Glasgow (cont)

The next morning, I got out of my cramped, airless hostel room as fast as I could, and I didn’t even care that it was raining because it was refreshing. The Glasgow connection with architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh was one of those things that I knew about at one point, but then forgot about, so it was a pleasant surprise when I was looking into things to see in the city. Another pleasant surprise, after walking all the way from my hostel to the city centre (and up an alarmingly steep hill), was realizing that I had read about the Mackintosh art school when I was a teenager and recognized its great art nouveau facade from a book on architecture I used to have. Unfortunately, I was there so early in the morning that nothing was open, but I stood around in the lobby and watched as parents dropped off their children from art classes. “What age group is she? And is it 2D or sculpture?” the people who worked there would ask. I thought about how these kids probably didn’t know how lucky they were to be taking art classes in that building.

Then, frustratingly, I figured out that the Mackintosh House, which I was told I should visit, was back in the other direction from my hostel (something I could have discovered earlier and saved myself much walking if I had been organized at all) so I walked briskly back up town. All I had was the photocopied map that the hostel had given me and it was sort of annoying in that sites would be indicated by numbers but it was unclear what street the numbers were actually on, which makes a huge difference when one doesn’t know the city at all and is wandering around in the rain. As well, the map was getting mushy. I found the Mackintosh House, which had an okay selection of his furniture, but I liked seeing the art gallery that was beside it (possibly the gallery of Glasgow University?) because they had some elegant Whistlers, and a painting of a Canadian moose (done apparently by a Scot to combat the claim that the North American moose was the same species as the extinct British elk. Duh!)

I phoned my friend Siobhan, who was visiting her boyfriend in Glasgow, to see when she wanted to meet up and she told me first I should go to the Kelvingrove Museum, which I was close to. I swear I followed some signs that lied to me, because I ended up on the Glasgow University campus (and it being Saturday, no one was there) and got completely lost. I was up on a hill though, and at the bottom I could spy a building that may have been a museum (it’s hard to know in Europe though, as gorgeous neo-gothic towers could also just be post offices or public toilets) so I began the winding trek down. At the bottom of the hill a gate led out to the main road but I discovered to my alarm that it was locked. ‘What the heck?!’ I thought, ‘I got in totally freely at the top of the hill! What use is this?’ I was not going to walk all the way back up and go around and when I saw that there was an open entrance on the other side of the iron fence I decided to hop the fence. ‘That’s what boys do, right?’ I thought, ‘They hop fences when they have to. No big deal. You can do this.’

The fence was too high for me to just jump up on it, but there was a plastic garbage container close by so I very carefully (it was wet) stood on top of it and raised one foot up on the fence. Then I raised my other foot and saw that they fit perfectly in between the iron spikes. Then I slowly lowered my left foot down onto the mushy ground, but I slipped a bit and fell towards a conveniently placed tree, which a caught myself on. Only I quickly realized that, while my left foot was on the ground, my right foot was bent up behind me still on the fence. “Ow ow ow ow OW!” I whipped my head around and saw that the bottom of my jeans had been pierced by the metal spike. Although it hurt a lot (I am not particularly flexible, and my legs were still aching from the crazy amounts of walking I had done) I went to lift up my foot and dislodge my jeans. But I couldn’t bend that way, nor was I strong enough to pull up my leg any higher. Then I tried to just rip my jeans, but the hole was right by a stitch and it was stuck too. Damn you Levis brothers! ‘Okay, stay calm,’ I thought. ‘Just think. Ow ow. Okay, what can you do? Ow. How long may you have to wait until someone comes along? And what if they are teenage girls, or thugs who laugh and/or rob you. OW! And you’re getting more and more wet. Crap!’

In what must have been only a few minutes, although it felt much longer, and when I was seriously considering taking off my pants (although now when I look back, I don’t know how I would’ve managed this feat either), a middle-aged man walked by. “Excuse, sir? EXCUSE ME! Hey, sir, ummm, I was wondering if you could help me for a second. I’m kind of stuck...” The man came over, instantly saw what was wrong, lifted up my leg and helped me dislodge my jeans. “Phew!” I sighed. “Thank you so much!” “Now, for next time,” the man said in his Scottish brogue, “There’s an opening in the fence at the bottom there, so you won’t get stuck again. Good day.”

Glasgow

It was difficult to leave Edinburgh. I had had great times there with two good friends and did not particularly want to set off on the next leg of my journey by myself (or return to Dublin at the end of the weekend, for that matter). Megan took more time off work to wander around the city with me that last morning. We went back to the National Art Gallery to see the Impressionism gallery which Alyssa and I had missed the day before, but as most of it was closed for some reason we only got to see a couple new paintings, including Gauguin’s surrealist painting of angels wrestling which I had no idea was in Scotland. As we were walking in the park, I started to point at where the fellow was singing the other day, only to spy him in the exact same spot, going at it again. I’ve since learned through fellow-Scottish travellers on facebook that he’s kind of a legend. Finally, we went to the Children’s Museum (really a toy museum) which has multitudes of creepy porcelain dolls as well as many racist ‘golliwogs’.

I bid my farewell and set off on the Scottish rails again reading Fred Kaplan’s ‘1959; The Year that Changed Everything’ to distract me from my melancholy (having firmly set aside Ian Rankin). I was a bit nervous, as I didn’t have a little Lonely Planet book for Glasgow, but I told myself that all train stations in big cities have free tourists maps at the information booths. I also should add that my legs were still very much aching from all the climbing we did in Edinburgh, and I was very stiff when I got off the train. Eventually, I found where I thought an information desk should be, but all the pamphlets were train schedules and, bizarrely, info about sites in Edinburgh, the city I had just left. I finally gave up and went to get on the bus. I usually avoid buses as they never provide maps for where they go and you are just assumed to know (I even continue to do this for strange buses in Toronto!) but the other information my hostel provided on how to get there was via bus, so I braced myself for it. As in Dublin, your bus ticket differs in price depending on where you’re going (a practice that might make sense for locals, but is infinitely more complicated for tourists) and when the driver barked at me about where I was going all I could remember was that the street name started with Woods. “Woods...bridge? Woods...lawn...?” I attempted. He shrugged his shoulders as though the words were of a foreign planet. “Alright!” I cried irritably, and made him wait as I pulled out all my hostel info from my bag. “Woods...land.” “Ah, Woodlinds. Two-thirty-five.” ‘That was so difficult, wasn’t it,’ I thought bitchily as I looked for exact change. In British sterling 2.35 is FOUR pieces of coin, a ridiculously stupid price for a standard bus fare, so I ended up giving him two pounds. As if my frustration wasn’t enough, no effort was made at all to announce the stops, so I had to crane my neck the whole journey searching for every street sign. The bus ride was less than fifteen minutes, and I definitely could have walked it.

My hostel was up on this hill overlooking the city. The streets of white Georgian townhouses were arranged in circles, unusual for Glasgow, but luckily there were signs pointing the way. After checking in and thankfully receiving a photocopied map from the guy at the desk, I stashed my stuff and headed back to city centre. I am a traveller to the bone, and as cranky as I may be I am always relieved and excited to be in a new place. I will never forget walking down the steps towards the city centre as twilight descended.

Unfortunately, not much happened the rest of that night. I had the name and directions to one gay bar but after walking all the way into the middle of town discovered (conclusively, as I walked the street three times) it was not there. I ended up at an Italian restaurant by myself, and exhausted, went back to the hostel to discover two old men in my shared room, just hanging out with the lights on. I watched TV in the lounge for a couple hours, and when I got back and the lights were still on I ignored them and got into bed with my sequined eye mask. Unfortunately, that did not shield me from the incredibly loud snoring from below me and the hours-long bed creaking from the room above.
No more shared hostel rooms.

Edinburgh (cont.)

My second full day in Edinburgh began with a visit to one of the prettiest (and most shockingly cheery-staffed!) Starbucks I had ever been to. Then Alyssa and I walked up the Royal Mile once again to Edinburgh Castle, which is on a cliff and has yet more incredible views of the city. Unfortunately, it’s one of those tourist sites where you’d have to pay extra to get the little guide book about it (and the entrance was pricey enough), so neither one of us bought it. Inside we saw Mary Queen of Scots living quarters and a family tree (or thistle, in this case) of Scottish royalty going back to the 1000s. “Oh, they don’t have Wallis Simpson!” I said. “She was never queen,” Alyssa pointed out. After seeing the crown jewels and a piece of rock on which Scottish kings used to be crowned, we sat out on a picnic table by the castle walls and pieced together our combined knowledge of Scottish history (mostly Alyssa’s).

After an Indian buffet lunch, which both of us Toronto kids were craving, we eventually found the Writers Museum, which is housed in a beautiful wood-paneled home with an amazing spiral staircase. It was again educational for me as I knew basically nothing about Walter Scott, Robbie Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson. It was around this point that it started to sink in just how ignorant I am about Scottish history. Having walked so much the day before, we both needed breaks in between sights and after viewing the art gallery (which included a Scottish collection and an absolutely hilarious art nouveau-style painting of a fey male angel) we ended up resting in the park for quite awhile. Well, it was mostly because a young man, dressed all in black, at the bottom of the valley starting singing Scottish ballads, which there don’t seem to be that many of, so it was a lot of ‘I’ll take the high rrrrrroad if you’ll take the low rrrrrroad...!’ He was holding something in his ear, which we assumed to be a headset playing his accompaniment. He was totally nonplussed at people waking by staring at him, and when this group of teenage boys starting taunting “Who’s a pouf!?” and even sat around watching him for awhile, he just kept on going. His girlfriend joined him (sometimes singing herself), and then two other friends and we gathered that they had just gotten engaged. He sat and listened to him for longer than I like to admit. I love how when travelling you can plan and plan and do all the stuff you’re supposed to do, but often the most memorable things turn out to be incredible stuff that just happens.

Still full from lunch, we ended up at a Turkish cafe at the bottom of the Royal Mile and I had my first Turkish coffee since I was in Istanbul last year. Then it was back up the Mile to do the St. Mary Close haunted tour of the underground rooms and alleyways buried beneath the Royal Mile. The Lonely Planet book said the tour was a bit cheesy and obsessed with the scatological, which it was. We learned a lot about how the old denizens of Edinburgh would throw their human waste out their windows and let it ooze down to the river. “I understand they didn’t have our technology,” I said to Alyssa. “But there HAD to be another way!” My favourite moment of the tour was when we walked into a room and our guide told us not to touch the walls. “Partly because it’s the original plaster,” he explained. “But mainly because the original plaster had ground up animal and human remains in it.” When you’re standing in the middle of that room looking at the walls, that gives you shivers up the spine.

