Cork, part II

This morning I was awakened at some indeterminate hour by one of the women in my room, who had set an alarm.  Actually, I was wakened at several indeterminate hours by various of the women in my room as they snored, came in late, snored more, etc., but on this latest occasion I was unable to fall back asleep, especially because the other women also began to wake up.  Eventually I bestirred myself to dress and gather my things.  The hostel was charging three euros for breakfast, which seemed not a very good price for tea, whole milk, and dry cereal.  Instead I went to a coffee shop I sighted yesterday, which I anticipated would be worth visiting - in fact they were; they had filter coffee - a true rarity at coffee shops in Europe.  I also had a scone, in fact my first-ever British (ish) scone, with butter and jam, and it was quite excellent.

Thus fortified, I took the bus to Blarney to visit Blarney Castle.  My guidebook considers it an overrated tourist attraction, and perhaps as ancient castles go it is ordinary, but I am not a connoisseur of ancient castles so I thought it was pretty cool.  I took many, many pictures of the castle and grounds (you can see them in the album I linked to yesterday, if you are so inclined).  I also visited a few of the touristy stores in Blarney carrying wool, linen, lace, etc. while I waited for the next bus back to Cork.  Shortly before the bus came it started to rain, and the rest of the day was rainy, windy, cold, etc. - typical Irish summer weather, I'm told.

One of the first things that happened when I got back to Cork is that I stumbled upon one of the two modestly-priced restaurants recommended by my guidebook, Idaho.  There I ordered coffee (no such thing as too much coffee) and something called a "potato bake" - baked potato covered with cheese and topped with bacon.  This is exactly as rich and hearty and perfect for a cold afternoon as it sounds, and while it is not exactly a subtle dish, it was quite good.  According to my guidebook the place is "tiny" and diners are "packed in like sardines", but I found it quite cozy.  Also, my meal came with a side salad, which gave a whiff of nutrition to the comfort food.

After lunch, I walked around the downtown for a bit.  I intended to work my way westward and end up at the Cork Public Museum, but I got a bit sidetracked and ended up visiting the southern third of the city, which I hadn't been before.  I saw one of the major churches and some of the University College Cork campus (one very nice building in every single architectural style of the last three hundred years).  Then I went into the park (the museum is kept inside the park, supposedly), but apparently the wrong park, or I went the wrong way in it, because I ended up on a path by the river with a wooded area on the other side and absolutely no turnoffs, and when I came out I found myself nowhere near where the museum was meant to be, and also on an entirely different river than I  had meant to be on.  After a somewhat extended detour in search of a restroom (they do not have them in most restaurants, or pay toilets as they used to in London) I climbed the hill on the northern side of the history to visit the other major church, and discovered that the Butter Museum was nearby, so I visited that as well.  I concluded my day with a trip to Vibes and Scribes, a chain of bookstores (that are in some places combined with record stores or craft stores or some other type of stores).

It was a good day.  Turns out, lunch - both the sitting-down and the fueling-up components - is helpful for having energy in the afternoon.  Tomorrow I will spend the morning traveling to Killarney.

photos

My Ireland 2011 album ... for some reason the post-on-blogger link isn't working.  I'm going to do just one album, in order to keep it a bit more manageable than my dozen or so Parisian albums are.

Cork.

So the first half of today was occupied with getting from Dublin to Cork.  I took the bus, as I mentioned, which was pretty inefficient - the trip was nearly five hours long, as compared to less than three hours for the train trip.  But it was also very interesting.  Although we were on highways for part of the time, we drove through (and stopped in) many small towns.  Especially during the second half of the trip, I got a passing glimpse of several sights mentioned in my guidebook (castles and monasteries built on rocks and whatnot.  Ireland is lousy with castles.)  The ridership was about equal parts elderly people and young people - no families, children, or, that I saw, anyone between 40 and 60.  (Actually, I may well have been the only person over 30 and under 60; people who look the age I think I look - and, apparently, as I learned last night, even more people who look the age I actually look - tend to be in their mid-twenties.)  It was actually a fairly pleasant experience, which bus rides in the states - even with wifi - never, ever are.

When I got to Cork, I proceeded immediately to my hostel; this place is definitely friendlier than where I stayed in Dublin, and the common rooms are more spacious and the bathroom less deplorable, but it's also more crowded.  And, again, no towel for rent, and not even a scrap of hand soap in the bathroom.  In my old age I have become exceptionally demanding.  I set out to explore the city, and one of the first things I did was go into a conveniently-located Marks and Spencer to purchase a towel.  I was also a bit curious what, exactly, the famous M&S entailed - it seems to be basically a giant Target, a bit more pretentious and much more expensive but really only because it's British.  I ended up getting a beach towel because (a) it was on clearance sale for a price I might actually, at home, consider paying for such a thing, and (b) I don't have a beach towel and have occasionally wished for one, so it's not a completely wasted purchase as a bath towel would become after this trip.  Now it will be my Irish beach towel.

