By
noeleenm on March 30th, 2007
The days are falling in so fast around me this month, albeit longer, brighter days since the hour changed, that I hardly know where to begin…
Most of my waking hours are taken up with the CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) course, with occasional prolonged bursts of anxiety and activity about the flood campaign, which is recorded on http://www.braywatch.com/. Even more occasional bursts of activity – I’ve no anxiety to spare regarding this – centre on the more mundane business of living, such as shopping, cooking (as in throwing together sandwiches, much of the time), getting Fred through his NCT, organising house and garden maintenance, paying bills, and working to pay those bills. And sometimes I even get to talk with my family and friends by phone or text, and sometimes, blessedly, I get to sit down with the people with whom I share my home…
It tends to happen quite late at night, when I don’t have to rush anywhere else, and I’m too tired to even go to bed, or on Sundays when I’ve the whole day off both work and course. So, sporadically, I’ve gotten to know the new members of our house family.
Kasia is very slim, with a narrow bone structure, and the complexion of an Irish cailin, which is particularly noticable as she colours her hair red. A guest who came to reception in the hotel where she works the other day announced happily: ‘Well, you’re Irish anyway!’, and was quite surprised when Kasia explained placidly that in fact she’s Polish. She comes from a traditional Catholic Polish background, and talks with quiet pride of the influence the late Pope John Paul II had on the emergence of freedom in their mutually beloved country.
Not so surprisingly then, she went to Mass the first Sunday she spent in our house, but got confused, as she recounted later, when the lay Ministers of the Eucharist were invited up to the altar just after the Consecration, the most sacred part of the Mass. It was the family Mass, where the small children listen to the Bible readings in the side chapel in simple story form, while the adults listen to the traditional words of Epistles and Gospel. The children are then invited out onto the altar, with their ‘minders’, for the Offertory and Consecration, and the Ministers for the Eucharist join them in time to recite the Our Father altogether.
From Kasia’s point of view, what she saw was children going out onto the altar, and, later, the adults joining them. She was up there, too, when she realised that a lot of adults still seemed to be sitting in the congregation… Murmuring apologies, she sidled down off the altar and back to her seat, with a face to match her Irish hair.
She told me all of this, as I cried with laughter, when she asked if I thought it would be okay if she went to one of the other Christian churches the following Sunday? I thought at first that she was too embarrassed to go back to the Catholic church, but she explained that it was simply that in her town they only have Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches and she was fascinated by the churches, mainly of the Protestant faith, that she has seen in Bray. I assured her they would make her very welcome, and tried to give her a potted version of the differences in ritual between the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Catholic churches (with Quakers, who don’t have a public place of worship in Bray) thrown in for good measure.
No mishaps occurred on her next visit to church, but she seemed to miss the familiarity of our form of worship, so I think it’s possible that she’ll return to Mass – with a strong grip on her seat.
Kasia has a quiet, dead-pan sense of humour that is very funny, but Alba - the other new member of our house family – comes into the house like a gale of fresh air, hugging and kissing and regaling us all with her tales of the day, good and bad.
From Valencia, Alba has the dark skin and hair, and the tempestuous temperament, we associate with southern Spain. Everyone who crosses her is the villian in the melodrama of her life (as is everyone who makes war or causes the innocent or powerless to suffer, which I like very much about her), and everyone who treats her with the enthusiasm she showers out on the world is just short of being her very best friend. She even out-dramatises Gint, who watches her with laughter, and happily alternates between playing her leading man and the moustachioed villian of the piece!
In the past week though, Alba has put a cunning plot in place in our house. She announced on several occasions that she has put on too much weight since she has come to Ireland because of the amount of bread we eat here, particularly. As Alba is tall, this weight is negligible, if it exists at all, but her beating of her bare, navel-pierced midriff as she announced it had Gint’s eyes out on stalks. So she has gone on a strict diet, and has joined a gym, where her personal trainer is dark, good-looking and worth perspiring over anyway, she informs us.
But – because Alba has a thing about wasting food in a world where many people starve – she insists on bringing home bread and cake that would otherwise go in the bin of the shop where she works. And, as she’s on a diet, we all eat it.