After that, it was time to walk Alyssa to her train. I was sorry to see such a good, old friend go. She told me not to worry about my quarter-life crisis and enjoy my travels, and we’d see each other at Christmas time.

Edinburgh

I have never thought that much about Scotland. I have been an Anglophile since late-childhood (shuffling around with my Agatha Christie and E.F. Benson books and using words like ‘vulgar’) and I have obviously more recently became interested in the history and culture of Ireland. But if you had asked me about Scotland I would respond with a shrug: a rowdier bunch of British-decedents with a savage history and the unfortunate legacy of their greatest citizens emigrating, and all the back and forth about whether they are part of the United Kingdom or not is rather exhausting. Plus, family tartans are kind of made up.

Now, before Mel Gibson leads a pack of blue-faced rioters at me, I have to say that I did a serious disfavour to Scotland. Edinburgh is one of the prettiest cities I have been in, with beautiful buildings, more trees than you would believe, a vibrant culture and a people with a spring in their step (in great contrast to Dubliners these days). Megan, the friend that I was staying with, absolutely loves it, and that probably rubbed off on me as well.

On my first day, after a very sound wine-and-roast-chicken-induced sleep, Megan showed me around the Old Town. Edinburgh’s city centre is divided by a lovely valley-park, which I learned once at one time the river into which all the citizen’s waste was thrown in (and by thrown in I mean thrown into the slanted alleyways and then dripped down towards the river!), but now it’s a beautiful spot to sit in the afternoon. On the one side is the New Town, which is Georgian and reminds one of London or Dublin. It’s where the good shops are, but we didn’t spend much time there as they are tearing up Princes Street in order to put in a tram. Megan informed me that you have to hate both the tram and the new modern Scottish parliament building because all Edinburghers do. On the other side is the Old Town made up of towering 17th century grey facades with chateau-details and reminds one a bit of Quebec City. The main stretch is called the Royal Mile, and because all the museums seem to be on it we spend a lot of time walking up and down it, over and over again.

We also climbed up to the very top of the flamboyantly-gothic Sir Walter Scott memorial and looked out over the whole city. Edinburgh is a place made for views. When my old friend Alyssa, whose studying in Durham, arrived, whom we almost missed at the train station in one of those thank-goodness-found-you! travelling close calls, Megan said she’d show us the foot of the giant hill called Arthur’s Seat which is at the bottom of the Royal Mile. When we got there, even though it was late afternoon and the light was fading, someone decided we should attempt a climb up. And of course once you start going up a hill you just have to get to the very top, no matter how many times you need to stop to catch your breath, which you pretend is to take pictures, because the view will make it worth it. We got to the very top at twilight, with still enough light to see the view but also getting to witness the illumination of the city’s lights. A magical moment. We took our time walking down the hill in the dark, bonding by making fun of the accents of the various places we live.

My legs ached for the next three days.

Belfast

Or, Now I understand why they invented airplanes.

For my trip to Scotland I decided to go the long way and see a part of Ireland that I hadn’t on my first trip here with my family two years ago. The plan was to take the train up to Belfast, spend the night there, quickly see some of the city and then take the ferry across to Stranraer, Scotland, from which a train would whisk me to Edinburgh and my friend Megan’s outstretched arms. The trip to Belfast was painless enough, but their train station is one of those that’s a bit out of the city centre, with nothing near it and no way for a newcomer who has just stumbled off their train to figure out where to go. I had to use my parent’s big-ass Lonely Planet guide to Ireland just for a rudimentary map of the city, and wandered around with my giant backpack (because, naturally, I packed too much), getting more and more frustrated that the city lacked street signs for even major streets. Also, it was a dark afternoon and the light was fading already and I did not really fancy getting lost in Belfast at night time. A group of young chav-y mothers came out of a park with their prams, and as I was passing them my backpack got hooked on a streetlamp and I flung a bit backwards, and although I recovered quickly and acted as though nothing happened, I distinctly heard one of the women go “ha!”

I found my hostel and was put in a good mood on hearing that I had my four-person room to myself. I am a traveller at heart and no matter how tired I am, I always embrace a new city and cannot wait to explore it. I set out for the city centre with a vague plan of getting dinner and seeing a bit of the city, maybe even one of those political murals from the height of the ‘Troubles’ which I remember reading about in poli-sci at Guelph.

I did not expect Belfast to be Paris. I thought it was be a bit downtrodden and derelict, but in a picturesque way, largely based on the film ‘Odd Man Out’ with Eddie Izzard-favourite James Mason as an IRA-rebel on the run from authorities in the dark and watery old city. But it turns out much has been rebuilt and not in a good way. Giant modern buildings with no shops or restaurants at pavement level line street after street. I could find barely any restaurants, and some I did weren’t open, and I got lost frequently (street signs!!) and as evening set in I got disillusioned on discovering the ‘real’ Belfast experience, so I had Chinese food. And went to see ‘Up’. Which made me cry and miss my dog.

I went back to the hostel and ended up talking to a nice Australian girl in the common room. I didn’t meet anyone at my Amsterdam hostel, and I think this is a giant difference in the sexes; girls will try to chat with people and make new friends while travelling and boys keep their head down, awkwardly avoiding any interaction. She had been travelling for almost a year with a girlfriend and said parts of it was really hard. I told her my favourite travellers’ mantra from travel writer and transgendered-pioneer Jan Morris (which I first read while stranded in a train station on the Spanish-French border, exactly when I needed to hear it): don’t worry about the inconveniences of travelling, for the things that go wrong are the salt that give travel its flavour. “Yeah,” she replied, “but if I had known about some of the things that would happen, maybe I wouldn’t have left.” “Oh! What could have been so bad that happened to you?” “Umm, my friend and I had thousands of pounds stolen from our hotel room in Spain.” “Ah... I see...”

The next morning it was raining pretty heavily, so I thought ‘Fuck the murals. I’m just going to go early to the ferry docks and get the heck out of here.’ On my way though I stopped at a cozy little restaurant and had the traditional Ulster fry breakfast: sausage, bacon, hash brown, cornbread, pancake and, oddly, half a friend tomato. The cab driver who took me to the ferry asked how I liked the city, and not knowing what to say I mumbled something about street signs and no restaurants. “Well, it’s too bad you didn’t get to see more of it. It’s a lot better than Dublin!” To which I wisely stayed quiet.

When I checked in at the ferry port everything went smoothly until the very end when the man said, “Unfortunately, due to weather conditions, we’ve put everyone on the ‘super ferry’ which will take an extra hour to get to Stranraer.” ‘Weather conditions,’ I thought. ‘You mean like RAIN? In the Irish Sea?! How unbelievable!’ All I said was, “But I already bought my train ticket to Edinburgh.” “One of our buses will take you from Stranraer to Ayr, and there you can get the train to Glasgow and make the connection to Edinburgh.” “...Thanks.” Then when I went to board and I asked the woman about how that would all work she snapped at me, “I only deal with departures!” and then was boggled by the question of whether my standard ferry ticket determined any specific areas in the boat I was to go to. “Umm, I have never taken this boat before...” I said, pleadingly, attempting to make her feel guilty for being a bitch. But they did give us all ten percent off our next ticket with them, which is going to be SO useful for me.

Still, once we were on the SUPER FERRY I got excited and despite the wind and rain stood outside on the deck and bid farewell to Ireland. When I eventually went inside I wandered the boat a bit, which was filled with mostly non-tourists; Northern Irish and Scottish people on visits with friends and family, I assumed. I was listening in to a young mother with her two kids and was surprised to find out that I only understood every couple of words. That was my first indication that I was entering a new culture. As I walked around the boat it started to rock back and forth, back and forth. I grabbed a nearby rail to steady myself, and I started to realize why we had been switched to the bigger, if slower, SUPER FERRY. After a little bit I sat down and then all of the sudden I realized I was sea sick. Back and forth, back and forth. And I appeared to be the only one. Back and forth. And a group of rowdy men sitting across from me were actually DRINKING! How did they do that? Back and forth and back and forth and back... And I did NOT want to throw up! I was not going to arrive in Edinburgh with the distinctive acidic whiff of vomit on my breath, even if slightly disguised by Juicy Fruit. So I stared at the floor, because I had heard that was what you were supposed to do. And I begged the Celtic gods to let the ship stop rocking. And I shut my eyes, and after a little while I drifted off, sitting up right. When opened my eyes an hour had passed, the boat was rocking less and we could already see the coastline of Scotland, which looked as rolling and heather-covered as the MGM art department had taught me in ‘Brigadoon’!

But then there was the bus from Stranraer to Ayr, which, although it went along the water and was very scenic, was long and twisty enough that by the end of it I felt like I might vom all over again. At Ayr I found out that I would fortunately be able to use my same train ticket, but that the train to Glasgow would take an hour, then I would have to take a city bus to Glasgow’s other train station (a fact that annoyed me to no end at the time), from which the train to Edinburgh would take another hour, clocking my entire journey at two hours longer than I planned. And Megan had put off her Canadian-Thanksgiving-in-Scotland dinner just for me!

The next three steps of the journey were uneventful enough, but seemed to take forever mostly because I wanted them to take no time. I tried to read Ian Rankin, but his cynicism about Edinburgh and its crime problems started to really get me down. I text messaged Megan telling her to start dinner if she had to. It was definitely one of those journeys that you knew you were going to kiss the ground when it was finally over. Waiting for the bus in Glasgow that would take us to our next train, a young woman asked me something and I had to get her to repeat it three times. She was asking for a lighter, but I had no idea what she was saying, because her Scottish accent made it almost into three syllables. It was as though she pronounced the ‘g’ and the ‘h’. The Scotch accent is the only one I’ve come across that sounds difficult to get out even for native Scots.

Night had fallen by the time I caught my last train, so outside the windows was dark, but I probably just missed seeing nondescript suburbs so no big lost. When I arrived I said out loud “No more public transport today!” and splurged on a cab which took me to Megan’s flat, where the preparing of Thanksgiving dinner was running late (just like at home!). She went all out, with roasted chicken (I doubt there are turkeys here), stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, garlic bread and even cranberry jelly. We ate at a little makeshift table in her bedroom and drank a lot of wine, and I was just so happy to be there.

Taking a piss

There are Irish conversational traditions I really enjoy. When I first started at the store, and would have to apologize for making a mistake on till, friendly customers would say "You're okay" or "You're grand". "Aww," I thought. "They can tell I'm getting flustered and want to reassure me that I'm grand. I gradually learned that "You're okay" means "IT'S okay" as in the situation, not a personal affirmation. Whatever, it's still cute.

