By
noeleenm on February 22nd, 2007
I’m going to Barcelona for five days… I’m saying this quickly, in case my blog suddenly disappears again, as it has been ‘down’ more often than it has been ‘up’ during this past week. I’m ready to slay my hosts – siteground.com.
My excuse for the trip to Barcelona, so soon after a holiday in France, is that I’m going to meet Peter Vahle, a teacher, and a teacher of teachers, of English as a foreign language. He was a colleague of Frederic, who now works in marketing and is a colleague of mine, and he’s going to share some of his wisdom about the world of teaching English abroad.
I want to go to either France or Spain this autumn to teach English for the academic year, because I have very itchy feet again. The first step in achieving that goal has been put in place because I’ve enrolled in International House Dublin for their CELTA course, which starts 6th March. ‘Second step is meeting with Peter Vahle, and, having discovered from the http://www.oxfordtefl.com/tefl_cert/cert_tutors.htm web site that he likes “playing music with his band in the clubs of Barcelona”, I’m looking forward to meeting him even more!
As it’s my first trip to this reputedly very beautiful city, I bought the Lonely Planet guide to Barcelona, and I’ve just been drooling over – no, not its architecture, but its vegetarian restaurants.
Veggie restaurants, wine, an exciting city to be seen – and, maybe, music. Aaah, life is good!
…Other than a collapsing web site…
Now, before the site disappears again, I’m going to post this before I post myself off to Barcelona. ‘Back in five days… Let’s hope this site is, too.
Posted in Ireland, Spain | 9 Comments »
By
noeleenm on February 19th, 2007
Today is Chinese New Year – the Year of the Pig – and yesterday our Chinese community in Bray celebrated it with their neighbours, particularly their Italian neighbours, on the Albert Walk. …And I missed most of it…
The Albert Walk in Bray is a little pedestrianised alley that used to belong to our national railway, Coras Iompair Eireann, as it was called then. It’s the traditional route for the visitors who come to Bray by train to visit the seaside (go the other way and you might well find the railway crossing closed), and when I was a child it used to be closed off once a year by the railway company to prevent it becoming a right of way.
It’s lined on one side by the high walls of what were originally railway workers’ cottages and on the other side by little shops, many of which are now run by Chinese people. There’s a Chinese supermarket, restaurant, jewellery shop, internet point, and barber’s, among others, and – in the middle of all of them – there’s a pizza place, called Pizzas ‘n Cream.
Around the corner from the Albert Walk, as you head to the beach, there are two Italian restaurants, one called ‘Fiore del Campo’, which has a delicatessen across the road, as well as its restaurant. It was voted the Best Italian restaurant in Ireland by its compatriots here, and it’s where Roberta from Italy, who used to live in our house, worked as a chef while she lived in Ireland. The other is ‘Il Palazzo’, which only opened last year, but is already very popular in our town.
I find it interesting that, like in New York, an Italian quarter and a Chinese quarter seem to be springing up together here, so when I heard that there were celebrations planned there for yesterday between 1pm and 3pm, I rang my friend, Fran, and asked her would she like to go along. We were on holidays together in New York the first time I visited Chinatown and Little Italy there.
But fate decided otherwise – or at least my Irish visitors did, who descended in force between 12.20pm and 2.30pm.
Eventually Fran went to the Albert Walk with her family, and said the dancing dragon and the drums and the whole colourful pageantry of the celebration was great. When I reached there at just 3pm, it was almost over – no dragon, no dancing, no music…
…But the flags and lanterns and banners and the buzz of people enjoying themselves was still there, so I took a few photos anyway.
Bray’s Chinese community has now grown so much that our town is sometimes called ‘Brayjing’. Bonds were strengthened when we played host to the Chinese team who participated in the Special Olympics here. Chinese people are highly respected in Ireland for their work ethos - and well liked as well.
We have far less Italians living in Ireland, although most Irish people love Italy, and especially its food. It’s probably as pseudo-Italian as the Chinese food we eat here is pseudo-Chinese, as Elke, another Italian who shared this house, constantly told us, but it has conquered the world it seems. Who needs armoured cars when you can invade with pasta and wine?!
The final touch to the multi-cultural little street yesterday, though, was found at the opposite end from the railway station. It’s a book shop which sells only books written in Irish. It’s called ‘Cupla Focal’, meaning literally, ‘a few words’. It’s the modest answer a lot of Irish people give when asked: “An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?” (Do you speak Irish?) “Ta cupla focal agam” (I have a few words…)
It gave me the second half of the title of this post – ‘another few words’. The first half can be translated as ‘Bliain an Muich’, and it uses the Tuiseal Guineadach…
I wonder now how that translates into Chinese?