Now, I can hardly get off the chair after a meal, especially since I’m not getting time to walk these days. Gint at least is exercising, and nothing seems to make Kasia fat.
I was amused to notice, too, that Alba has stuck her diet sheet to the fridge using fridge magnets already there. One, broken, announces the House Rules and originally said:-
‘If it’s dirty, clean it,
If it’s dropped, pick it up,
If it’s broken, fix it,
If it’s hungry, feed it,
If it’s sad, love it.’
Having come into close contact with the kitchen floor tiles at some stage, this magnet broke across the middle, and Alba separated the two pieces to catch each corner of her diet sheet. It’s broken right across the middle of the second last line.
Somehow I have to find a way of resisting Alba’s combination of idealism and single-mindedness regarding diets. If I didn’t have a strong feeling that he’d remind me of one of my grand-nephews, I’d even think of having a look at her personal trainer…
Posted in Flooding, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Spain | 1 Comment »
By
noeleenm on March 16th, 2007
This morning I listened to ‘new’ Irish men and women – people from all over the world who had just sworn their pledge of allegiance to Ireland and become citizens of this, our beloved country – being interviewed on ‘Morning Ireland’. It was a moving experience.
In years past, our forefathers went as missionaries to some of these countries. They must have been often homesick for their green homeland, and, I have no doubt, however well they assimilated into those countries, on St. Patrick’s Day they celebrated their roots. Others of our forefathers went abroad in very different circumstances – forced to leave their homeslands, not out of conviction or deep faith, but simply to survive. They, too, would have remembered Ireland with deep nostalgia on St. Patrick’s Day.
Today the journies are reversed, and citizens of those countries come to Ireland – and some of them stay and become part of our country, just as we became part of theirs. But, like our own people, they must still be homesick at times for the countries and the way of life they left behind.
It seems fitting then that tomorrow we celebrate the man in whose honour the beer turns green and Irish parades take place in all the major cities – and quite a few small towns - all over the world, yet who was not even born here. That St. Patrick was homesick when he was forced to come to Ireland as a youngster is poignantly recorded in his own ‘Confession’, and still, when he escaped home, he dreamed of Ireland until he returned again.
He’s a fitting Patron Saint for both the old and the new Irish. May he bless each one of us, wherever we find ourselves, and may he always intercede for peace in our land, whatever the colour of our skins, whatever the accent in which we speak to each other, and whatever faith we profess.
Posted in Ireland | 2 Comments »
By
noeleenm on March 14th, 2007
Teaching English to adults has one great advantage – no discipline problems! It’s a pity one can’t say the same thing about local council meetings…
I missed last night’s presentation of the flood defence works proposed to save our Dargle riverside communities from further danger to lives and homes, because I had to attend class. Instead, members of our floodplain campaign group, SWAP, along with neighbours from the other side of the river – Seapoint Court – and our local Dargle Residents’ Association, all listened as the Dargle Flood Study Group explained its proposals to Bray Town Council. Apparently, the councillors listened courteously, just as they did over a year ago when a deputation from our community explained our fears about the proposed development with which these flood defence proposals are inextricably, and disgracefully, linked.
And, according to two observers from two very different camps, they ended the Council meeting in the same chaos as they did on that occasion, and with the same total lack of respect for each other – and for our town – that they showed then.
Scoring politicial points off each other seems to be more important than serving the people who elected them. We had asked that no vote should be taken on these proposals until our communities had a chance to study them also. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable request as we are the people who have suffered two and three floods in our lifetimes because of the lack of these defences – and we will be the people who may lose our lives, as well as our possessions, if these proposals don’t work, and the high rise buildings they are designed to allow dam the flood waters’ escape from our homes.
