Even more WWOOFing in Co. Clare

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First I'd like brag: I got a comment from someone I don't know! So, like, people other than my family and friends must be reading this, and stuff. So cool! Hey, if you're reading this and you've never actually met me and you'd like to make my day, leave a comment 😊 😊.

Anyway, down to business. Here is another email I sent to my fam and friends. Enjoy!

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Hello!

Things are still going really well out here in Ireland. The weather has been a lot better (we’re getting some sun!) and it’s nice to be settled in a place where I feel comfortable getting a snack out of the fridge or starting a load of laundry.

The work is pretty much the same as before; I’m still doing a lot of painting, and now quite a bit of weeding. I get up at around 8:30, make and eat breakfast (either eggs and toast or oatmeal, which they call “porridge” here). Then Robin (the husband) gives me a task to start my work day and shows me what to do. At around 11:30 or so Miriam usually calls us in for tea and we have a little break (if Miriam’s not around I will usually initiate a tea break on my own). Somewhere between 1:30 and 2:30 we get called in for lunch, which is sometimes prepared by either Robin or Miriam, but mostly we just make sandwiches for ourselves. Between 5:30 and 6:30 we clean up what we’re doing and get an hour or two to ourselves. I usually either read or go for a walk or a bike ride (there are several bikes around that we are free to use whenever, and any direction I pick from here will be a beautiful ride). At around 7:30 or so I usually help make dinner which usually involves peeling and chopping mass quantities of garlic and washing extremely grubby potatoes from the garden. We usually eat sort of late, and most of the time the food is really good (albeit extremely garlicky). We’ve been eating a variety of things, like vegetable curry, beef stew, quiche, Spanish tortilla (sort of like a potatoey omelet thing, nothing related to a Mexican tortilla), and pasta. One night Miriam even made homemade pizza. Dinner always involves fresh veggies from the garden, like carrots, tomatoes, runner beans (sort of like giant green beans), onions, radishes, beets (which Irish people call “beetroot”), zucchini (called “courgettes” here), potatoes, and of course, garlic. Seriously, so much garlic. I usually am asked to chop up one or two heads per meal. Yes, I said heads, not cloves. I wouldn’t be surprised if you guys could smell breath all the way back in California. After dinner we have tea and occasionally dessert (usually something involving the word “pudding”, like bread and butter pudding, queen of puddings, apple pudding, etc. Keep in mind that in Ireland, “pudding” is kind of a more cakey thing, nothing at all like our chocolate or tapioca pudding). Then the other WWOOFer (now a 19-year-old German girl named Charlotte; the French guy left on Saturday) and I do the dishes (or sometimes Rowena, the daughter, when she’s around, does them), and we have the rest of the evening to ourselves.

There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes we’ll all go on a walk with the dogs out in one of many beautiful areas a short drive from here, or we’ll go picking hazelnuts (which grow everywhere), or mussels from a beach about 20 min away. Last week the family had a big barbecue and I got to meet a lot of people in the area. Later in the week I went to a pub with Miriam and one of her friends where there was a ceilidh going on. A ceilidh (pronounced KAY-lee) is a traditional Irish evening of dance, where a live band plays traditional Irish music and people dance with partners in a specific way, which I desperately want to learn how to do. It was mostly older people (over 65) that night but I have met a few young people that enjoy it as well. Rowena tells me that she was forced to learn how in school as a child. Maybe it’s like how they made us do line- and square-dancing in elementary school P.E.? In any case it looks really fun, and I plan on going back soon and asking some nice old man to teach me how.

We pretty much have weekends to ourselves, although we’re still expected to help with meals when we’re around. Robin and Miriam encourage us to take weekend trips to check out the area, which is nice. The weekend before last I went to a barbecue with a guy I met through Rowena and met a ton of entertaining people I’d been hearing stories about. Since the bbq was out in the middle of nowhere (like pretty much everything out here) I had to stay the night. I ended up getting a free horseback riding lesson from the guy who invited me to the party, though, since he works at a stables nearby (owned by the bbq host’s father… everyone out here seems to be connected), which was pretty cool. I’m thinking of going back for real riding lessons, especially since I know everyone that works there now (they were all at the party), even though the original guy has gone back to college in Northern Ireland. That would be so cool!