Posted in China, Ireland, Italy | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on February 15th, 2007
Tuesday ended with a bang – but I was only a bystander. Our town is built on a hill, and I had started to climb the long road up to the top of it, from the end of our seafront, as part of my renewed (since France) daily walks, when I heard what I thought at first was an explosion behind me. I turned to see a car spinning across the road, ending up facing the wrong way, while another car sat at the crossroads I had just passed. A man ran out of a nearby house, and we both hesitated, trying to decide which driver needed the more immediate aid. I saw the driver of the car at the crossroads turn her head, and then pull her car into the side of the road, and I ran to the second car, as the neighbour phoned for an ambulance and the gardai, while running to check on the first driver.
When I reached the car that had spun across the road I realised that its driver was a black woman, sitting with her head hanging on her chest and no sign of movement. There was no passenger beside her, but, in the back, a baby chair hung at an awkward angle: because of the sun shield I couldn’t see if a child had been thrown out of it onto the floor. The driver’s door was locked.
It was certainly among the longest few seconds of my life as I knocked frantically at the window of the car, trying to rouse the driver. At long last, she raised her head, opened the door, and simply stared at me in shock. But there had been no child in the car, thank God.
The woman was on her way to work, she explained, shakily, when she could talk. Her husband was at home, on the other side of Dublin, with their four children. The youngest is five months old. They are from Nigeria.
She had come out from a side road onto the main road, it seems, and insisted she had stopped. I didn’t see the accident, only its effects, but the neighbour had been coming out of his front door, which is one of those lovely old two storey over basement houses, giving a clear view of the road. So he saw it all…
Then, though, we were both more concerned with trying to check that both women were not in need of first aid, and with trying to prevent a further accident, because we were afraid to move the cars. The other driver was a local young woman, and her parents arrived on the scene quickly. Other people stopped to offer help, too, but, by the time the ambulance (both women insisted they didn’t need to go to hospital, although both were severely shocked) and police had arrived I had learned that nobody could come out to the Nigerian woman. She had to face the questions – kindly as they were put – of the Gardai, and try to work out how to get herself and her car back home alone.
Obviously operating in that state of shock where one is quite likely to insist on walking on a broken leg simply to get away from the scene, she wanted to tie up the bumper, which was hanging off, and drive home herself. Much more than the bumper had been damaged, though. It was undrivable.
The gardai offered to arrange to get her home, but when I looked at her face I realised that arriving home in a squad car would be the ultimate humiliating end to a dreadful day. I went home, fetched my own car, and drove her back.
It took me less than an hour to drive there and back – or it would have, except that I availed of being over that side of the city to drop into a friend’s house. Yet, this lady, her husband, and even the Gardai, were high in their praise of such a simple action.
But I’ve been involved in accidents myself, although never badly injured, thank God, and I remember the terror, the inability to think straight, and the sheer longing to see the face of a family member or friend appear out of the crowd. All three of my accidents happened before the days of mobile phones, and each time I was driving alone.
At least, though, I was in my own country and dealing with my own culture.
The following day both husband and wife rang to thank me again, and she assured me that she was not hurt. Yet I couldn’t get her out of my head. Despite the kindness of the people around her after the accident, especially the ambulance men and the Gardai, there was an aloneness about her, a dignified withdrawal into a protective shell, with only the tremor in her voice and the occasional stop to control it showing how badly shaken she really was…
I hope that neither driver suffers any ill effects from the collision, and I hope that the insurance companies will sort it out reasonably painlessly too for all concerned. I know that the most important thing is that four young children were not left orphaned that night.
But there were other important things at stake there, too – how we treat strangers in our land, particularly when they are at their most vulnerable, and how justice, as well as mercy, is seen to be as accessible to all. I hope our Nigerian immigrants felt that they are…
Posted in Ireland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on February 13th, 2007
Yesterday was Gint’s birthday. He celebrated it by buying tools for his new enterprise, arranging to have business cards printed, and, in the evening, attending the second in a series of classes run by Wicklow Enterprise Centre on ‘Starting your own Business’. The course was especially designed for non-nationals who want to work for themselves in Ireland.
When he came home from the course, we celebrated it in a more traditional way by sharing a bottle of wine, and he told me some of the stories of the people who are doing the course with him. One student from India is proposing to start his own software company. A Polish lady wants to start up a trucking company, with her husband doing the driving while she looks after the admin side of the business. An African gentleman (Somalia?) is a qualified mechanic and wants to work at his trade here, but may have problems getting a visa. Someone else wants to hand-make leather shoes.