But then there's other tendencies that I will not miss when I go home. Namely, the supposedly-comedic rudeness that people will show you when they are "taking a piss out of ya". I've noticed this a lot with Irish coworkers in particular. They will say something personal and pretty offensive and then will brush it off as just a joke. But the thing is, it's almost never actually funny, and no one laughs. "Taking a piss" is usually intended to deflate your ego a bit, take you down a couple pegs, but to do that it usually requires a grain of truth in the joke. Which makes it more difficult to just brush off when they tell you they're just "taking a piss out of ya" because they may have just underlined a paranoid feeling you already held.

My Quarter-Life Crisis and Two Films about Americans in Europe

Last night I finally rented ‘Summertime’, the 1955 Katherine Hepburn film about a middle-aged woman who travels to Venice. I say ‘finally’ because when I was not long here my friend sent me a screenshot from the film as a postcard from Italy (and on seeing the image of Hepburn in a shop with a smiling-black-slaveboy decoration in the background, I knew it had to be Venice, as they love their smiling-black-slaveboy motifs to this day!) I was planning on renting it at some point, but I put it off because I thought it might be slow or dull, and for some reason I thought it co-starred Rock Hudson and not the charming Italian actor it actually does. Last night, though, thoroughly exhausted from two opening shifts in a row (the earlier one in which I had been accused of not giving a teenage girl the right amount of change and a posh middle-aged woman guilted me because the store was out of plastic knives) I thought it was time to curl up with my old friend Katherine.

The movie is lovely, and shot gorgeously on location. The picturesque but cramped architecture of Venice is used brilliantly as characters will rush out of scenes only to be glimpsed in the background, crossing a little bridge or running up a flight of stone steps. Having been there last year, I got very excited that the first scene took place on the same train route that we took (all the sudden, outside of the windows, all you can see is water and then you know you’re close to Venice) and I recognized other locations relatively unchanged in fifty years.

The plot concerns Hepburn, whose name in the film is Jane Hudson (but not ‘Baby’ Jane Hudson) who saved up her whole life to visit Europe alone as she’s Katherine Hepburn and a self-described ‘independent’. Of course, ultimately, she falls in love, because that’s what happens to Americans in Europe, but the best parts of the film for me where in the first half, when she wanders around by herself, trying to make conversation with other tourists she has nothing in common with, unsuccessfully attempting to wrangle invitations out for dinner, and her only friend is a little Venetian boy who follows her around trying to sell her pens and pornographic postcards as souvenirs. The film captures the conflicting feeling of being overwhelmed by beauty while being doubly lonely with no one to share it with. At one point, suppressing tears at a cafe, a woman asks her if something happened to her and she replies, “No, nothing happened. That’s the story of my life, really.” I could definitely relate.

Two nights ago, I wanted to get out of my apartment, as I was getting utterly sick of the British TV adverts I see over and over again, and we’re sharing our space with a psychologist now, who will exit her office only to light candles in our hallway to mask the smell of our cooking even at dinner time, but nothing was on at the Irish Film Institute. I looked for other possibilities and found out ‘500 Days of Summer’ was on at the Savoy, a big ugly movie theatre located on the North Side’s big ugly O’Connell street. I suddenly had the urge to not see the film alone, so I text messaged my new Brazilian co-worker slash protégé Eduardo. How much more at home does it make one feel when you have friends who are ready to go out at the spur of the moment? He was in, but wanted another film as he had seen that one, so I did more research and saw that ‘Julia and Julie’ was on at a theatre that appeared to be right in city centre, but I had never been too, and so it was decided.

‘Julia and Julie’ tells the (two) true life stories of PBS celebrity chef Julia Child and modern day would-be writer Julie Powell who starts a blog in order to document her attempting every recipe in Child’s beloved cookbook ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’. Switching back and forth through the decades, the film shows the difficulty Child went through as a wife of a diplomat living in Paris after WWII trying to find what she should do with her life (“The wives here don’t DOOOO anything!” Meryl Streep groans in Child’s bizarrely swoopy voice) and the resistance she encounters when she commits herself to becoming a French chef, intercut with Powell’s (Amy Adams) blog-writing, which is an escape from her depressing cubicle job dealing with post-9/11 insurance claims (although it’s interesting to see September 11th now being shown as a matter of life in New York in romantic comedies). As a failed novelist, Powell also has to figure out what to do with her life, until her blog and the spirit of Julia ‘save’ her. There’s a hilarious scene early on when Powell goes out to meet her upwardly-mobile friends for lunch at a trendy Manhattan restaurant and they all order ‘cob salads without...’ (‘cob salad without egg’, ‘cob salad without bacon...’, etc.) The joke is that if, as Powell at one point claims, Julia Child taught America to eat and appreciate great food, we seem to have forgotten again.

Afterwards, hungry (of course!) and not wanting to go home yet, Eduardo and I went to a trendy tapas place on George Street, shared a plate of what was essentially potatoes and meatballs, but the red wine was good, and talked about the big cities of Brazil, families’ religious backgrounds, and life after death.

‘Julia and Julie’ was good escapism, and also made me miss my Mom, who gets great pleasure from cooking and also gets great pleasure from Nora Ephron (mostly ‘When Harry Met Sally...’ and really, who doesn’t?) but it also inspired me to figure out what I’m doing with my life (or at least continue to think about it). I’m twenty-four years old, have a Masters degree in everything but name because of a French test (Julia Child failed her first French cuisine exam, which made me smile), have never had a job in a field I’m really committed to, am interested in all sorts of things (film, fashion, art, politics) but the only thing I ever do which I’m good at is write, and, like Powell in the film, I can only do that with a blog. And you wonder if even that is really getting out there. Powell writes a couple times on hers, “Who is reading this anyway?” and another time gets all excited for her first comment, which turns out to be from her Mom.

All that being said, I still have time. Julie Powell was thirty when she got famous for her blog; Julia Child in her forties when she discovered French cuisine; and Jane Hudson was middle-aged before she finally went to Venice and fell in love. I also have a supportive family, the ability to make friends quickly and North American optimistic energy, which is mostly being used to ask “For here or take-away... and what size...?” over and over and over again. But by moving to Dublin all alone I proved to myself that I could do the brave and at times difficult thing in order to have an adventure and change my life. I will be ready to come home when I do, and take some Ryerson courses which will hopefully point me in new directions, reconnect with old friends and make new ones, and, perhaps most importantly, continue to write.

I know that should be the ending, but the theme of this post got me thinking about films about Americans in Europe and how many great ones there are: ‘An American in Paris’; ‘Before Sunrise’; about five Audrey Hepburn movies, with the most popular being ‘Roman Holiday’ (okay, she’s not American technically, but the movies usually have someone like Gregory Peck also in them. Everyone should check out ‘Two for the Road’ with Audrey and Albert Finney, which tells the story of a married couple meeting, falling in love, getting older and more distant from each other through non-linear scenes from their road trips around Europe in the 1960s).

Of course, these movies usually show Paris or Rome or Vienna not as they ‘really’ are, but as the manifestation of magical old world Europe, the flipside of industrial America. This is why almost all of these movies end with the American leaving; they have to, like Dorothy clicking her heels in order to return to Kansas, because the European city was just a whimsical escape from the real world, which is, naturally, America. But that’s okay. ‘The Journey’ as an archetype is very ancient, most likely the very first story, and we need it as much as early humans did to encourage us to venture into the unknown.

My apologies, loyal readers

For such a long absence.

I didn't even end up writing about my Amsterdam trip, and now it's the end of September. How did that happen?

And this will have to be a short one, as I've fritted away my morning booking ferry tickets from Belfast to Stranraer, Scotland, for my mini-holiday next month.

Okay, where to start? Amsterdam was good. Seeing Jen and Stu and Liam was fantastic. Went and saw Rembrandts and Anne Frank's house (the most touching thing for me was to see her room, with magazine cut-outs of movie stars on the faded wallpaper, and you can't help but think, 'I put movie stars on my walls as a teenager!'). Parts of Amsterdam are beautiful and magical, other parts are the tackiest places you'll ever see, and it was in that area that I was staying!

On my last full day I visited Liam in his city of Leiden, and saw his beautiful attic apartment above this ancient tea shop, and with a gorgeous view of the cathedral, and when I found out on top of it all he paid less rent than I did, I wanted to murder him. I checked my emails and found out that I 'failed' the UofT French test a third time, and felt like I was going to faint. We went out and had warm soup for lunch, and Liam is such an old friend that I did not care if I cried in front of him. He was very supportive and we discussed my options (either pay for another whole tuition in order to take the test a fourth time, or abandon the Masters degree I worker very hard on... neither of which is very pleasant) and also what I was going to do with my future. A lot of us are reaching a quarter life crisis, and as Liam said, this moment in our lives is made harder by the fact that it was immediately preceded by the best time in our lives (undergrad). Speaking of which, I keep having dreams about Guelph people, and living in res again and all those good times.

Anyways, I wander around Amsterdam in a blur that last day and really just wanted to be home, but 'home' now meant Dublin. I had Chinese food for dinner (very bland, as I mentioned before, am spoiled forever) and went to the fabulous art deco movie theatre and saw 'Away We Go'. I read a big chunk of Edith Wharton's 'Age of Innocence' on the plane home, and was deliriously happy to get back to my own room, away from high hostelers who turn on the lights at 3am and Italians who (honest to freakin' God) listen to their radios in the middle of the night! All I wanted was a whole pizza from Luigi's, the late night pizza place beside my house, and was overjoyed to find them still open when I got home from the airport. The eastern-european woman who works there barely gave me a smile though.

The next day I found out that I had an extra two days before I had to go back to work, so I wandered around the city feeling contented and comfortable. Two tourists stopped me and asked directions to a certain street.

I smiled and answered, "Umm, I'm sorry. I don't know where that is. I'm not from here."

A Lesson for the Ages (or Best. Night. EVER.)

Okay, I know I haven’t written about my Amsterdam trip. Every time I start on it I get distracting and disinterested. Maybe it’s because, fun as it was, not that much actually happened. Or it might be because I summed up my trip via Skype with three of my most devoted readers already (you know who you are) thus sapping my initiative to sit down and write about it. I will write about it. But right now I just want to tell y’all about my amazing night last night.

I came back to Dublin with renewed energy to get out there, experience things and meet new people. I had a fun time at The George’s bingo night on Sunday; it was as if the performing drag queens chose their numbers just for me (ie. ‘The Elephant Love Medley’ from ‘Moulin Rouge’ and Liza Minnelli’s ‘New York, New York’, which I most definitely sang every line to). As soon as they let us, I danced my butt off, but I didn’t really meet anybody and got intimidated by all the beautiful mans there.

