazz Festival. Cork is Ireland's second largest city (although it's less than half the size of Wichita) and down near the southern coast. People come from all over for the festival, so it was significantly more populated this weekend but it was still fairly small and accessible. The town of Blarney is only about a half hour by bus, so Saturday we spent the afternoon climbing Blarney Castle to kiss the famous Blarney Stone with the notion that it would help speed my blog posts along (for anyone who doesn't keep up with Irish legends, kissing the Blarney Stone is supposed to bestow "the gift of gab" or eloquence - apparently Winston Churchill and several other famous orators in history gave it the ritual kiss), but my flatmate will attest to the fact that I've whiled away most of my morning trying to write this one. So perhaps my gift is still en route. (Delivery to Ireland is actually very slow for some reason.)

[Me, in Blarney Castle]

Now Alec is gone, minus a few odds and ends, and it's reading week at UCD which means I am spared a bit of class time in order to study. So I suppose I'd better get to some of those essays now, since I don't think my prof would take very kindly to the excuse that I'm still waiting on a present from Blarney.

Dia dhuit ([pronounced "dee-uh gwit"] technically "hello" but literally "God be with you") and slan ("farewell")!