Sorry Christa - here are some pictures from my WALK today

This time, I included four self-portraits. Because, you know, I have a pretty big ego to satisfy.

#1



on my way out of the yard


#2: looking back at the house

still on my way out the yard

#3: My regular green boots were in use, so I borrowed boots from one of the kids - look at those cute little dogs!

sheep in the back yard

cows stare at me a lot when I go walking, that is, if they aren't running away

Making a repeat performance - the donkeys! Mama and Papa weren't so friendly, but the little guy walked right up to the fence to say hello.

along the road

#4: so this one didn't exactly work out...

Books I have read so far:

Roddy Doyle: The Commitments

Penny Perrick: Something to Hide

David Guterson: Snow Falling on Cedars

Jane Austen: Persuasion

and Northanger Abbey

Hunter S Thompson: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I started the Iliad - I thought it was time for something a bit more challenging. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is still going steady.

I had a dream last night that I was in a practice room somewhere and the person in the room next to me kept singing the same thing over and over, and then I woke up and realized it was the rooster crowing over and over again. On that note - goodnight!

pictures from my walk TODAY

But first, some fun facts:
1. I split wood left-handed (which is also how I play hockey)
2. I have successfully talked to two people on skype
3. When Atty talks about something going wrong, she often says "going pear-shaped"
4. People assume that since there is cold and snow back home, I ski
5. Everyone thinks it's really cold because yesterday it got down to -7 Celsius, which is probably 18 F.


So: Boot's (Rupert, Arthur's brother, who runs the farm) yard - right out back for us



sheep in a field



more fields (this is all on or near the Mountainstown property)


This is where I turned onto a different road - too much cows and manure around here

more

Pictures from my walk today

beech tree in the yard with vines

the driveway

same

the back yard

walking up the road

cool trees across a field

another field and stones and stuff

A couple of things :

1. I will not come home with an Irish accent, at least in part because the people I am surrounded by have English accents

2. instead of eating "dinner" or "supper", the evening meal here is called "tea"

3. Thanks for the mail!

4. I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, approximately one chapter each day, which seems to me to be the proper way to read it. Book group, anyone? Or actually, if there is anything you want to read and discuss, tell me and I will search Atty's fairly wide book collection and see if I can work something out.

5. I am on skype most evenings while checking my email and such, so if you want to add me (NOT the same one I had in S. Africa, probably because I am inept with technology) please do: madeline.neenan is the name, or Madeline Neenan, or meneenan@gmail.com should all get you there.

6. If you are going to be in Ireland or really anywhere in Europe this spring, or know someone cool who is, please let me know. Where I really want to go is Greece. I also haven't been to Italy, any British Isles besides Ireland (although I'll be going to Leeds in England sometime), Norway, Finland, Russia, Bosnia...

:D

the first from Ireland

Starting from the beginning... I was delayed one day in Chicago because my plane had a bit of a fender bender with another plane - we hit a wing and damaged it badly enough that the shamrock part of the Aer Lingus logo was knocked off. So I spent a lovely night in a suite at the Mariott, complete with two TVs, three sinks, a bath and a shower, a work desk, two sofas, a huge bed... I had broken the Neenan code so I had no swimsuit, but I did have fun having lots of conversations with Irish people headed home for the holiday.



Other pictures at random:

The house, from a field - this is where the entrance probably was originally. Now it winds around from the side (the view from my bedroom, at the end of the post).

The view opposite to the one above - standing on the front steps, looking out into the pasture.

Josie (the very energetic middle child, 10 yrs) with the dogs. The brown one is Shnoogie, or Gay Boy, and the black lab (still grow I N G) is Ozzie (as in, Ozzie Osbourne).

Donkeys

Check out this huge beech tree stump! (Those are my feet)

The kitchen - one of my favorite rooms because it has tea and warmth.

Atty at the stove, pretending to threaten me. She sort of looks like she's crying. But she's laughing.

I've never seen this before: an aga. There are two burners, covered by those big metal things. The one on the left is HOT, that's where you cook things. The right one (covered by a towel in this picture) is more of a warming burner. There are five oven spaces. From top right clockwise they get progressively cooler. This thing is on constantly, burning (a huge amount of) gas. You open what you need when you need it and otherwise it looks like this.