During dinner on Monday evening I cuddled up with reruns of ‘Scrubs’ and ‘How I Met Your Mother’ (which is all about going out and meeting people, and whose photo-montage title credits give me pre-nostalgia for my twenties) and I was like, “I need to get out there!” I walked all the way to the North side, to Panti Bar. It was craft night and so a drag queen was handing out plasticine with instructions to illustrate events from your summer, which to me sounded way too hard. I just wanted to build a pyramid! I sat for about half an hour, nursing a beer, and looking around the room. I knew that if I stayed long enough an old creeper would probably strike up a conversation, but for some reason I wanted to do better that night. Eventually I spied a group, a girl and three boys, who were young and talkative and friendly-looking. I watched them for awhile, trying to figure out my opening line and working up the nerve to approach them. My heart was pounding in my chest and I kept talking myself out of it. Finally, I grabbed my mound of red plasticine and went over to their table.

“Hi, I really want to build stuff with plasticine, but I’m worried it’d look weird if I did by myself. Do you mind if I join you?” The girl gave me a welcoming smile. “Of course not! Pull up a chair!” “I’m not a creeper, I swear...” I added, unnecessarily.
“My name is DeDe. I’m from California. This is my friend Dylan. He’s from New York. We’re here for a wedding.” Dylan briefly acknowledged my presence. “And these our two new Irish friends! We just met them at the last bar we were at.”
“Wow, I thought you guys were all friends.”
“Well, we are now! And so are you.”

As we chatted, Dylan went to get drinks and the Irish guys left because they had work to do the next day. When Dylan came back he was very not impressed that they had left without saying good bye and he obsessed about how hot they were. Then he went off to meet other guys. It became manifestly clear right away that I did not warrant that kind of attention.
“Canadian, huh?” One of the only things he said to me. “I’ve met some hot Canadians...”
“Have you, now?” I said, the indirect burn slowly sinking in. I turned to DeDe and said more quietly, “You know, I’ve met some beautiful women...” and she laughed.

As Dylan went trolling for men, DeDe and I had plenty of time to bond, and I quickly became her new favourite person. We made each other characters from ‘Yellow Submarine’ out of plasticine and she explained that sometimes she got in trouble by flirting too much with gay men. Dylan eventually returned with a very cute Irish lad named Kevin; sandy blond hair, blue eyes, innocent face. DeDe couldn’t stop telling him how handsome he was and touching his arm. He said he was out with two girlfriends and they were going to go to the Dragon next and we should join them. When he left, Dylan whined at DeDe for flirting so shamelessly. When we were again left alone I told her, “He should let you flirt away. He’s a gay man! Anyway, YOU are not his competition...”

As the two Americans and I made our way towards the Dragon I tried to give them at the very least a rudimentary tour of Dublin. “So we’re crossing the Liffey now...”
“The what?”
“The Liffey. It’s the main river that runs through Dublin.”
“Oh, like in Paris.”
“Yes... like in Paris.”

When we got to the Dragon we joined Kevin and his two girlfriends at a booth. It was a Monday night, so no one was really there at the beginning, but then a surprising amount of people began showing up. Not totally happy with the selection at our table, Dylan preceded to gather more men from the bar. Before we knew it, a cute Indian guy was at our table, who called over his shy Philippino friend. Dylan seemed to be really good at approaching people and introducing himself, but not so good at continuing it from there. DeDe and I started the dancing, but she became disappointed that the DJ didn’t play many 80’s songs.

Back at our table, she complained about how she wasn’t going to make out with anybody that night.
“Do you want to kiss later?” she asked, at least partially in jest (I believe).
“I don’t really make out with girls. Sorry, but they all feel like my sisters.”
I went back on the dance floor and rocked out to most of the hit songs of the summer. My favourite moment had to be when we danced to Beyonce ‘Single Ladies’ and all wagged our hands in the air and I leaned into Kevin (despite, or rather, because of the fact that Dylan was trying to dance with him in a way to cut him off from his girlfriends and me) and asked, “How many Beyonces does it take to screw in a light bulb? None! I’m Beyonce, I don’t screw in lightbulbs, bitch!” And he laughed.

When I went back to the table, DeDe was stuck in an awkward conversation with another Indian gay guy and I didn’t really know how to extract her, so I wandered around instead. I found Kevin and his two friends (but thankfully not Dylan) upstairs by the smoking patio sitting in big comfy chairs and I joined them. We all talked and bonded, and one of the girls lives close to my neighbourhood.

“Any cute boys tonight?” Kevin asked.
“Other than you? Not many...” I answered, and he smiled. Then the conversation continued, but my finding him attractive came up again and next thing I knew he leaned in, across the table, for a kiss. He so surprised me that I barely kissed back.
“Oh, sorry! Didn’t know you were going to do that!” I stammered, all flustered, not believing that the one guy I had thought was cute the whole evening wanted to kiss me.
“That’s okay. (Pause) Want to come out for a smoke with me?”
“Yes.”
As we got up and walked outside he asked, “Do you even smoke?”
“No,” I laughed.

He borrowed a lighted from these two hunky guys, lit his cigarette and then leaned in immediately for another kiss. He caught me off guard again and I swung my arm in a weird way, knocking his cigarette out of his hand.
“Oh my god, sorry!” I cried.
“No, I’m sorry! Did I burn you?”
“No,” I said, looking down at my arm. ‘I’ve just decided to become Ally McFuckingBeal tonight,’ I thought. I turned bright red and started to giggle. It was at that moment that I figured out how much I must’ve liked him. He faced the hot men again, lit another cigarette and then we successfully kissed. But I was distracted with my breath.
“Do I taste alright?”
“Yes.” And he’d kiss me again.
We went back in and rejoined the girls, and we all continued talking like nothing had happened. I made some joke about Dylan ignoring me and Kevin was like, “But do you fancy him?”
“No.”
“Then it doesn’t matter. I mean, he’s nice enough, but comes on kinda strong.”
After a little while, he invited me out for another cigarette break and we kissed some more.
“You taste very nice.”
“You’re just saying that because I asked before!” I cried.
“No, I’m not.” I got all flustered again.

I began worrying that something would upset things, that some unknown event would ruin my life, that even though I had already got his mobile number, I would never see Kevin again. These are the kinds of things that dance through your head when you all of the sudden like someone. But we both started to lose each other in the kissing.
“Okay, we should stop,” he said. “I don’t want to ditch my friends.” He’s a good friend too.
So we went back inside and pretty soon they decided they needed to drive home. I walked them downstairs and found no one at our first table, but my shirt and jacket un-stolen (bless Dublin!) As everyone gathered their stuff, Dylan reappeared.
“You’re not leaving?”

“Yeah, we need to drive home to the country.” Then everyone stood around awkwardly for a minute, so I began giving little hugs and kisses to the girls.
“It was nice meeting you,” Kevin said to Dylan. “So,” he turned to me. “You walking us out?”
And that was my John Hughes teen movie, the nerdy one ends up with the dreamboat, PERFECT moment.
“Sure,” I said, and followed them outside. Out on George Street, suddenly back in the real world, there was no kiss goodbye, but as we discovered that we’d be walking in opposite directions, Kevin said, “Well, you have my mobile number.”
“Yes! I do!”
“Talk to you soon,” and they wandered away.
To say I was giddy would be an understatement. But I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to DeDe and I considered going back into the bar to look for her. And then I saw her leaving against the building with a handsome STRAIGHT Irish lad with dark hair and blue eyes.
“Dede! I wasn’t going to leave without saying goodbye!”
“Hey! Thanks for leaving me that whole time!” To which I felt like answering that I was not the one she was travelling with but abandoned to attempt to pick up twenty men, but I let it slide. I told her the whole story with Kevin, including the embarrassing Ally McBeal bits.
“You’re getting all flustered!” she cried. “You like him!”
“Shuddup!”
“Call him tomorrow!”
“It’s going to end in heartbreak,” I said, cynically.
“You don’t know that...”she countered.
“Okay, well, I should walk home, because nothing else can happen to make this night better. But I want to thank you for being so welcoming to me at first.”
“But you had the balls to come over to a table of strangers!” she said. “Good for you.”
“Okay, well, thanks for everything. You two have fun!”
“You’re a beautiful person!” DeDe yelled after me as I walked away and I turned and blew her a kiss.

I walked home in a complete daze.

Peter’s Chung King

Just west of Spadina and College, at the foot of Chinatown and on a street that has gradually turned into a computer supply store village, is Peter’s Chung King. You wouldn’t notice it passing by; old white drapes obstruct any view inside, although a signed 1980’s photograph of Sharon, Louise and Bram proves their endorsement. Inside is not more noteworthy. I believe it has mostly blank dull walls, interrupted only by some foreign money taped up and those weird Asian landscape paintings (are they plastic?) that only appear in Chinese restaurants. Truth be told, I don’t remember much more about the interior, as my family always ordered it to take out.

To call it our favourite Szechwan restaurant would be incorrect: it IS our restaurant. My parents were first introduced to it years before I was born when it was at another location. Its second place on College Street was conveniently just below my elementary school and five minutes from our house on Brunswick. The story is that they found it so delicious they licked their plates. Actually, many myths surround Peter’s. Most evocative are the stories of picking up Peter’s on our way to our cottage and driving the other passengers crazy with the delicious smells on the boat ride across to our island. Even if this only happened once, it caught on as a family tale because it sums up a wonderful experience of living in Southern Ontario: you could actually pick up really good Szechwan food and enjoy it on a dock beside a lake within an hour. How lucky are we?

Over the years different dishes were added or subtracted to our take out list (it is always Mom’s job to phone, always Dad and mine to go pick it up, and smiling Peter would occasionally come out and greet Dad as I waited in the car), but it was mostly the old favourites: spring rolls, Muchu Pork (later switched to the vegetarian Muchu), ginger chilli shrimp, garlic broccoli and, last but not least, Spiced Chicken, which because of a typo on the original menu (another legend) all of us call “spice-ces chicken”. This last dish of chicken, peppers and peanuts in a smooth, spicy brown sauce is so popular around the table that, as my brother and I got bigger, we had to start ordering two dishes of in order to prevent family fights.