But, even as the Labour leader in Bray Town Council, Dr. John McManus, rushed to support the measures, the Town Manager told him he didn’t need the councillors’ support – these measures are going ahead anyway! On the other hand, if the councillor wanted to endorse them…
For the second time in this campaign, Cllr. McManus swallowed the insult without a blink and his Party swung in behind the Town Manager. This is flood defence at any price – provided the cost is only to our community…
Cllr. Behan of Fianna Fail, who is a candidate in the next General Election, took umbrage with the Town Manager (although not enough to take away his support for zoning the floodplain for high density building in the first place), Cllr. John Brady of Sinn Fein (also a candidate in the next General Election) asked that no approval be given for the proposals until our community has a chance to study them and was told he was out of order by Cllr. Pat Vance of Fianna Fail…
As responsible local representation, it’s pathetic, but as a means of bumbling through proposals that nobody – except the OPW – seem very keen on allowing us to look at too closely, it’s very effective.
We quietly arranged a meeting with the OPW representatives for Wednesday, 28th March, to which all our community will be invited. The proposals for flood defence works will be explained to us there, and we will be allowed to ask questions – which we’re not allowed to do in the Council chambers, even if we could be heard over the shouting. We’re also anxious to have an independent expert look at the proposals for us, but that depends on funding because we are conscious that even tacit approval of these proposals by our community may be seen by Ireland’s Planning Board, who are studying our appeal to stop building on the floodplain, as agreement that we believe this will keep us safe.
Meanwhile, if I could enforce an imaginative way of imposing discipline on the councillors who create havoc in our Council Chambers when they are supposed to be guarding our interests, I’d move every one of their houses down into our neighbourhood, pray for heavy rain – and watch them settle down to treating this like adults.
Posted in Flooding, Ireland | 3 Comments »
By
noeleenm on March 14th, 2007
Last night we had our first teaching practice at our CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching), and all six of us in our group were pretty nervous beforehand – albeit the ‘teaching’ this first time was only to conduct some introductory activities. We were also working in pairs, and our ‘teaching’ was unassessed. From tomorrow on, we will be teaching individually, and Devon, our tutor, will be taking notes at the back of the class, as well as our fellow trainee teachers observing.
First times are always a bit nerve-wracking, though, even with Devon taking the same students for an hour beforehand, while we sat in a row at the back and observed a Mistress at work. She used the subject of ‘Favourite Teachers’ for a lesson on gist listening, as well as enabling the students to use new vocabulary to talk about the topic themselves.
She also used the names of the eight students a lot, who came from Spain, Italy, Hungary, Brazil, and China - so we got to match backs-of-heads to names, and prayed we’d be able to still name them when we were facing each other!
We were, as it turned out, as the activities were all based around getting to know each other. The students had obviously all been primed to be nice to us poor trainees, and co-operated with great good humour as we all tried very hard to look as if we knew exactly what we were doing!
In the long run, the biggest surprise of the night probably went to Devon herself. About half-way through her class, I idly turned over the Observation page we were each asked to fill in. It was also printed on the reverse. I nudged Clare, beside me, frantically and hissed: “Are we supposed to be filling in this side as well?!” She turned a pale shade of green, and the nudging and hissing moved all along our row as we realised that there were several other pages behind, and we weren’t sure how many we were supposed to fill in.
Devon turned to glance over her students a few moments later, and stopped, startled, as she realised that all the students were heads down, busily working, but the entire row of trainee teachers were sitting with their hands up begging permission to ask a question!
We didn’t need to fill in anything except the front of the top page, it turned out, but I did think Devon glanced beyond her students again when she was pre-teaching vocabulary for the listening lesson. One of the words on her list was ‘imbecile’…
Posted in Brazil, China, House Family, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Spain | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on March 12th, 2007
Okay, I got one post up already today, and the discipline of getting it up quickly is probably very good for my habit of writing long, long posts…
Now, though, I’m going to try to put up a hotch-potch of news because so many things are happening at the moment in my life that I’m dizzy.
Our house is full again, with the warmth and noise and life that brings. Kasia from Poland (whose surname I can’t remember but she says the English translation of her first and family names are Kate Fox) and Alba from Valencia in Spain both moved in yesterday. Despite the fact that we’ve had a couple of weeks with those two rooms empty, I still found myself dragging my friend, Thomas, across to bleed the radiators before they came, and frantically putting back together the freshly defrosted fridges. When will I ever learn to be organised…?