Ozzie and Shnoogie peacefully snoozing in the kitchen.

I haven't moved to where I'm supposed to live yet, there was a ceiling issue, but this is the toilet in my area right now. I've also never seen a toilet like this. That big white thing at the top of the picture is where the water is. Funky, eh?

The view from my (current) window yesterday morning.

And in the afternoon, when the sun had come out. People keep telling me that the weather is uncharacteristically nice, so either the sun rarely shines in Irish winters, or the people I have met are terribly pessimistic. Perhaps a mixture of both.

Well that clarifies absolutely nothing about what my life is like. I have no routine, we have just been constantly visiting, once every day except yesterday, either hosting or attending somewhere. Since there is all this socializing, I am being offered far too much alcohol, and I must put up a fight if I want to remain sober. It was a bit much to start with champagne at 11:30 on Christmas morning. People keep pouring me wine when I'm not looking or filling me up before I have a chance to refuse or pouring me a new glass of champagne when I've finally gotten rid of one. One night I was drinking coke in between glasses of wine and I turned around and someone was filling me up with red wine. It's a weird mixture. I don't really recommend it.


The kids are fun, I haven't spent all that much time with them. They have a lot of electronic games that make me feel like a grandma because I don't understand them.


Everyone I have met is very friendly, mostly members of Atty and Arthur's families.


It's much warmer than Minnesota, so HA.


Tomorrow Atty and I are hopefully sort of constructing a schedule so that I am in some sort of pattern for how things will be.


I have read a lot - they gave me three books for Christmas and I finished two of them. The first one was The Commitments, by Roddy Doyle - funny and fast read, also a movie in the 80's, I belive. Second, Something to Hide, a biography of Sheila Wingfield, a semi-known poet of the last century who was also Atty's grandmother. The poem of hers I recognized was this one:

Odysseus Dying
I think Odysseus, as he dies, forgets
Which was Calypso, which Penelope,
Only remembering the wind that sets
Off Mimas, and how endlessly
His eyes were stung with brine;
Argos a puppy, leaping happily;
And his old Father digging round a vine.



Email me if you're bored. I love that stuff.

yikes!

feelin Karoovy

THE KAROO:
Weekend trip to the Karoo, a desert area to the northeast of us. Highlights:

Going up into the mountains to watch the sunset

Going to a “tequila” factory: they can’t call it tequila because that’s patented in Mexico, so it’s called agave, but it’s the same thing. It’s made from this plant.

After our tour, we did shots – some people went a little too far (um, eight shots), but most of us just had one of each kind. Which means three.

Dinner at a nice restaurant with the roommates. Awww

Went to see Bushman or San paintings somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. It was pretty neat. These people have a bunch of fossils and stuff at their house as well.

The Owl house. So, sometime in the 1800s or so this woman’s husband dies and she has to move from Cape Town back to this little town and take care of her parents. She’s not thrilled about this. Her parents die and she starts changing her house, using colored glass to make light do interesting things inside. Slowly this becomes an obsession with expressing herself. She gets married again but divorces right away, she has workers come and help with her projects occasionally, but basically she is just this woman who doesn’t belong in the African interior in a small town and goes crazy and lives in her own little world to escape. That’s my theory. She committed suicide by drinking caustic soda when her arthritis and such was so bad that she couldn’t do her projects any more. This is probably the creepiest place I have been in my whole life. Anyway if you think it’s interesting you can always google “owl house south Africa” and you will probably get to some information.

3 cool things

1. John (my cousin) set up this thing in our group: date night. Each week we are ramdomly paired with someone not in our flat and we set up a date with that person (cross-sex, same sex, whatever) and try to get to know them better one on one. It's a really cool idea and fun to do. My dates so far:

Breakfast and good conversation with Giff, a friend who I work with at the OLC back at school. Laid back but nice, not something we wouldn't have done anyway.

Date number two: Teddy and I decided to do a walking tour of PE. So we took a kombi/taxi/minibus to "town" and got out, looking very out of place with our white skin and American accents. As we walked in the subway to get to the other side of a street, Teddy said "I wouldn't caught dead here in six hours" and I said "I think you would" - as in, if he was there in six hours, something would have happened to him. It wasn't the safest part of town, at least not for people like us, but at 1:00 it was fine; there were people everywhere. We got a map and directions and did our walking tour of the historic sites of PE, and it was fun - to see things I wouldn't normally have gone to see and to talk to him, since we don't know each other very well.