It is our special occasion dinner, a good thing to have with visitors, but also good on a gloomy day when no one feels like cooking. When my first boyfriend was invited to have Peter’s with us for the first time, even at that early stage in the relationship, he recognized the honour of being included in my family’s important tradition. Peter’s was one of the things I missed most when I travelled throughout Europe last year, made worse by a lunch I had in a Parisian Chinese restaurant one Sunday afternoon when a dish that looked surprisingly like Spice-ces Chicken was given to me and got my hopes up only to end up tasting NOTHING like it. On my first evening home, when I told stories to my parents for three non-stop hours (drive from the airport, drive to pick up food, sitting down at dinner), we of course had Peter’s. And I realize now I had already subconsciously chosen Peter’s as my first dinner when I return to Toronto.

My Dad called me on skype yesterday as I was dressing for work. Before chatting for that long Dad said, “So did you hear about the terrible thing that happened on Granda’s birthday?” Even without any more information, in my gut I already knew. In reaction to my pained expression by Dad said, “Well, it’s not THAT bad...”

But it was.

“We had our order all ready and Mom phoned and a woman answered the phone and said, ‘Oh, didn’t you know? Peter decided to retire and the restaurant is closed. Next month I’m opening a sushi restaurant.’ So yeah,” Dad said, trailing of. “Thirty years, and it’s gone.”

Now, I was feeling pretty tired and lonely and a bit homesick already. Tears starting coming to my eyes, but I suppressed them. I can’t remember what I said, perhaps just nodded, and Dad said, “Well, he deserves to retire. Peter had been running it for a long time.”
In my head I said, ‘I don’t care! His kids should run it or something!’ Mom, in her housecoat and carrying her coffee, joined us.

“You know what, sweetie, don’t upset yourself about it. All this means is that we’ll have fun trying different places to find a new restaurant.”
Again in my head, I reacted with a modified cliché of the petulant child who has just lost his first pet: ‘But I don’t want another restaurant! I want Peter’s back! Now!’

“My only consolation,” I managed to say finally, “is that I’m not missing the final meal. But shouldn’t he have told us or prepared us? Thirty years...”
“Yeah, Mom and I were joking that we should hire Peter for around the house.”
If only. But of course, it wouldn’t be the same.

Then I had to go to work. As I walked in the bright early afternoon sunlight, tears streamed down my face. At first I berated myself; ‘You ARE NOT crying about a Chinese restaurant!’ But it’s about so much more than a restaurant or food or eating, although of course I will miss those dishes to no end and good Szechwan has completely spoiled me for the crap that is often called ‘Chinese food’ which tastes alright on the way down but revisits you all night. No, it’s not just the food. It’s the role it played for my family. It’s the beloved tradition that has been snapped unexpectedly from us. And now I can’t even remember the last time we ate it. But I am so glad I shared Peter’s with some of my new UofT friends this past year.

I was already upset about some of my favourite places in Toronto shutting down (mostly bookstores, like Mirvish Books and Pages on Queen Street). But Peter’s closing took me completely off guard. Restaurants come and go, and big cities are always changing. I will eat good Szechwan again and, more importantly, the warmth and fun of our family dinners (which made the Peter’s tradition special in the first place) will continue. But the two together, along with the ritualized drive down to College street, the parking in little-visited Snow’s Flowers across the street, the sitting with the warm plastic bag on my lap and the arrival home to a table set with plates and bowls and little pink tea cups from Chinatown and plastic chopsticks whose red and green markings have long since faded in the dish washer... these things will never be the same.
And recognizing that you can’t, as much as you’d like, stop time in its tracks, that sometimes things just have to change, is a part of growing up.

Peter’s, I will deeply miss you.

Ireland vs. The Netherlands, Round 1

Or; Vomiting up the Lord

Okay, stay with me.

So I’ve been reading Frank McCourt’s ‘Angela’s Ashes’ because it’s famous and he just died and it’s a good thing to read in Ireland, even if working at the Starbucks at Dundrum shopping centre gives me a VERY different experience of Ireland than McCourt and his brother having to pick pieces of coal off the cobblestone streets. Whatever. It’s brilliant. McCourt really managed to capture the voice of a child. I’ve been reading it on and off though, because there’s only so much of the tragedy you can take. (In between, I’ve picked up Rupert Everett’s memoir of a much different kind of life.)

One of my favourite parts of ‘Ashes’ was about little Francis’s first communion, which was a BIG DEAL in Limerick in the 1930s. The children became official Catholics then (one of his peers, because he couldn’t physically bring himself to swallow the Communion wafer, for his entire life never thought of himself as part of the Church), but more importantly, it meant they could big out on sweets and go see a James Cagney film at the cinema! Unfortunately, had the sweets and food made little Francis sick and he threw up in his grandmother’s back garden. Because it was the day of his first communion, in which one swallows, via a wafer, the body of Christ, grandma became furious that Christ was now splashed around her backyard. She sends Francis back to the Church, having only done his first confession earlier that day, to confess for this new sin and ask the Father what she should wash away Christ with. When Francis reports back that the priest replied water, grandma sends him a third time to ask if he meant Holy Water or regular water.

“Forgive me, Father, I have sinned. It has been five minutes since my last confession.”
“Were you the boy who just visited me?”
“Yes, Father. My Grandma wants to know if you meant Holy Water or regular water.”
“Regular water will do, son, and tell your grandma to not send you back again.”

I thought that whole situation was hilarious, especially capped off by the frustration of the priest. Who cares if it really happened to McCourt or not; stranger things have happened.
For instance, in preparation for my trip to Amsterdam I have been reading a Lonely Planet book on the city for inspiration. Rembrandt and sex shops, what’s not to love? On one page a little box is titled ‘Vomiting the Host’:

“The Miracle of Amsterdam had a rather unappetising start. In 1345 the final sacrament was administered to a dying man, but he was unable to keep down the Host (communion wafer) and—there’s no way to put this delicately—vomited it up. Here’s the miracle part: when the vomit was thrown in the fire, the Host would not burn. Shortly thereafter, a chapel was built on the site and it soon became a pilgrimage area...”

It goes on to described how “the Host” was kept in a wooden box, and allegedly sick orphans would be cured if they sat on it.

So there you go. When confronted with Holy vomit, the practical Dutch turn it into a miracle while the superstitious Irish are more concerned with cleaning it up. Okay, that’s not far; the Dutch people in the story are Medieval versus 20th century Irish, but still, you don’t hear stories like that every day.

UPDATE: After finishing this, I went back to Rupert Everett's autobiography. He is at Catholic prep school and, mostly because he figured out he was gay, ended up in the theatre club. He didn't think he could act, but cast as Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', he pulled out a campy, burlesque performace that brought down the house. His second major role was Mary Stuart in the play of the same title. When she is being administered her final communion before being executed, the man who was supposed to sign her death warrant couldn't find his plume and used a ballpoint pen instead, which made all the actors break character and laugh. Then this happened,

"I managed to stop myself giggling but as the priest put the host in my mouth, the image of Wadham signing my death warrant with the biro flashed upon me, and I sputtered with suppressed laughter. The Host shot out of my mouth onto the floor. There was a huge collective gasp. None of us knew whether to pick it up or what, because, remember, in the Catholic Church the host IS Jesus' body and there are all sorts of rules concerning it, and one is that you are not allowed to touch it under any circumstances. Only with your tongue, which raised the question: would Mary lick it up off the ground at this point? Our audience was well versed in Catholic ritual, so they understood my dilema and started to laugh. I was literally crying. My false eyelashes were halfway down my cheeks on a river of mascara and I'm afraid to say that Mary went to her death on the wave of a huge round of applause."

No vomiting, but still! Incredible!

French Tests, Sandra Bullock and Dreams of Amsterdam

So the French test is done. I had to go all the way out to Blackrock on the Dublin bus, which always manages to make me sea sick. For Toronto people, that’d be like UofT getting you to go to their Scarborough campus to write a test... at 10 am. But I did see a bit of the ocean for the first time here, so that’s something. The UCD Business School campus felt like a country estate (it may have been at one time) and I wandered around, having characteristically (even when I don’t know where I’m going!) arrived an hour early, realizing that this test was one of the most important I will have ever written; if I pass, my Masters is completed and I can move on with my life. If I ‘fail’ a third time, I am definitely not returning to UofT (at least in the fall) to spend seven thousand more dollars on the privilege of writing it again, and I don’t know what I’ll do with my life. Either way, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, so that’s just how it is I guess. The test went fine. I wrote it in a giant exam room with two other students writing their own things, and at the very beginning I heard the girl behind me burst into tears. It sounds bitchy, but I honestly thought ‘At least that’s not me!’

I paid my tutor for her troubles the day before. This is how inconvenient my finances have been this week; I get paid on Friday, but my rent is due Thursday (to come out of my Irish bank account automatically). I knew that the one would come before the other, although not how maddeningly close they would get, so I deliberately saved my rent money for this month for the last four weeks, and scrimped and saved wherever I could (I have ate A LOT of Starbucks Paninis, which I get four three euro at work). Then, the day before I went to write the test, UCD emails me to tell me I have to pay them with a bank draft, when I had thought I could just bring my credit card. They love bank drafts over here. Correct if I’m wrong, but I had barely heard of them back in Canada. I got my parents to put money in my Canadian bank account so I could pay my tutor on our last session, and then I planned to go to my Irish bank, get a bank draft, and transfer some money from my Canadian account to my Irish one so the landlords can get the proper amount of money.

Getting back to my room, I couldn’t find my Scotia bank card. It wasn’t anywhere in my wallet or my bag and I started to shake out all my pairs of pants. The last place I had seen it was when I used it that very morning to take out money for the bank machine to pay my tutor. I couldn’t have been stupid enough to leave it in the machine... could I? I ran back to the bank and asked them if anyone had retrieved it. Of course not. The only other place it could be would be if I had dropped it at the cafe I met my tutor at, so I quickly walked to the Moda, which is half an hour from my house. They hadn’t seen it either. I phoned my Dad long distance on my mobile on the walk home. How could I be so scatter brained to lose my Canadian debit card on exactly the week that I needed it! I am not a grown up yet!

I tore apart my room again when I got home. Finally, gave up and phoned the Scotia bank hotline (they had just opened, as it was just 9.00am in Canada), cancelled my card and asked them to send my parents a new one, which would probably take a week. If that wasn’t enough, all the time on hold to Canada used up all my mobile minutes and my phone ran out of credit. So I had to wait around until my parents came on skype. Just as I went to call them, I inadvertently nudged my mouse pad a little and saw a bit of bright red poking out from under it. The skype was ‘ringing’ as I lifted up the mouse pad: NO. I. DID. NOT. As my Mom said hi, I lifted up my ‘lost’ Scotia bank card.

“I don’t understand! I do not remember taking it out or holding it at my desk this morning at all!”