Gint has decided to stay on, despite van parking problems, having kept me entertained with stories of his search for a new house. There’s the ‘cat man’, the ‘don’t open that wardrobe!’ house, the ‘bed-is-high-above-the-window-and-it-makes-me-feel-like-a-prisoner’ (which I don’t follow at all) house, and he has developed several routines around them. I hope he will be as good at laying timber floors as he is at acting…
The flood campaign has suddenly become active again, despite the fact that we’re still waiting for a decision from the Oral Hearing by the Planning Board into our objections to building massive high rise apartments and shops and restaurants and even an hotel on the floodplain downriver from our homes.
Flood defence proposals, which we have been promised for twenty years now, are back on the agenda for the meeting of Bray Town Council which takes place tomorrow night. We desperately need this protection (the Dargle River was very, very high several times over the past few weeks, causing a lot of anxiety in our community), but the problem with the present proposals is that they’re being tied in with the granting of permission to build on the floodplain.
We’ve asked to see the proposals, and have a chance to discuss them with our community, before Bray Town Council votes on whether or not to approve them. Let’s see what happens to our request…
In the middle of all of this, my new car, Freddie, went for his NCT (National Car Test). I’d had him serviced, got his emissions and lights checked out, and even had his engine hosed down so that he’d be clean and ready for the Big Day. The garage, at the last moment, pointed out that his registration plates were a little faded, and so I ended up, on the morning of his test, bringing him to the garage again to have new plates fitted. Then I checked he had a clean hanky, had washed properly behind his ears, and set off for the Test Centre.
I was in the middle of studying my notes for the TEFL class while Freddie was being tested when I heard a couple of women who were watching the cars being tested from the viewing area remarking on ‘that car that seems to have water coming out of it’. I looked up to see them pointing at Freddie, who now had two mechanics under him, pointing torches up at his innards. Then one of the mechanics, seeing me looking out the window, came over to the viewing area, invited me to come out and supplied me with a hard hat, and showed me oil haemorraging out of Freddie’s innards…
They wouldn’t even let me drive him home until he had First Aid to stop him ‘bleeding’ all over the road. Apparently, the hosing down was a little too thorough and knocked a piece of rust off Freddie’s sump. He’s now repaired, getting ready to do his re-test – but this time he can go with no hanky and I’m damned if I’m checking behind his ears.
The funny thing is our tutors at the TEFL course keep telling us that we mustn’t have any other projects going on in our lives at the same time as this course, as it’s too intense… I arrive at classes glassy eyed with all that’s gone before, but the good thing is the course is so interesting that it takes my mind off the horrors waiting outside.
And it’s nice to have the house full again.
Posted in Ireland, Poland, Spain | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on March 12th, 2007
I am strongly reminded of my boss, who is a brilliant businessman but a terrible typist, as I start to write this post. He was determined to keep in touch by e-mail while on a cruise a year or so back, and I got three very weird e-mails from him in quick succession. The last was very short indeed.
When he arrived back at the office, he explained piteously that he had sat down at the computer on board ship, laboriously typed up an e-mail to me – taking great care to get the spelling right – but, before he had managed to hit Send – the ship had moved out of reach of one satellite and into another, losing his perspiration drenched words along the way. At least that’s what they told him on the ship after this had happened several times and he went like a raving lunatic to the Pursar.
My boss didn’t know about the Save function at that time.
So he started again, caution about spelling and grammar thrown to the wind, and got a panic attack that he was about to lose this e-mail too. He sent it, half-finished. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Realising this he tried another one, with much the same result. Finally, he wrote down a very short message on a piece of paper, typed it out as quickly as possible, and sent it, too. It wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize for Literature but I could understand it.
“But I had to leave out all my witty remarks that I’d saved up”, he told me, sadly.
I’m a reasonably fast typist, but my host, SiteGround, is giving me – and everybody else – only occasional glimses of this site over the past few weeks. I know it’s happening to www.wicklow.com for the same reason. So I’m going to save and publish this post while I can…
Because, suddenly, I feel seasick.
