Monday update!

Things I have seen in the sky today, in reverse chronological order:

-A shooting star

-Fireworks

-An enormous yellow waning-gibbous moon

-A perfect, well-defined, brightly colored rainbow!




The photos don't do it justice. But it was absolutely gorgeous, and as far as I can tell had a complete 180° arc over all of Galway.

Baffle 2007

Last night, I went to BAFFLE, the Bowes' Academic Fellowship and Fraternity of Literary Esoterics. I have no idea what that name is supposed to mean, but it's an annual poetry festival/competition. It's held in Loughrea (or Baile Locha Riach,) a small town in East Galway. Beth, one of my friends/classmates, lives in Loughrea, so she hosted myself and Meredith, another friend/classmate, for the night. It was a lot of fun!

Meredith and I took the bus out-- it was about a 45 minute ride-- and Beth met us at the bus stop. She gave us a quick walking tour of the town, pointing out the numerous pubs and Ireland's only working moat. (Apparently, it is fed by the namesake lake and circles the town, and is "working" in the sense that the water actually flows through it.) After stopping back at her house and an hour-long misadventure with her door, we went down to festival.

There was a poetry competition being held in three pubs. Thanks to the door problems, we got to the nearest pub about half an hour after it started. We each got a pint and stood listening to mostly old Irish men reading poems very badly. (It doesn't matter if the poems were good or not-- some were and some weren't-- but most of the readers just did not know how to present their work. Unfortunately this is all too common with poets, from the readings I've been to.) During the break, we struck up a conversation with the only other person in the pub that seemed remotely near our age. Aside from him and us, everyone there was at least fifty years old. This young man, whose name was Neil McCarthy, turned out to be one of the poets-- he read second-to-last. He was a very cool guy, and in addition to his poem being very very good he also was a good reader. After the competition, in which he was announced as one of the five who will move on to the next round (tonight), we invited him to come to another pub with us. He gladly obliged.

On the walk to Beth's favorite local pub, I talked to him a bit and found out that we had both been present at the same slam poetry competition, at the Cuírt Poetry Festival in 2005-- my only previous Galway experience. Not only were we both there, but he is very good friends with the poet that won that slam-- who I had spent at least half an hour chatting with, before and after the readings. Neil and I probably even spoke, because I remember the winning poet having friends nearby. What a small world!

We all left the pub around 1 am, and Meredith and I spent the night at Beth's house. This morning, Beth made us tea and Meredith made us scrambled eggs, and we were all greeted by the beautiful view from Beth's front windows:

(Click for a larger, prettier version!) It was dark when we arrived the previous night (It gets dark here around 6:30 now!) so we didn't get to see what a gorgeous view she has of Lough Rea until this morning.


Today has been spent working on my last midterm essay-- a history essay, on patterns and trends in 19th century emigration. In case you were wondering, this is what essay writing looks like...

Notes, books, and cup after cup of tea.

Dia duit! Ayla is ainm dom!

This past weekend, my MA program organized a trip for our whole class to the gaeltacht-- the Irish-speaking region of Ireland. Half of the class is Irish, and therefore learned the language in school at least, but the rest of us have only been studying it since the beginning of the semester. I was a little apprehensive about it, as my Irish at this point is mostly limited to the title of this entry (Hello! My name is Ayla!), but it turned out very well.

The town we stayed in is called An Ceathrú Rua, or Carraroe. We stayed in two houses-- four in one and eight in the other. I was in the house with eight: Grace, Katie, Duíbhir, Jeremy, Beth, Megan, Jen, and I took up four rooms. (And one bathroom. Showering was quite an ordeal of scheduling.) Our Bean an Tí, or "woman of the house" (house mother), was a young woman named Maíre. She had a year-and-a-half old son, James, who was our entertainment the first day. He toddled around and responded to spoken Irish, but not spoken English. She and her mother fed us dinner and breakfast and gave us sandwich fixings to make Saturday's lunch. It was all wonderfully filling food, topped off with delicious tea. Everyone in the house spoke English but preferred to speak Irish, so we just pushed Duíbhir, Katie, and Grace to the front and had them speak and translate for us. I confidently thanked people, though-- "Go raibh maith agat" was the phrase I used most often during the weekend. I figure, if you only know one phrase in the language of an area you're visiting, "thank you" is a good one to have. Even if you can't speak their language, you can at least be polite.

We had a program of classes and activities scheduled. The activities were, for the most part, entertaining. The classes, as far as us non-Irish students were concerned, were very juvenile, which annoyed me. I may be a beginner but I'm also a grown-up. (A grown-up who, incidentally, has a double bachelor's degree in English and Linguistics and has, at one point or another, studied Spanish, Latin, and Italian.) I can handle a real textbook, I don't need a children's book. Still, I feel that my confidence and grasp of Irish improved from the weekend, just by being surrounded with it and listening to it. I was able to see it in use and get a feel for how the language really sounds.