“At least you found it!”

“Too late, though! It’s too late now! I’m such a dumbass.”

After I wrote the test, I treated myself to some fish and chips and sat by the canal for awhile, then went back and had a deep nap. There had been plans to go to a party with Siobhan, but that fell through, so instead I bought a book about Amsterdam (I couldn’t find one for awhile, as I was looking under ‘H’ for Holland, not ‘N’ for the Netherlands) and sat beside the Liffey by O’Connel bridge reading it. I’m trying to get excited for a new city, but fears about the French test kept creeping in. The worst moment, having been disappointed before, will be opening that email which holds my fate. But nothing to do about it now.

I felt the need for some escapism, so I went to see ‘The Proposal’ with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. I love how romantic comedies have gotten to the point where they are so clichés of themselves but still unconsciously so. Mr. Reynolds is dreamy though, and I almost clapped in the theatre when I discovered Betty White played his grandmother. Still, took the Luas home feeling a bit depressed. Really, I should be spending celebratory nights of freedom with friends. I am really regretting not having a group here yet, and I don’t know how to acquire one. Now that the French test is out of the way I will have free time, but I still don’t know how. For the moment, though, I will concern myself with learning about Amsterdam, figuring out what museums slash gay bars to go to, and a location to meet up with Jen and Stu the first time that we all can find without getting lost.

Mongolia

It’s been a rough week. Actually, it’s been a rough month, which is partly why there are so few entries for July. My time is divided between a very stressful, tiring job and studying for a French test. I will start with the French test. For any of you out there who don’t already know, the University of Toronto tried to kill me this past year. I won’t go into the whole thing again, but suffice it to say I need to write a French comprehension test for the third time in two weeks in Dublin (which then will be sent back, at my expense, to Toronto). I need to pass this one, otherwise, supposedly I will have to pay another term’s tuition to write it a fourth time in order to get my Masters degree (which I am not doing, so I need to pass this one). After a bit of pressure from my Mom on skype, I decided to get a French tutor to help me prepare and she is fabulous. French-born, she loves living in Dublin and is in no hurry to go back. Where she’d like to go is Mongolia, so she’s adding Mongolian to the languages she knows. When we met up she said that she liked me because she could tell from my facebook profile that I was “a fighter”.

She wants me to translate Emile Zola’s famous article ‘J’accuse’ which charged the French government with conspiracy and anti-Semitism in the conviction of a Jewish military official. So for the past several mornings I have sat in my room, pen in one hand, French-English dictionary in the other, translating Zola. Occasionally it is fun, like when I decipher a figure of speech on my own, but mostly it’s tedious and frustrating and depressing, because after failing twice already it’s hard to believe that the third time will be the charm.

Then there’s the job. Oh boy. I won’t go into it in too much detail, but just when I should be feeling comfortable and confident at the store, I’m feeling exhausted and under pressure. It was so bad the other day that the only way I could make myself feeling better was visualizing quitting, and I have never quit anything. But quitting would put me back out there in the barren desert which is the late-00’s recession, and I can’t keep spending money here if none is coming in, and should I just call it a day and come home, but can I get out of my lease and... thus did I almost have a break down. I couldn’t even skype my parents, them being at the cottage (where I would love to be right now), so the only thing I could do to make myself feel better was eat an entire pizza and watch the brit-com ‘Black Books’.

[Tangent: A brit-com devotee, having been raised on ‘Fawlty Towers’, I’m using this summer as an opportunity to catch up on ones I don’t know. The 1980’s ‘Yes, Minister’, about a twittish MP and his scheming assistant who will do anything to ensure that the status quo never changes, was brilliant. I also really enjoyed ‘Spaced’, the show that launched the whole Simon Peg-Edgar Wright phenomenon. It’s really good if you are in your mid-twenties, working dead end jobs and feeling like a loser. Taking the brit-com into the 21st century is ‘The IT Crowd’, about the nerds who work the computers in the basement of a fancy company, but it has a laugh track, which is unsettling in the post-‘The Office’ era. I’m partial to ‘Black Books’ which is dark and surreal and follows the exploits of a Basil Fawlty-ish bookseller who hates all his customers.]

This morning was shit as well. Tried to sleep in a bit but kept having restless dreams in which E.F. Benson characters were ordering a never-ending selection of Starbucks drinks. Translated a bit of Zola, made myself some TERRIBLE microwavable risotto (Uncle Ben, you led me astray!) and watched my favourite episode of ‘The Golden Girls’, which gave up the idea of having a plot at all and just featured the three main ladies sitting around on a rainy day in the dressing gowns eating cake and telling stories. But even that couldn’t stop me from crying. The tears would come unexpectedly and horribly, bubbling up from my belly and uncontrollable. I think, along with being homesick and hungry, they were about being scared of my next shift and not knowing how it would be.

Of course it was better. It HAD to be (unless, y’know, I had killed a customer). The best part of it came at the very beginning. I came into the back room and my co-worker from Slovakia was there. “I had a terrible day yesterday,” I told her. “Me too!” She cried. “It was an awful, awful day!” She went on to list all the reasons she had a shitty day, some similar to mine, others unique, and that made me feel so much better. Then my co-worker from Mongolia came in. When we started working together I found her a bit cold, but her dry sense of humour had grown on me and I was getting the feeling that she liked me. Although about half of my coworkers are from other countries, nobody else seems to miss their homes (“Do you get homesick ever?” I asked the pretty Polish girl. “No,” she said, smiling.) “How are you?” asked the Mongolian girl. “I’m okay. Was feeling pretty homesick this morning...” “Aww, really?” And then she came over and gave me a hug. It was exactly what I needed. “I miss my Mommy too sometimes,” she said.

So I’m not quitting. But I’m taking things one month, week, day at a time.

Mr. Impossible

I got the travelling itch from my parents. When they were first together they travelled throughout Europe having adventures and when my brother and I were born didn’t let having two little babies stop them. It was much cheaper to travel with young children back then, I think, and they carted us around, having us famously (but only occasionally) sleep in pulled out drawers. I have distant memories of being in Europe when I was very young, but when you are a kid and you’re with your family you are home anywhere and you don’t notice your surroundings in the same way. I do remember what any kid would remember; my own stuff. There was the Raffi and Sharon, Louis and Bram tapes which I can still hear when I imagine driving around the blue-grey French countryside. There were my toys, of course. I remember playing with Muppet Baby paper dolls in a sunny garden, I think on the same day that my late step-granddad got stung by a bee and had to go to the hospital briefly as he was allergic. I remember (how could I not) my Chitatica Banana. She was my Chiquita Banana. She was inflatable and had a matching red hat and skirt. She had hung in the window of some grocery store and I had liked her so much my parents were able to buy her for me (I was spoiled). I just loved her. She came back to Canada with us and eventually she had to be stuffed with cotton in order to keep her figure. But that didn’t stop me from throwing multiple weddings for her and Cat in the Hat. (What could they have had in common, other than distinctive head gear?)

Then there’s the story I like less about the My Little Pony that I stupidly lifted towards the car window, probably to see her mane blow majestically in the wind, only to have her fly out onto the freeway. Spoiled as I was, my Dad made a quick and wise decision: No, we were not stopping for her. Speaking of car windows, I also had a series of Garfields with the sticky little tabs on the limbs, and to this day when my parents are keeping fun of the way little Max behaved in Europe they chant what I allegedly would shout after a long day in the car: “Where is my gite (French word for a rural hotel)?! Where is my GARFIELD!?”

Then, of course, there were books. There were many, but what I remember most distinctly were the Mr. Men books (and there later, more politically-correct Little Miss counterparts). They came out in Europe first and I believed he owned some in French. My favourite, as it went down in family lore, was Mr. Impossible. Maybe because he was inexplicably magic. What’s so interesting about being happy all the time, or having really long arms, when you can do impossible things like jumping over a house? Also, he wore a top hat. Again, a distinctive hat! Might have been a pattern.

Although the series has been continued by the original author’s son (and they even have a nifty website with games for each of the current batch of Mr. Men and Little Misses, although Mr. Impossible is absent) I hadn’t thought about them for years until their recent comeback. Mr. Men t-shirts are a huge trend in Dublin right now. Everywhere you go you see Mr. Messy or Little Miss Loudmouth t-shirts of different styles and on all different kinds of people. By coincidence I brought the transgendered Mr. Man t-shirt (he has stubble, hairy legs and high-heels and is named Monsieur Madame) I bought in Paris last year to Dublin and have worn in out and about sometimes. But I decided right away, despite my meagre earnings, that if I came across any Mr. Impossible memorabilia I would have to buy it, just as I had to buy a t-shirt with a giant picture of Garfield clinging onto it in Guelph one year. Problem is, Mr. Impossible has vanished. I vainly search through t-shirts, key chains, book marks... nothing. I will not compromise with a Mr. Bossy or some such nonsense.

Wherever Mr. Impossible is, I hope he’s happy, and stays in touch with the Cat in the Hat and his wife Chiquita.

Oxegen

[Note: for those of you keeping track of such things, and may God have mercy on your soul, that is not a typo, but rather the name of an Irish music festival]

I’m not a big music person; I don’t go to concerts; only buy CDs if I’m going to listen to them over and over in the shower or when planning cute lil’ outfits; and I do not base my identity on the bands I like (actually, I knew very few ‘bands’ right now). I have more of an appropriative (rather than appreciative) relationship with music, meaning that I enjoy songs not really for their artistry but for what I can bring to them, like memorizing their lyrics so I can lip synch to them on the dance floor. And yeah, I have pretty tacky tastes. I like classic jazz while cooking and pop and dance for everything else. And it’s gotta be upbeat. My main problem with hipster music is its aching earnestness. They sing love songs as though no one else had ever sang of love before. If I like a song about love, it’s got to be love with several giant quotation marks.

So when I first heard about the Oxegen music festival, assuming it would mostly consist of hipster indie bands I had never heard of, I wasn’t super interested in going. But I did have the weekend off. And I found out that Lady GaGa and Katy Perry were playing, and while I am not huge fans of either, I appreciate that at least some people are taking pop back from dull, over-produced solo efforts from former band lead singers and creating music we can dance to again. Plus, when it came down to it, I thought it would be good to do something really different with my weekend and have a new experience, something I hope I would never forget.