Maybe an hour and a half later, we finished the tour and got in another taxi. We were the first ones in, so we had to wait for the driver to fill it up with the rest of the passengers. The first two guys to get in were these rasta dudes. They sat in front of us and started asking what we are doing in Africa, if we like it, etc. I've never heard the rasta dialect spoken, only seen it written: "I n I" or just "I", no matter what, even where it's grammatically supposed to be "me". They had a lot to say, at least one of them did, telling us about how he is from Zambia but in Africa "we are migrants" (we as in him and the other guy). He is an artist, he paints or draws or something - "I could make a picture of your beautiful faces" and he also "makes music". The other guy didn't have as much to say for himself, but he did tell us that if anyone tries to tell us that South Africa isn't a good place, we should just tell them "you suuuuck". They were also talking about how Westernized SA is in comparison to the rest of Africa, which is something I have heard elsewhere as well. Cape Town could practically be in Europe, at least some parts of it.

My date for this week hasn't happened yet, but it is with Brian - we are each picking out our 3-4 favorite youtube videos and showing them to each other. My idea - I know, I know, I'm a genius.

What I chose, in case you’re bored:

Buttmachine (thanks Chanti)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHlDfejCHkc

If you're into it (thanks to Pasutti)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY8jaGs7xJ0

Sony Bravia (thanks to Papa)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bb8P7dfjVw


2. I am one of four captains of a dodgeball team on our group. We had our first games of the regular season on Monday and Tuesday (we lost one and won one). It's great - every member of our group, except for the director and the "non-traditional" (read: over age 30) students joined the teams, which gave us four teams of seven. And the assistant director of our program is the referee. I am completely awful at dodgeball, but it's fun, and I can at least organize a team name, etc. I had first pick but I don't think I did that great of a job stacking my team. Oh well.




We are Team Eskom, which is the name of the power company here. Explanation: we have been having rolling blackouts - "loadshedding" for the past few days, and are scheduled to have them every day until we leave. So each day our power goes off for two and a half hours, a different time each day. There are nine zones in PE. SO, in honor of the blackouts, we are Team Eskom, we wear all black, and our cheer is "loadshedding". It's sweet. Plus some girl band sings a song about Eskom ("Eskom, Eskom, you light up my life") so I might have to get a hold of it to pump up my team.



I don't know if this is just the nature of study abroad, but I think date night and dodgeball are signs of how our group is coalescing or a word like that. We're becoming a group. And it's nice that we mostly like each other.



I have a lot of respect for the people I'm here with. Sometimes I think they drink too much or that they are disrespectful. But in classes when we talk about our experiences here, and the dichotomy of vacation life in Humewood and volunteering in New Brighton township, I am grateful that it isn't just me having ethical dilemmas, confusion about our role and if we can even do anything useful, what the point is of us being here, or at Pendla, and why we aren't able to be involved in the local culture - I feel like we are all struggling to understand our experience together: no one is taking it lightly, just here for the tan and the cheap alcohol, the surfing and the time at places like Coffee Bay. That stuff is great, but we are all very aware of our strange position. It's a relief not to be alone in that.


3. Ahh okay originally I had a different cool thing but then we had a practical for Marine Biology today! So we went to a rocky shore about 40 minutes away from school to do some sampling. We were collecting data for to help with this guy’s research for his PhD. We drove South Africa style - rode in the back of a "bakke" (pickup truck) all the way there.

So we were collecting something – this is really embarrassing but I know I’m not alone in not knowing the name of what we were actually looking for. But I do know they were something that lives in shells and we had to dig around and pry them off the rocks to measure them, and then we threw them back in the water. Not to be critical, but in our first sampling area, my cohorts were pretty wimpy about digging around among the creepy crawly and stickery or slimy, so I was the sampling champion, but at the second spot I got some backup. It was practically euphoric when you knew you found a big one and pulled it out and got to shout out the measurement to the scribe.

AND while we were there a sea otter just showed up and started swimming 5 meters away. It swam around for a while and then climbed up on some rocks to hang out and dry off. Its behavior was kind of catlike and kind of doglike. It was a catdog sea otter.