I walked about Cork for a while, getting the lay of the land - it seems to be much less big-cityized, but also more spread-out, than Dublin.  I went to the English Market (continuing the Ireland-is-the-Philadelphia-of-Europe theme; it was just like the market in Philly except with no Amish vendors and much smaller) and purchased my first proper(?) meal of the trip, a sausage on a stick.  (It was actually really good, even if I did feel a bit stupid eating it.)  I went to the Crawford Art Gallery, which is supposed to be one of the best art museums in Ireland (according to my guidebook); it was actually quite good, even ignoring the zero-Euro cost.  They had a variety of paintings, sculptures, and installations from the nineteen, twentieth, and twenty-third centuries, with some - but not too much - explanation.  On the way back to the hostel, I got a bit lost and ended up walking in what I would have thought was a pedestrian-unfriendly zone - a sort of industrial area with lots of car traffic, home of Heineken Ireland - which contained quite a lot of pedestrians.  I went into several small grocery stores to buy something for dinner, and was repeatedly appalled at the offerings outside the snack / dessert area.  Mayonnaise seems to be a major ingredient in everything here, sometimes in addition to margarine.  Butter and ham also feature prominently.  I ended up buying a wrap with ham and coleslaw (apparently that's considered a vegetable here).  I may have discovered the one country on earth where the cuisine is actually worse than in the States, and - at the same time - the one vacation where it is possible for me to gain weight.

written this morning, on the bus

Well, it’s been up and down.  After finishing my blog entry last night and eating the last of my filched-from-work snacks for dinner (when I get around to posting photos, you’ll see that I haven’t had a proper meal since…. Well, it depends how you define proper meals; possibly since Sunday) I went to the pub where the Literary Pub Crawl was to begin.  It was a very good tour; it began with an introduction to the literary heritage of Ireland and an excerpt from Waiting for Godot I hadn’t realized it, but Samuel Beckett is Irish) and continued with three more pubs alternated with (outdoor) discussion of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and other Irish writers as well as excerpts from the work.  The tour guides were really excellent; they are professional actors and very knowledgeable on the subject matter.  I didn’t have anything to drink at any of the pubs because I was already feeling so knocked-about, but it was interesting to see all the different places.  One of the people on the tour had also been on the historical walking tour in the morning, and we got to talking – he was a law student from Moscow doing a summer-long tour of Europe to participate in debate competitions.  As I was leaving the final pub to go back to the hostel, one of the tour guides suggested I arrange a future meeting with “[my] friend from Moscow” because “stranger things have happened”.  I pointed out that (aside from the fact that I’m pretty sure neither of us was interested in such “things”) he lives in, you know, Moscow, and also is probably a decade younger than me, and both tour guides were quite surprised to learn that I am not, in fact, 22.  Of course I know I look young, particularly when I’m tired, but these days I mostly meet people who know that I’m not a college student, and my conception of myself has evolved so much in the last five years that it’s surprising to realize that I still register (at least to middle-aged men) as very nearly a child.

               That was the up bit.  The down bit started in the middle of the night, when I was awoken by the noise of the bars outside and the snoring roommate inside and kept awake for, I don’t know, somewhere between one and two hours.  This was much-needed sleep that I lost, but worse was the fact that I couldn’t really entertain myself, since my netbook was in my locker outside and turning on a light while other people are sleeping is not the done thing.  Also, I was starving; I retrieved and ate the “flapjack” I bought yesterday – that was the last of my stockpiled food, and events like last night are one of the reasons I stockpile – and tried not to feel too sorry for myself.  I thought of two of the couples on the literary tour; they must have been in their late twenties, both newlyweds, with about eight brain cells among  the four of them (this is an unfair characterization, I suppose, as one of the couples seemed to possess about four brain cells each, while the other couple clearly had none).  They chattered away merrily while we waited for the tour to begin, mostly about their weddings (one of the couples was on their honeymoon; the other, or at least its female half, was just wedding-obsessed) and a bit about their travels.  I was certain that neither of these couples, in their proper hotel rooms, was having trouble sleeping, or at least if they were, they were having trouble sleeping in a proper room.  Of course, I told myself, hotel rooms in Europe are not, in my experience, significantly less depressing – or any more spacious, per person – than hostel rooms. 