And Gint has temporarily postponed his original business idea of importing very solid, and very handsome, timber garden furniture into Ireland from his native Latvia, because of the heavy freight costs involved and the shortness of Irish summers, in favour of setting up on his own laying timber floors. He loves timber, and is at his happiest working with it. At the beginning, he will probably get more jobs laying light laminate flooring, but hopes to progress to his idea of Nirvana – laying solid wooden floors, particularly parquet flooring.
It was great to hear stories of people with enterprise and enthusiasm, willing to work hard to make a life for themselves. Many Irish people went away in years past and built up lives on dreams and hard work: now it’s our turn to provide the fertile field for entrepreneurship, it seems.
I wonder sometimes is it easier somehow for people from any country to build up a business away from home and its distractions of what all the friends are doing (often down at the pub) and the limitations sometimes imposed by being boxed into what people expect of you. Abroad you are no longer defined by your background, except that part of it that is truly you, and loneliness provides at least plenty of time to work, which in turn can provide the opportunity to integrate.
It’s a time of new beginnings in our house. Gint is looking for another home because he now has a van (replacing ‘Baby’ in his working life, if not in his heart), and parking has become increasingly difficult in our area. Wojtek has moved to his new house, with room to spread his DJ equipment – and to build on an increasing commitment to his girlfriend. Maria, at this time, should be wandering around the West of Ireland: we’re waiting to hear from her.
Soon, when I know the results of my application to do a Celta course (a Cambridge certified course in teaching English as a foreign language) over the coming months in Dublin, I will be advertising rooms in my house again, but this time just till the autumn. Then I hope to go abroad – depending on my results from the course, if I’m accepted, and on the decision from An Bord Pleanala (the Irish Planning Board) on our community’s campaign to stop high density building on the floodplain downriver from our homes. I will not walk away from that until it’s resolved.
Hopefully, though, I’ll become a traveller again for the winter, living among strangers in a strange land as the young people who have lived in my house have done over the past few years.
Birthday dreams – they’re a funny business!
Posted in Flooding, Germany, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, Poland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on February 12th, 2007
Last night my home was filled with live music. As Rasa, Maria, and then Wojtek, left, I deliberately did not replace them in order to have some space to get the entire house cleared back to its bones, including my own room. I wanted, too, to have room to decide what I want to do next, with my house and with myself.
But, because of Christmas, New Year, and then my 60th birthday celebrations, family and friends seem to have flooded into the space left by my young foreign friends. On Saturday night, for instance, we had a ‘Carcassonne’ reunion with the friends with whom I went to France, and on Sunday night Gerti, Eoin, Oliver, and Nando, Gerti’s German Shepherd, came to dinner to celebrate my birthday a month late, and brought music with them…
Gerti, who is from Germany, lived in my house sixteen years ago, and we became – and have remained – close friends, despite the fact that months often go by without our seeing each other. Since Gerti met Eoin, her husband, we have gotten to know each other, especially since I designed a web site for his business last year. And Oliver was a friend of Gerti’s when she lived here, and has remained a friend of both Gerti and Eoin since. Although we see far less of each other, Oliver is the kind of person you can pick up with just where you left off.
When they arrived, bearing gifts of food, Eoin said: “I brought the piano with me”, and I laughed. I’ve always felt that the only problem with that lovely instrument is precisely that you can’t bring it with you to a party. But he had…
He produced, and assembled, a full-size Yamaha keyboard, that he played later in the evening. It has a beautiful sound, and Eoin knows how to produce it. He played classic old Irish airs, like Carrickfergus, the Sally Gardens, Danny Boy, and newer Irish songs like those of Jimmy McCarth, before going on to his own kind of favourites - ranging from Gershwin to the Beatles – and some of his own compositions. He kept reminding me, as we sat around the blazing fire, drinking a mixture of beverages of the song ‘The Piano Man’, despite their drinks being non-alcoholic. Then, to my surprise, Gerti stepped up and announced that she was going to sing a song with him, and that she had written the lyrics herself to the air of an old German folksong.
It was a song for my birthday, describing ‘my friend’ (me!) as Gerti sees me, with all the bias of an old close friend. It was about the flood campaign and about family and friends and living and loving life and about language and about passion, and it reduced me to tears. It was perhaps one of the nicest gifts I received for my birthday – the gift of loving words, wrapped up in music. And I am grateful for it.
Posted in Friends, Germany, Ireland | No Comments »