Unfortunately, after I had already bought the ticket online, I came down with a cold. That, combined with the fact that Niamh was the only person I knew there that I could meet up with, caused me to worry quite a lot as the time of departure for the concert approached. The festival was a Naas, which is about an hour outside Dublin, and Dublin city very kindly provided their double-decker buses to take us directly to and from the event. I did have to wander all the way to the North side (on my way I dropped off a thank you card for the woman at a Starbucks who had faxed my CV around the city), and was feeling quite ill when I got to the bus debut. The bus was filled with young people, many of whom were 19, many of whom were already drunk. I planned on reading my Oscar Wilde book for the journey, but the countryside was distracting (it was the first time I had seen any this trip) as was the singing of a group of teenage girls behind me: “POK-POK-POK-POKER FACE!” Also, I remember one of them, over and over again screaming, “I fucking snogged Pete Doherty!” It was like the bus to summer camp, but drunker.

When we exited the bus at the festival grounds it immediately began raining again. Luckily, I as smart this time and brought a hoodie, a rain jacket and an umbrella. I did not bring, for I do not have, a pair of rain boots, and I did not realize that “Wellies” were essential at Oxegen; the place was basically a giant mud pit. Even chichi Lohan-looking girls in neon tops and eye-liner, their hair fashionably unwashed as though they slept on the ground (although at Oxegen, they very well might have) wore rubber boats with their clingy skirts and opaque tights. After trudging through miles of mud to get to the entrance (only to have to trudge back as I missed the place to I was to pick up the tickets), I entered the festival only to discover that they did not provide one with a schedule of the performers, or a map of the grounds. “Great,” I thought, sniffling.

Then for about half an hour I wandered around in a daze, feeling wet and feverish and overwhelmed by the crowds of people, the loud music, the mud. I walked from one end of the grounds to the other to get a feeling for the lay of the land and text messaged Niamh. I finally asked a young woman if she had a schedule, which she did (evidently they were selling them, but I never saw any) and she told me Lady GaGa was about to go on, so I raced to the designated stage. By this point, even though it was still wet and muddy, the song had come out. Lady GaGa emerged from some sort of large white papier marche geometric enclosure in her characteristic wig and booty panties. It was very surreal it see her in broad day light. I think she would be better helped by a night venue, or at least being inside. I think the people immediately around me had some trouble relating to her as well. Her interaction with the audience was a little forced. “If you had told me a year ago that I would be performing in front of [how many people were there that day] I would have told you to fuck off. I used to work so hard to be successful and get famous, but y’know, now that I’m here, I wish you all were famous!” Yeah, sure you do.

Probably the best thing about Lady GaGa, besides all the male spectators who were sort of dressed like her, was a guy walking around with a sign that read “Lady GaGa was a dirty camel toe!” which got big laughs from everyone (I don’t think the Lady herself saw it). But when she sang ‘Just Dance’ almost everybody around me got into it and did what the song instructed.
Then Niamh texted me saying she was at the Lady GaGa performance and asking where we should meet. I said at the closest T-shirt stand, so when her ladyship was finished both Niamh and I ran around the T-shirt stand, yelling into our mobiles “I’m here! What?! Where are you? What?!” until we ran straight into each other. She gave me a big hug. “This,” she said proudly. “Is Oxegen! I will introduce you to my friends. As a young man, whose name I can’t remember, performed on the stage where GaGa had just been, Niamh introduced to her group of hardcore Oxegen-ians. “This is Max!” “Oh, are you going to write about us on your website?!” “You called Niamh a fag hag,” one of them announced loudly. “She is not a fag hag; she is a PUBLIC VAGINA!” Then PUBLIC VAGINA was screamed a lot. It may have been an inside joke.

Before I could decline, Niamh was dragging me off to buy drinks (“Because you are cold sober, Max, and I am shit faced!”) and talking me into buying two overpriced beers (“While we’re here. I’ll get two as well.”) Somehow, Niamh walked away with one, but I had two giant plastic cups of Heineken which I drank very quickly as we watched the next performer.

So I got drunk. But not drunk enough that when we were walking towards the Katy Perry venue, and some boys were wrestling in the mud and Niamh wanted to join (“Yes. Yes! It’ll be FUN.”) to not try and stop her. But she ended up in the mud anyway.
Katy Perry was probably the most fun. She brought a lot of props with her, like an inflatable strawberry and giant chap stick, and was wearing the pink leopard print body-legging much derided by the gofugyourself girls. She was much better at connecting with the crowd than GaGa. “Hey Ireland! I hear you guys are crazy! I just in Scotland and...” There were a few scattered boos for Scotland. “Hey! You guys are friends, be nice! You have the same proportion of gingers!” Then she added, “I can say that, I have a ginger in my family.” She sang ‘Waking up in Vegas’ and ‘Hot N’ Cold’ (my favourite) and the audience was mostly really into it. Of course, it was Oxegen, so there was still shenanigans: a giant inflatable phallus appeared and bobbed around the crowd. “What?” Katy yelled, responding to something someone said in the audience. “No, I’m not going to sit on it! You people ARE crazy!” Then she confiscated the giant phallus, but replaced it with her strawberry, although she brought it back out for a later song and writhed with it a bit. She finished with ‘I Kissed A Girl’ (natch) but halfway through the song the rain came back, but we all didn’t care and kept singing and dancing. Instead of hiding beneath the canopy of her stage, Katy came out and sang close to the audience and got soaked too, her mascara streaming down her face. When she was finished, I wanted to hear more from her, but it was probably for the best, as those were all the songs of hers I knew.

Niamh and David went back to the camp side to dry off and tidy up, and I found a fish and chip stand and ate my greasy dinner ravenously as I watched the passing concert goers slip around on the mud despite their Wellies.

Thoughts after One Month

One month ago I stumbled off the bus from the airport outside of Trinity College, having to schlep my two heavy bags all the way across Dame street to my hostel. I was jet-lagged and exhausted, overwhelmed by what I had just done (arrived, to stay, in a new country, alone) and filled with worry about finding a job and apartment (in the short term) and liking the city and whether I made the right decision (in the long term). That first day I went to St. Stephen’s Green, saw Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, ate a whole pizza myself and ended the day listening to the lilting accents of Dubliners as I quietly sipped my Guinness. Looking back, the first week was probably the worst over all, what with a lot of confusion and dread and not getting the spot in the house I wanted. I cried a bit in public parks.

But look at us a month later. With an apartment in a lovely village that is both walking distance from city centre and four Luas stops away from the mall in which I found a job, things worked out pretty nicely. Of course, appliances sometimes don’t work. A couple times this week I came home from a long shift at Starbag to my French room mate Cyril informing me that the shower was clogged, or actually, more like asking me if I knew what was wrong with it. After eight hours of unclogging sinks of Splenda packets and bloated fruitcake cranberries that NOBODY SEEMS TO EAT can you guess who was not in the mood to deal with any more drains? But because of him getting on Tim’s back when I didn’t care enough we’ve gotten some stuff around here fixed.
And I’m still getting used to the job. Today started out well with them teaching me till while there were not many customers. But as things picked up in the later afternoon, I found myself sharing the bar with one of my shift supervisors who I must say definitely has that Irish sense of humour. When we completely missed a young woman’s frappuccino, and then when I finally made it but made it incorrectly, he says to me, “There’s a difference between missing a drink and idiocy. Come on!” And smiled. Then I think he made a couple jokes to other people about the “supposed store” I used to work out.

I wanted to tell him, “Y’know, it’s very difficult moving to a new country. And it’s difficult being on your own. And it’s difficult getting used to a new store in a new country, and all new people who have their routines already set, which your own experiences might not gel with right away... I think, all things considered, I’m doing pretty well...” And that is probably when I’d tear up a bit. (Yes, I envisaged spontaneously tearing up in my run-through). But instead, when I had a chance, I discussed it with my other supervisor and she agreed with me that it was “just an Irish thing” and to not take it seriously and that I was doing a great job. And then things slowed down a bit, but when they picked up again at the end of the day and I made a couple mistakes calling drinks (either people were changing their orders, or I couldn’t understand their accents, or both), but that first shift supervisor was much easier on me. Then we all bonded while frantically cleaning before close. The best part of the day was finally getting to chat with customers and remember that I am in an actual foreign country with interesting people. And people always seem to become friendlier when you just simply ask them “And how was your day?”

Okay, just a couple thoughts about Dublin, and then I should go to bed. I went to this quaint little museum on Merrion Square (the Georgian neighbourhood that Oscar Wilde grew up in) which is a house they’ve restored to how it appeared circa 1800. When you’re inside being taken through the cook’s quarter’s in the basement, the elegant if small dining and sitting rooms with Neoclassical fixtures, and then the cosy nursery in the attic (I remember reading an article about a British designer who said that, if you’re looking for traditional British comfort, turn to the children’s quarters rather than the cold grown ups’), you can begin to picture yourself in Old Dublin. During my tour I tried to do this despite the presence of the fellow tourists, a group of middle-age women from Oklahoma who were characteristically friendly but attempted to relate everything we saw to their modern day lives (“More stairs?! Can you imagine how many times they had to walk up and down these? No wonder they didn’t need to worry about their weight!”)

I’m not a big Joyce devotee, but, despite the fact that many old buildings and whole streets survive in Dublin, it is easy to feel as though you’d like to just glimpse Old Dublin. The rainy, stony city with cobbled streets, in which all the houses looked the same and the only restaurants were pubs and the only public buildings were churches. It’s very romantic to think about. Dublin is a city that was shaped by booms and busts almost throughout its whole history (the grand Georgian period of the late 18th and early 19th century fizzled out when England dissolved the Irish parliament and many of the aristocracy up and left for London). Now I have arrived as yet another boom turns to bust, and no one really knows where it will lead. They say new building had essentially stopped. How much longer will people want four euro cups of coffee? Of course, realistically, I am hopelessly postmodern and I would not want to live in the Dublin of the 19th century. The things that are jarring against the old grey buildings are the very things that make this city liveable for someone like myself: Indian restaurants, vintage T-shirt shops and gay bars. These things are now just as ‘Dublin’, if not authentically more so, than Leopold Bloom, Molly Malone and fish and chips. And I guess, the longer I stay here (and I’m really considering staying the whole year), the more influence the city will have on me, and me on it.

George II

I wasn’t going to go out on Friday night, as I was still exhausted from my first two shifts at the new job and had another one on Saturday, but my new friend Rachel text messaged me before I went to the movies that she’d be at The George and I just couldn’t down an invitation from a new friend, even though I had been at The George the night before. [Nothing much had happened, but I did talk to this largish, heavy fellow who claimed to know all the provinces in Canada, put ironically left off the list two of the provinces with the largest Irish diasporas, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Also, he went on and on about Michael Jackson and I finally had to ask, “Were you a teenager of the ‘80s? Like, was he the big thing for you as a kid?” and he said, “Not really, cause I was born in 1986.” WHY DID EVERYONE GET YOUNGER THAN ME?!]