               At some point I fell asleep again and didn’t wake up until morning (good).  I showered – there was hot water (good), and although I didn’t have a towel and the hostel people didn’t have one to rent to me (bad), it was fairly warm so I was able to get cleanish and dryish without too much fuss (good). I had a bit of breakfast (good).  I discovered that I had forgotten half the cord for my camera (bad, but could have been worse – it was the outlet half, not the camera half, so I can still charge by connecting to my computer, possibly, or possibly with the plug half of the computer adaptor) and had been under a misapprehension about the outlets available in Ireland and brought the wrong adaptor (bad, but could have been worse – the hostel sold me a universal adaptor).  I also discovered that I could get a bus instead of a train to Cork, which would take more time – unclear how much more time, maybe an hour?) and cost a great deal less money (13E rather than 60E, which seems worth it).  I had to hightail it to the bus station, though, since there are only buses every two hours.  I made it just in the nick of time (very good; the train station is all the way across town so I might have been stuck for two hours if I’d missed the bus) but as I was putting my bag under the bus I realized that one of the compartments was open.  It wasn’t the main one, where I have all my clothes and sundries or one of the smaller ones where I have shoes and lotions.  It was the second-to-main one, where I put all my biking gear.  It’s unclear what, if anything, fell out – I didn’t have time to look, and I don’t even recall how far open the compartment was, definitely significantly.  This could be very, very bad – my biking shoes and toe clips were in there, which might be hard to replace here and would certainly be expensive ($200, or more, for both); also my biking shorts, brand-new camelback, and bike helmet – in other words, all the expensive and/or difficult-to-replace-while-traveling stuff is in this compartment, so this is probably the worst compartment to lose something from, since clothe and toiletries are comparatively disposable.  So I could have really screwed myself over here, simply by being in a rush and forgetting to check all the compartments of the bag.  It is also possible that nothing fell out; if something heavy or loud had fallen, it is to be hoped that I would have heard it, or that someone walking behind me would have seen and told me.  My blue vest was sort of poking out when I discovered; this is encouraging because it is one of the last things I put in the compartment (although also lightweight and friction, which means less likely to fall out).  The nature of the compartment is such that I’m most worried about narrow things, particularly the camelback and the pedals.  I suppose there’s no point in worrying about it too much, since I can do exactly nothing about it until I get to Cork.

               Which is where I’m on my way to now.  We’re driving through countryside; it seems to be not exactly woods and not exactly farmland.  Pastureland, maybe?  Just now I see a field with grazing animals – cows or sheep.  Very Britishly, there have been lots of walkers, on the road (when we’re not on highways) and even in the fields.  The fields are much smaller than American fields, too, and have trees or shrubs as borders.

One thing I’ve noticed here is how many other languages, besides English and Irish, I see.  Everything is in English, of course, and everything official is also in Irish - apparently only the very old and the very well-off speak it now – but there are also bits of German and French and everything else.  I wonder if this is a European thing, with all the countries being so close together.  I didn’t notice it in France, but they’re defensive of their language there and frequently signage isn’t even in English.  I noticed it a bit in Iceland, but not as much, and thought it was because of the prominence of the tourist industry.  I don’t recall noticing it at all in Germany. 

Sleepy, and also hungry.  Should have had more breakfast in the hostel, but I didn’t really like the place and felt uncomfortable there.  Hostels are always physically uncomfortable, but the attitude of the management and guests makes a big difference in how they feel.  At this one, the management seemed largely contemptuous of the foreignness and uncoolness of the guests, and the guests seemed obnoxious and aggressive.  Perhaps, though, this is just that I’ve gotten too old and remain too uncool for such places.  I think Cork will be better, if only because it’s a smaller city.  There should be less street noise, hopefully less crowding.  I’m looking forward to relaxing for the day and a half after I get there (assuming I don’t have to shop for new bike supplies…) – and also to the rest stop we’re supposed to make in a while, when I’ll be able to get some kind of snack.

Dublin. No, I do not have a creative title.

Somehow, when I travel, I always seem to have more adventures than usual even before I leave home.  Perhaps I am more attuned to adventures, or perhaps there is something about dragging a suitcase that creates adventure.

I don't know that I have the energy - or the time, really - to do my adventures of the last 24 hours justice, but I'll try to make a quick rundown for the benefit of posterity and my two readers.