Posted in Ireland | 6 Comments »
By
noeleenm on March 1st, 2007
The above message was written – in English – on the rooftop of a house in which people were apparently squatting in Barcelona, just beneath the summit of Parc Guell. If you’re going to protest, do it in the most public place you can find, and do it with wit and humour!
Despite being one of those tourists, I found myself sympathising with the message because Barcelona is full to capacity with tourists, especially along La Rambla in the old part of the city – even in winter, and even mid-week, and right through the day and night.
It’s little wonder because it’s an amazing city. Architecturally, it’s stunning, and compact enough to emphasise its diverse styles, from the elegant simplicity of La Iglesia de Santa Maria del Mar (Catalan Gothic) to Gaudi and his contemporaries exhuberant designs: they make Disney and Spielberg look as if they’re suffering from a severe lack of imagination.
Barcelona is strongly Catalan, the language being spoken constantly in the streets, yet it’s a very multi-cultural city, reminding me of Galway in Ireland, on a much larger scale. Partly that’s because of the ubiquituous tourists, but it’s also the fact that so many of those tourists simply never leave again. That says a lot about a city, and about the innate hospitality and courtesy of the people who have always lived there.
I found the fact that everything was written in Catalan first – street names, shop notices, menus, etc. – often repeated in Spanish, but not always, quite confusing at the beginning. Some of the words were close enough to Spanish to guess their meaning, but if your Spanish is rusty that can make you think you’ve just got the word wrong! Once I settled into a Spanish speaking rhythm, though, I was charmed to find that not only were people quite prepared to switch instantly to Spanish to accommodate me, but they used the familiar form instantly. Having learned Spanish in a family setting, with six children around me, I ‘tutear’ everybody and keep having to correct myself when I’m talking to an adult stranger. Having people address me instantly as ‘tu’ made me feel very much at home.
Another thing that I loved about Barcelona was the omnipresence of street entertainment, particularly of music. In the five days I spent there I listened to the trumpet being played (very well) in the street; accordeons; guitar playing of both the rock variety (a Rastiferian guy who had the crowd singing and chanting along with him as he sang and played songs like ‘Sorry’) and, naturally, classic Spanish guitar; an opera singer (who hammed it up to the crowd, but used the acoustics of a narrow street to excellent effect with a magnificent voice); keyboards and xylophone; and a guy who played what he called a ‘Hang’, which looked for all the world like a Wok with a lid but without any handle, and which he played like a drum.
There were dancers – again, classical, but also Catalan folk dancing in front of the Cathedral on Sunday, accompanied by the local brass band who played on the steps. The Catalan dancing was one of the few local happenings that failed utterly to move me, I’m afraid, mostly because they seemed to move so very little themselves. Huge circles of dancers formed, most of the women wearing white ballet type shoes, but the dancers seemed to simply cross their feet in time to the music, occasionally raising their joined hands. Probably an expert Catalan dancer would have a heart attack at this description of their dancing, but, used as I am to the excitement of Irish dancing – no matter how inexpertly carried out – I was disappointed with it.
It was about the only thing I was disappointed about in this lovely Catalan city, though. I hate shopping, but even I was impressed by the streets full of shops of really beautiful and imaginative products, and the variety of markets and market stalls around the older part of the city. The Rambla itself, a long promenade stretching from the Placa Catalunya right down to the port, is lined by mainly flower shops – and street entertainers. It’s a colourful, bustling, warm city.
…And, in a radius of about ten minutes walk from where I was staying, just off the Rambla, the Lonely Planet guide to Barcelona listed no less than seven vegetarian restaurants… Heaven!
Mind you, two of the first three I tried had disappeared (printed publications go out of date so quickly!), I was directed to another not listed in that guide – the Unicorn, which has entertainment on Friday and Saturday nights (I found it on Sunday!) - and the three other listed restaurants that I managed to visit were excellent also. Of all of them, the BioCenter was definitely my favourite. The food was varied, and simply mouth watering, and the service was friendly and excellent.
If they shot tourists in season in Barcelona, at least I’d die happy…
Posted in Ireland, Spain | No Comments »