A Trip well travelled

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Hello avid blogsters,
Well, I am safely back in my dear ole muggy North Carolina. I hope you have all enjoyed keeping up with my traveling adventures. The tail end of the trip was a series of buses, hitched lifts, characters, and tea. Let me fill you in on some last tidbits, stories, and maybe pseudo deep thoughts with Jack ANDY (saturday night live anyone?). Since I did get to do a lot of reflection on this trip (happens when you are alone on a bus), I feel myself inevitably going into some final reflection here. But first the stories:

So I finally made a trip up to Northern Ireland where there was this legend of a fiddler that I had secured an interview with for my project. The rain was brutal and only made things worse for the already slammed little green island. For those of you that don't know about a week ago Ireland was under water. Something like 200 Dublin families lost their homes and all across the midlands and North there was serious flooding. So rain is nothing new really to Ireland but most people were unaccustomed to this. Someone must have done something really serious to piss Zeus off. I think it's better but keep Ireland in your thoughts..Anyway, I got into Newry, Armagh and met up with the woman I was set to interview. We just sat in her living room and listened to music and talked. All the awhile, she just kept feeding me Irish brownbread and a few Irish breakfasts. I must have looked like skin and bones by then because the trays just kept coming at me, and those of you that know me (which I would suspect would be all of you) know that my profile disappears when I turn sideways anyways. So yea, I ate that brownbread like it was my job. Enough about food..
We went to a session that night where some drunken American idiot kept hooting and hollering in between tunes to just remind everyone he was a drunken idiot. On the way back we drove through Northern Ireland back to dear old Carrick-on-Shannon which had become my home away from home. It was surprising to see how much IRA insignia there still is plastered over County Armagh. Spray paint here and obnoxious IRA block letters there. It's important to remember that only 15 years ago that place was on fire. Ya really can't imagine (myself included) what it was like unless you were there but it was an eerie reminder of "the troubles" as those 30 years have been called in Ireland.

I really just interviewed my face off those last few days and got to do a lot of travelling because of it. Mayo, Galway, Clare...I was a giggling Irish baby in the cradle of Irish traditional music. I even went to Dublin for a little while which was like going to another planet. Dublin is a bustling cosmopolitan wet metropolis. I walked down O'Connell street which is the Times Square of the city I suppose and gave myself a little tour of Trinity College. I realized this after turing Trinity, but a funny thing about Ireland is that everything is either 40 years old or 4000 years old. Trinity was the exception because the buildings there were these aged gray edifices enclosed in a beautiful little campus. All those buildings seemed centuries old and it gives me cold chills to think of the great minds that have walked through them. But before seeing those, it seems like the Irish country side is either sprinkled with crumbling pre-celtic ruins and medieval abbeys or new cookie-cutter housing complexes...(an American export maybe?). Anyway, it's the most bizarre juxtaposition of old and new. Dublin I say again is completely different. They have everything there. People of every color, buildings of every century, liquor of every potency, and music of every genre.

I'd say the project part of this trip was a success. I came away with 12 interviews and each one was more insightful than the last. Most of these were fiddlers (surprise) but I made exceptions for a few flute players and accordionists as well. The accordion is enormously popular here (insert accordion joke here). I think Ireland is great and it has changed dramatically since I was there in 2003. Everyone loves to joke about the recession but it has caused a few problems which will only grow for some people. The drinking laws have been tightened and you can only get away with one pint before you hit the road....and they WILL breathalize you. The youth love to party and are all on in to that techno-pounding stuff which makes my ears bleed and makes me want to cry. I think that is a European thing though. I can only really comment on the Western Irish because that's the Ireland I know best, but Ireland changes every other valley. The accent changes, the popular sport changes, the weather, the everything. Every now and then you find a little town where it seems like everyone knows you. You'll walk down the street and random strangers will want to know "so how ye doin'?" Doin' pretty good, I'd say. Ireland was good to me. Each of you should go to Ireland and see it for yourselves. This has all been my take on it. They're not all happy go-lucky shamrock-eating leprechauns and while you know that, the gift shops would seem to indicate that tourists think Ireland is a big bowl of Guinness ready to be consumed by them. That's not Ireland though. Yea, they love their Guinness..it is THE beer of choice (sorry Co. Cork natives), but they also love their families and a good country-western song. Don't ask me why they love the latter, but as I said, cultural phenomenon yet to be researched....Ireland to me will always be having a pint in the pub till 3 in the morning with those guys in Carrick-on-Shannon playing tunes and telling dirty jokes till we keel over. Thanks to everyone who had the endurance to keep up with these blog entries. I write them because I want to keep up with YOU. So send me your feedback and when you're going on the next big adventure. I will spare you any pseudo-wisdom here at the end but I hope you all have enjoyed these and stay in touch. I go back to Chapel Hill tomorrow to start my senior year and then it's.....the next big adventure. The "real world" I think they call it. Take care everybody,

Andrew
Andre

ps- ainda trabalhando no traducao gente. Quando nao se usar portuguese num ano, se-precisar um pouco mas tempo para fazer estes traducoes.... Mas espero que tudo esteja bem. Ate nos nos-encontramos de novo, fica tranquilo e abracos abracos.

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