The activities were things like singing, set dancing (think Riverdance, only done by clumsy tired grad students,) a short hike, a day tour, and a scavenger hunt. The singing was probably my favorite, followed by the hike. The weather was beautiful this weekend, and we got to see some of the beautiful desolate bogland of Connemara. I would post pictures, except I forgot my camera. (I'm pretty annoyed by this.) Other people took pictures, though, so eventually I might steal some of theirs to show. The landscape there was unlike anything I've seen before-- and this is only an hour's drive from Galway. I sometimes wish I had a car here, so I could drive around and get a real feel for the countryside. And then I remember that I'd have to drive on the other side of the road (not to mention the other side of the car) and I'm dissuaded. (Though I would like to try driving here some time, if only to see if I could manage a stickshift with my left hand. Most people here drive manual-transmission cars.)

Overall, the biggest thing I took away from the weekend was a much deeper appreciation of the Irish language. So far, I've been studying it in much the same way I studied Latin: with an emphasis on translation, little to no speaking, and no practical application. This weekend, I got to see people who use it as their first language, to communicate every day, and I was struck by just how cool it really is. My MA coursework includes Irish classes, but I think that (if I get into the PhD program here!) I am going to continue taking classes next year. Irish is a beautiful language, and I would really like to be able to speak it.

Mid-week update! Now with content!

In case you're wondering what exactly I'm doing with the whole grad school thing, here's a paper I finished today! (Also useful in case you're wondering why English is the language here nowadays instead of Irish.)

The Shift from Irish to English

I know it feels rather rushed, but when there's a limit of 1,500 words, which I exceeded by 100 words already, that's kind of unavoidable.

busy busy busy

No real post, today, sorry. I am far, far too busy writing mid-term papers. And by "writing" I mean "tearing my hair out and bashing my forehead against the keyboard." (Wait, I was supposed to do work in grad school?)

So instead, here is a pretty photograph and my gallery of photos so far.

I call it... "Ireland Is Pretty"


More photos from Ireland.

Note: all pictures, unless otherwise noted, are taken by me, with a Canon Powershot A540. I am by NO MEANS a photographer, so any pictures of quality are entirely accidental. I'm not a visual artist, and I really don't understand visual art a lot of times. When it comes to taking pictures, I just try to accurately record things that I like.

What's the craic?

I've been here a bit over a month now, and I had been doing pretty well at fighting off the third-week illness¹ that afflicted everyone else in my class. This weekend, however, it finally hit me. It started out with a really bad sore throat, transitioned into a very solid cough, and now has moved up into my sinuses. I'm going to do my best to write a coherent entry though I can't breathe out of my nose and my head feels like it's being held upside-down underwater.


I have gone to a couple of pubs in the the last two weeks, so I thought about writing on pub culture. Then it occurred to me that you can't talk about pub culture without talking about the craic.

Craic, pronounced like "crack," is an Irish word. It is most often translated as "fun," but that isn't quite accurate. A closer translation might be "entertainment," but that also isn't exactly it. It's one of those wonderful words that doesn't have a strict analogue in English. As a concept, it's something like "a good time."

It's usually used as a noun and occasionally a descriptive. Of a person, you can say "he's good craic." Of a place or activity, you can say "it's good craic," or "the craic is good." You and your friends can be messing around, not taking things seriously, "for a bit of craic." You can even ask someone "what's the craic?" if you want to know what fun things are happening. I was invited to a pub on Friday, the Roísín Dubh², and when I got there I was informed by an Irish guy that, even though it's usually busy, the craic is good.

Of course, thanks to my Linguistics background, I can't help but hear something idiomatic without trying to figure out its cultural context and distribution. Of course, most of the Irish people I've met have been around my age, but it seems pretty common with both young people and older people. I get the feeling that it's a bit more widely-used here in the West. When I was in Dublin on my study abroad, I didn't meet too many Irish people, but I did talk to some, and I don't remember hearing it once. Now, I've only been here a month, and I've heard it all over the place. One young man who has lived here in Galway all his life uses it frequently, but I know a girl from Dublin and I don't think I've heard her say it once.

Of course, these are all generalizations based on my rather limited observations. No matter who uses it and where, though, I think it's a pretty darn cool word.




1: This is something that college orientation programs really should talk about-- the fact that, in the third week after school starts up, you probably will get sick. Everyone coming back from their holidays and being closely confined is a great opportunity for disease, and colds never fail to go around.

2: "Roísín Dubh," or "Little Black Rose," is a nickname for Ireland.