• Met a bizarre character on the way to the airport
• Flew on  possibly the oldest commercial airplane currently in service.  
• Took pleasant, efficient, reasonably-priced public transit directly to hostel.
• Discovered that I have become too old and spoiled to appreciate hostels.  In this one, you have to either leave your stuff unlocked (bad idea, obviously) or lock it in lockers that are not only not in the same building as where you are going to sleep but not in an actual building at all.  This is particularly fun when you discover something in your bag has exploded; my approach to this has been to mop up as best I can and just cede that compartment to grossness for the time being. (Fortunately it only had bottles in it, no clothes.)
• Walked around a bit, trying to get my bearings and choose between the free walking tour recommended by the hostel guy, which seemed poorly organized but was free, and the 12E walking tour recommended by the guidebook.  After a meallet of yogurt and coffee (eating is an adventure for me even at home; in a foreign country, there are whole realms of excitement, such as the fact that they have hazelnut yogurt here, which is actually really good, even though it's Yoplait, which is a brand I can't stand in the US, and also trying to ingest caffeine in the absence of proper drip coffee, which which today's solution has been something called the macchiato) I chose the latter.  It turned out to be a good decision; there wasn't too much walking involved, but it was historically-focused and quite interesting.
• Comment: A lot of Dublin architecture reminds me of early U.S. architecture, I think what would be called Federalist at home.  Here it's called Georgian and is on a grander scale.  In general the city is a bit like Philadelphia - lots of history, lots of old politics, buildings from the same period, upscale shopping, a bit of seaminess - but with more aggressive drivers.
• After the walking tour, visited the Chester Beatty Library, which is an impressive collection of illuminated manuscripts, plus an exhibit about art books by Matisse.
• Walked north of the river - shopping (largely chains we have in NYC, plus Marks and Spencer), books and more books, tourists and souvenir shops, statues.  Had more coffee, and something called a "tiffin" that I thought, from the packaging and display, would be a granola bar or protein bar or something, but turned out to have the following ingredient list: "Belgian milk chocolate, biscuit".  I'm pretty sure this food item would be illegal at home, but it did give me the energy to continue walking - important, because at this point (around 3 p.m., or 10 a.m. after almost no sleep according to my internal clock) I was definitely flagging. 
• Continued walking.  Presumably there are pictures of the interesting things I saw on my camera.  Saw another shopping district and a biggish park.  Sat on the grass, fell asleep, woke up freezing (it was warm-ish this morning but by late afternoon was in the low 60s).  
• Detoured through residential areas to see the birthplace of George Bernard Shaw and the Irish Jewish Museum, both open only a couple hours a day and not the hours I was there.  At this point the day was starting to feel less like vacation and more like boot camp, which I suppose is how my vacations frequently end up.

I have at this point walked past/through a good portion of the tourism-relevant area of the city.  There is certainly more I could see, and museums I could visit and so forth, but I won't feel bad about leaving tomorrow morning.  Tonight - because a hostel is not a place you have a quiet night in - I'm going to go to something called the Literary Pub Crawl, which is basically a tour of places that writers went (although probably also a bit of a pub crawl as per the name) and is supposed to be very interesting.  Then, I'm looking forward (with perhaps a bit of delusional optimism) to a good night's sleep before a quiet train ride to Cork.

weekly roundup

This has been a middling-uneventful week, although I suppose I have some excuse for that - in addition to marathon training and wrapping up a project at work, I'm also preparing for a trip to Ireland (which I plan to chronicle here).  I did manage to go to one wine bar with my less-serious book club (we read Penelope Lively's Family Album, which was worth reading even if we didn't discuss it all that much), Cellar 58, where the waiter was extremely anxious for us to order food and extremely tardy (over an hour, for simple-to-prepare plates, when it wasn't particularly crowded) in delivering it.  The amount butter and salt contained in my egg-on-bread dish made up for some, but not all, of that.

, 

For the first time ever, I managed to properly explore Summer Streets - by running through it.  I covered the whole distance, plus the Brooklyn Bridge, twice, and although the "activities" seemed a little deserted (with the exception of the sand-building area) I was impressed by the number and professionalism of the volunteers and police officers, the water stations, and the link with Central Park.  I managed to run about 14.5 miles with minimal unpleasantness - a good note on which to take a hiatus from training for a couple of weeks while I'm out of town (I'll be walking a lot, of course, and during part of my trip I'll be biking 30-40 miles a day, so it's not as if I wont be getting exercise... just not of the running variety).

Also, I finally saw Harry Potter, in IMAX 3-D of course.  To be honest, I can't say that it was awesome - but then, I don't think any one of the Harry Potter movies is awesome.  They're all good, but most of the awesomeness is in their sum.  The books are similar, although they're obviously an awful lot better.