Anyways, I went to see ‘Gigantic’ mostly because I am a devotee of Zooey Deschanel because of ‘Almost Famous’ but we don’t see much of her. It was the first movie I saw at the Irish Film Institute that I could’ve done without. And I don’t want to go on a rant here, but I will outline a couple of complaints. [Spoiler alert, sort of]. First of all, the title is unexplained. And, despite dramatic intentions, the movie plays itself as a comedy, but without many jokes. And had a weird obsession with showing stomach-turning bodily-stuff (one barfs on camera, another has to pull a bullet out of his leg, there’s a group masturbation scene and John Goodman spits out from his mouth a brain tumour...YEAH). Then there’s the mildly offensive fact of a movie about the problems of rich white people features both casually racist language (is it making fun of racism, or not?) as well as racial stereotypes, like the repressed Asian businessman and the flirtatious black co-worker. I also have a problem with romances in which the two leads go out on two almost-dates and speak as though it’s a relationship that can be “all screwed up” by someone not showing up for a dinner, but all worked out by showing up for another dinner. Does the writer/director know how young people date at all? Also, if I see another movie (‘Juno’, ‘Smart People’) in which a baby arriving at the very end is supposed to clear up everything and make everyone happy. This is really where we’re at in 2009? Enough of this stupid Bristol Palin bullshit.

Okay. My night at The George. I found Rachel with her friend Elaine and we started drinking. I didn’t want to drink too much as I had to work the next day, which she was having none of. Rachel is a very good person to go to gay bars with because, as a bisexual, she is a girl, part of the queer community AND can discuss the hotness of men with you. She had the hots for this punky looking guy (“I’d do ‘em!”) while I got a crush on this guy who was sort of hanging out with him: acting awkward and awkwardly dressed to match, he had dark curly hair and looked a bit like that dreamboat Steve Zahn from some season of ‘Survivor’. Anyways, we made eye contact a number of times and I was trying to work up the bravery to talk to him. While we were standing outside in the smoking area Rachel began harassing me about going over and starting a conversation with him. “I don’t do that!” “Come on! Do it! It’s easy! Come on!” I kept hesitating, so finally she said, “Alright, I’m going to do it for you!” And she wandered over to him. Elaine and I began talking and pretended to not look over. “Oh, this is going to end horribly,” I said. “He’s going to have a boyfriend, or be completely not interested or something else...” Rachel wandered back. “He’s straight. He’s just here because of a birthday party for the one I liked. Yeah, totally straight.”

I wish it ended there.

Much later, after we had danced a bit, the girls had gone to the restroom and I was left outside watching over Rachel’s drink. A young woman came up to be to set her drink down and offered me a cigarette. “No thanks,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you have a lovely Irish face.” She looked a bit like Emma Watson, but obviously younger and very pretty. “Tanks, it is an Irish face.” We got to talking about what she had done that evening, and what I was doing in Dublin, until I saw the curly-haired guy sneaking up behind her. Now, I had not had a conversation (thank God!) but I knew he probably knew who I was, and I could think of no reason why he was approaching us now. “Excuse me,” he said to the young woman, whose name I forget, that I was chatting with. “I think you’re name’s Rachel, I was chatting with you before...” (Oh God.) “Um...” “...You were telling me about your friend Max, who wanted to chat with me...” “...” Before total disaster happened, I interrupted. “Um, this isn’t Rachel. This is a girl I just met. You didn’t talk to her. Rachel is in the rest room. This is her drink.” (For some reason, I felt the need to explain everything I could.) “Oh, okay. I’m Avery. I was just wondering if I could use that connection and get a cigarette.” The young woman who was not Rachel complied. Then we all started chatting to get rid of the tension. It turns out the two of them both worked in movies or TV or something, but some reference I made to the Irish Film Institute fell flat, and I suddenly realized that Avery, the shrewd straight man that he was, might be trying to pick up my new friend, but before I could politely exit, the girl said SHE had to go. I was not about to be left with a straight man (why’d they even let him in anyway!?) who I had twice been embarrassed in front of in one evening all by myself, so I explained that Rachel’s drink needed to be returned to her, and I had to seek her out. Second most humiliating thing to happen to me at a Dublin gay bar.

But that was not the end of the night. The girls and I ended up dancing again, and then I lost track of them in all the people and the smoke machine smoke, and I ended up dancing by myself with a handful of very randy couples all around me. Sure, I was a little jealous. It’s nice to be made-out with on the dance floor occasionally. Then this older gentleman (I’m guessing maybe... 37, but it’s hard to say) reached out his hand for me to lift him up onto the stage with me. And then an older woman did the same thing and I thought, a tad bitchily, ‘Is this my job now? Will I be tipped?’ but next thing I knew the older guy was dancing with me. ‘I’m going to let this happen,’ I thought. It was fun... for a little while. But after only about five minutes he began to venture with his hands further and further south. And this was not traditional over-the-clothing touching. He attempted to both go under the clothing AND unzip my pants. Shocked, I just kept literally pulling his hands up and away, but he was persisted. Honestly, my thoughts were less on being molested and more of the ‘I am not about to be kicked out of the bar for this drunken fool’s lecherousness!’ It turned out his was drunker than I thought, because at one point he grabbed me and the two of us almost toppled off the stage together and I gave him a little slap on the arm.

So after I lost him, I realized I would not find the girls again, so I headed home. Partly down George street a young lad approached me on the street. Now because ‘Gigantic’ had a subplot about a homeless man who had a violent and completely unexplained vendetta against Paul Dano, my first thought was ‘Oh my, he’s gonna kill me’. Then, because I had my cell out, I thought he was just going to ask to use my phone. But as he started to walk beside me he asks, “Where’re ye from?” “Canada.” “Canada! What’s... what’s the capital of Canada there?” “Ottawa.” “Is it now? Yes. I don’t know what I would’ve said... Montenegro or something... well, have a good night!” And he was gone.

And that’s not even the end of the stories from that night! Walking past The Bleeding Horse pub, I got in the middle of these group of four young people (three girls and a guy) and began laughing at two of them as they weaved some drunken scenario about waking up in dirt. “Oh, this was ill-thought out! I slept in soil!” It reminded me of the way my friends and I talk and I started giggling. The two girls in front of me turned around and asked if I was laughing at them. Before I knew it I was explaining once again what I was doing in Dublin and was being invited to go get “chippys” with them. I wasn’t even hungry, but they seemed so friendly and funny and I have been dreaming for weeks of going out for greasy food with friends after a night at the bar, I had to say yes. Turned out two of them lived near Ranelagh so we walked home together. It was a pretty nice way to end the evening.

A Tale of two Shopping Centres

It had been a couple weeks here and I was getting pretty desperate to find work. The only thing I would really draw the line at was being one of those people who hold signs up all day. So I was very thankful to get a call for an interview at a Starbucks at Liffey Valley shopping centre. I really didn’t give a hoot how far out of town it was. That is, until I had to go out there. I live to the South of the city centre, and Liffey Valley is to the direct West. So first I needed to go downtown, and then hop on a double-decker bus that would take about 45 mins to get to the mall. This was my first bus experience, so I giddily climbed up to the section on top and sat right by the front window; big mistake. These buses go fast, and swerve around tight corners, and I swear we hit a branch of a tree at some point, and by the end of the trip I was feeling sea sick. Liffey Valley is a gorgeous and gigantic mall that feels more like an airport. Despite realizing how inconvenient it’d be for me to get there, I gave the interview my all. At the end of it the manager said they were interviewing one other person who actually lived closer than me, but she was pretty certain the shopping centre at Dundrum was hiring too, and that I could get to very quickly on the Luas line. But, she added, I don’t know if this other person will work out, so I’m going to cover my bases first and get back to you.

That very evening, when I was walking down Ranelagh in order to buy a couple essential groceries, I got a call from Jayson from Dundrum shopping mall asking if I’d to come in for a “chat”. Assuming the other manager at gone with the neighbourhood applicant, I readily said yes and appreciated getting an interview at a closer store. The next day I went out to Dundrum, which despite being incorporated into the Dublin suburbs, still has the feeling of a village thanks to the little street you have to walk from the Luas stop which has pubs and charity shops and little brick houses with gardens. The mall itself, at the end of this stretch, comes up rather as a surprise. Jayson is a good guy and asked many of the same questions the Liffey Valley manager asked the day before. At one point I said, “I should come up with a different answer to that than I answered yesterday,” and he said, “You had an interview yesterday?” It turns out Liffey Valley had not called him yet and he had offered me an interview completely on his own (coincidently phoning me the day of my first interview!) No matter, they’d work it out, he said. I finished off the interview and felt pretty confident.

Then the Liffey Valley manager went missing in action, and Jayson, not wanting to step on her toes, didn’t offer me anything until he could reach her. Then it turned out she was waiting for the other person she interviewed to get back to her, but by this point I was favouring Dundrum and didn’t like the feeling of being bounced back and forth. “Do I have any sort of say,” I asked Zara, the assistant manager at Dundrum when she outlined the situation for me, “because your store is a lot easier for me to get to...” Finally, Zara phoned me about coming to do a test run (I forget what it’s actually called, but it’s something they do here in customer service where they see how you are behind the counter for a bit before they offer you a job). So I came in and everything went well (except a pitcher of frappuccino mix was knocked over in the fridge, maybe by me, and we had to mop it all up). Anyways, Zara said I did a good job and I’d hear from them soon, eventually getting a call from her the day of the Pride Parade.

And it’s been a whirlwind ever since. I was hired as a full-time staff member, which means I am guaranteed forty hours a week, which is radically different from scheduling in Canada. Also different though is the pace. In Toronto I must have worked at one of the quietest stores; now I work for one of the busiest in all of Ireland. I never thought about it this way, but starting at a new job is all about surviving a thousand little humiliations. For instance, despite the fact that the dress code is international, they made fun of me for wearing khaki pants instead of black. Worse, on my first day working with the manager Jayson, he said my scruff was a bit thick (“This store is kind of high profile, you see...”) so I offered to go and buy a razor and shaving cream from the pharmacy upstairs, which I hope showed my dedication. They have me mostly doing “cafe” (which is called “bussing” back home, but is so not as big a deal!) which involves going around picking up all the plates, mugs and garbage people leave at their tables. They keep apologizing and saying that I’ll get to do something more interesting soon, but for the time being, while I’m still getting used to the pace of the store and all the little things that are different, I’m quite happy with my little bin of dishes.