This last weekend was very, very cool. I went to one of the three Aran Islands, (I went to Inismór) which are just off of the west coast right between counties Clare and Galway. It was really nice to get away for a bit and just be on my own for a couple days, and the island is absolutely gorgeous. Everything there seems to be set a century back in time; all of the farms are parceled off by hand-built stone walls, and most houses have a small plot with a couple cows and perhaps a few chickens. There is one ATM on the whole island, and apparently it’s a rather new addition. The bank is a tiny little stone building that looks more like a old hermit’s house or something. There are three restaurants and three pubs in the main village. There are two other tiny villages and the rest of the island is just countryside with the occasional little farm. I hadn’t booked accommodation ahead of time and all the B&Bs in my guide book were full up, so I ended up staying way out of town, about a 10 min bike ride out into the country. When I got there, there was a cow outside my window, snacking on the front lawn. One thing that really makes the whole place feel different is that the local language is not English; it’s Gaelic, or Irish, as people here call it. Of course everyone speaks English fluently too, but as a second language. When I first arrived I wandered into a B&B to ask about rooms. There were none there, but the owner called another place for me to see if they had any. Her entire conversation on the phone was in Irish so when she handed the phone to me I had no idea if there was a room or not! Walking down the street I heard locals chatting away in Irish to each other, and when I ordered my food at the counter at a cafe the employees communicated my choices to each other in Irish. Since I am a huge language nerd, I found this so, so cool. In most of Ireland, the Irish language sort of seems like a old tradition struggling to be revived (when the English occupied Ireland they gradually stripped away many facets of Irish culture, like the native language, and over the last century and a half there has been an effort bring it back). Many signs all over the country are written in both English and Irish, but most Irish people, even though they have to take it in school, are not fluent in the language and never use it in their daily existence. But not so on Inismór! So cool!

I spent my time on Inismór riding my rented bike around to ancient archaeological sites, like a huge, extremely impressive Celtic ring fort built on the edge of a 300-foot cliff. The cliff has eroded away over the centuries, causing bits of the fort to fall off into the ocean. The fort is now a semi-circle on one side and a vertigo-inducing sheer drop into the ocean on the other (there are no railings at all whatsoever; people shimmy up on their stomachs to look over the edge. Lindy would not love this). I took lots of pictures. I also met a group of friendly and hilarious Irish guys there who had come to the island for a bachelor party (called a “stag night” in Ireland), and ended up meeting up with them at a pub later for a couple beers. The next morning I set off on my bike again and saw another smaller but also very impressive ring fort on a cliff on the other side of the island (and it’s much lesser-known, so I had the whole site to myself—just me, a huge, rocky and imposing monument, the grey Irish sky, crashing waves, gusting winds, and sheer black cliffs… so magical), and a ruin of a tiny church built by a disciple of Saint Patrick on the top on a hill, overlooking both of the island’s shorelines. It was awesome. I will definitely have to take more side trips while I’m out here. Currently on the agenda is a trip to Scotland to see Ross and Emily, two of my friends from my time in Bordeaux, and a trip to Derry (in Northern Ireland) to indulge my historical curiosity (I’ve been reading a lot about what has happened in that area in the last century and a half), where I’ll likely stay with Claire, another friend from Bordeaux. I’d also love to see Donegal (a county in the northwest of the Republic), the Connemara (a really wild and beautiful region north of here), the Beara Peninsula (where apparently all of the Irish Harringtons are from) and so, so much more, but there’s no way it’s all going to happen on this trip.

Man, I love it here. It’s going to be hard to leave. I think I wrote the words “cool” and “awesome” about 30 times each so far in this email. But it is!! When I was in France I'd occasionally go see an American movie and forget where I was for two hours. After the lights went up it would all rush back in and I'd take a deep breath and think, "Ok. Back to France. No easy way out yet.". I went to see "Julie and Julia" (not amazing but cute) here the other day and the same forgetting where I was thing happened. But when the credits rolled and the truth hit me, I wanted to jump up and dance around exclaiming, "I'm in Ireland! I'm in Ireland! Yeeeeehhheeee!!!!". I couldn't stop smiling the whole way home. Love, love, love it.

Oh, and some of you will be impressed to know that Robin, who is a beekeeper, if I haven't mentioned that before, took me up to see some of the beehives yesterday. Yes, you read correctly: Lisa Harrington went and stood in the midst of hundreds of bees (covered in beekeeper gear, mind you) and she lives to tell the tale. It actually was fine. There are so many bees around here all the time (and my bee phobia has been gradually fading since Costa Rica gave me my cockroach phobia), I'm kind of totally used to them. However, I don't think I will ever get to this point with roaches. Fortunately, Ireland doesn't really have them! Miriam tells me she's never seen one in her entire life and she's my mom's age. That's it, I'm moving to Ireland forever.

Hope everyone is doing well!

Love you,

-Lisa

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Photos

The view
from the house where I\'m staying. Awesome! That rocky, swirly bit in the top right is The Burren, a really cool national park.

The house
picturesque and perfect. We've since scraped off all the paint and repainted the whole thing a color called "Cornish Cream".

Beautiful kitchen
pay no attention to the technology at the end of the table. It's mine anyway, so not only is it unsightly, it's not authentic. I spend lots of time chopping garlic at this table.

Comments

[Mami]

MORE PICTURES!
The pictures are great, but I want to see more!

[maggie!]

thanks :)
hey! I don't know you, but I just wanted to says thanks for the insight - I'm in the process of planning a wwoof-related trip to Ireland myself :) Also, love the pictures and imagery! thanks, :)