I'm leaving for Ireland Tuesday after work.  I am mostly packed, but I don't feel at all prepared.  I suppose that's normal.

I have done, and failed to blog about, a number of things lately.

Thing 1:  Fondue at Kashkaval.  After my excursion to Artisanal, fondue was clearly the thing to do.  Instead of going back to Artisanal (huge, high-ceilinged, thoroughly French, midtown-Easty), I went to Kashkaval, which is basically the opposite - cramped, even by NYC standards, with a much younger crowd and serving Middle Eastern tapas (which I didn't try) in addition to the fondue, and also housing a cheese-and-fancy-foods shop (which I didn't look closely at, being spoiled by the many cheese shops in my neighborhood).  The meal consisted primarily of melted cheese with dessert starring melted chocolate, so of course it was awesome.  Also interesting, because I had never had anything with cheese fondue besides bread, and on this occasion tried both vegetables (ranging from the good - mushrooms, broccoli - to the weird - peppers, which are not weird themselves but don't really go with cheese, insofar as anything can not go with cheese) and meats (the meats were very good; dipping them in cheese did not particularly improve them).

Thing 2: Excursion to DC.  The purpose of this trip was to organize and pack up my remaining possessions at my parents' house, although it felt kind of like the purpose was to spend ten hours on a bus over the course of two days.  The pain of the lengthy bus ride was significantly alleviated by rereading Sense and Sensibility.

Thing 3: Master Class, on Broadway, starring Tyne Daly.  This is a play about Maria Callas, an opera singer about whom I knew little and cared less.  I do somewhat like opera, though, and this play made me want to see more of it.  It dragged a bit at times - there simply wasn't enough action, or enough characters, or any humor, to prevent it - but Daly's performance was incredible and usually engrossing, and it was definitely worth seeing.

Thing 4: Fifteen-mile run.  My goal was to get one of these in before my trip to Ireland, and I did, although just barely.  I was sick much of this past week (to the point of actually taking a day off work Tuesday) and, although I felt better on Friday, my evening at the theater prevented me from getting to bed as early as I'd have liked and the vestiges of my cold kept me from sleeping well.  I woke up at 5 a.m. yesterday morning, feeling okay, and after a bit of cereal and a bit of dawdling headed out to Central Park.

This was one of those runs that felt bad from the beginning, and never really got any better.  They happen.  I ran one big loop around the park - six miles - and then one loop on the upper five (comprising Harlem Hill but not the easy bottom loop).  The last part of this loop was alongside a race that was running on the lower five, and because of this race and the exhaustion that was quickly beginning to overtake me, I decided not to do my last four miles as a single loop around the 72-to-102 portion of the park but two circuits of the bottom loop.  Up until this point I had been running very slowly but had only stopped twice, at the water fountain on Harlem Hill, for refills, and although I felt very tired I had no specific complaints aside from running short of tissues.  I'd worn a shirt with longer sleeves than usual and my worst friction burns weren't acting up too much (later, I felt burning at the collar of the shirt, and my burns look pretty bad even today - but they feel way less bad than usual, probably because I can wear shirts that don't hit so high).  But things got very bad very quickly after I hit the 11-mile mark - calf spasms, thirst, general fatigue and desire to stop running at every moment.  I was taking (short) walking breaks about every five minutes by the end of the run.  When I finally finished, it was an effort to drag myself home, and I felt pretty badly for several hours.  I'm pleased that I did this before my trip (next weekend, I'll probably bike Summer Streets - for fun, and for bike practiced - instead of doing a long run) and also rather apprehensive about how I'm going to get from where I am to marathon in the next 13 weeks.

Thing 5: Alexander McQueen at the Met.  Sadly, this is something I did not do.  I had been putting it off because of the reports of huge crowds, and when I finally tried to go yesterday (this is the last weekend of the exhibit) the line was out the door.  And around the steps, snaking along the plaza, and down the block.  So I went to the Guggenheim instead and looked at rocks on pillows (weird) and a room with dollar bills covering the walls (cool).

Thing 6: Discovered an(other) awesome brunch place: Elmo, in Chelsea.  Really more of a general restaurant, but the french toast was awesome (and huge, although after yesterday's run the hugeness wasn't a problem).  It was both unique (made with raisin-walnut-cinnamon bread and topped with very good baked apples and caramel sauce) and good.  And - sadly rare in brunch places - the waiters were non-snooty and refilled my coffee without being asked, and - also rare in brunch places - the meal was actually a reasonable-even-outside-NYC price.

Agenda for this week:  several small workouts, although possibly not today.  lots of work.  book club.  start packing for my trip.