Dachau

I woke upe today to a bird seemingly trying to get into the window. Through the curtain, which was partially translucent in the early morning light, I could see its flapping fluttering wings and hear their thap thap thap against the pane. It was staying at the top border of the window as if trying to acheive some hard to reach perch. It was a small bird, its unnerving thap thap thap persevering for ten maybe fifteen minutes as I lay in bed working up the gumption to rise up to the day. I was reminded of how the Irish say that if a live bird is in your house after someone you know has passed, it means that the person's soul is free, though if a dead bird is found in your house, the person's soul is restless. Finally the bird gave up its futile struggle and I was safe to wake up fully without the haunting presence thap thap thapping against the window.

I went to Dachau today, about 20 minutes by train out of Munich. It was probably the most frigid day I have had on my travels thus far, about -5 centigrade, and I spent most of it walking around outside. Dachau was the first of Hitler's concentration camps and the only one to function for all twelve years during the war. The ground was so cold that even through my boots and two pairs of socks, one wool, my toes still started to go numb. Just a microscopic taste of standing for at the very minimum an hour for role call every morning, no matter the weather, just in your measly prison garb. There was a small creek flowing down the side of the barracks yards that you cross a bridge over to get to the crematoriums and gas chambers, running parallel to the long barbwire fence. Standing on the bridge and looking at the water recede into the distance, bare and brittle winter branches on either side of the creek sometimes leaning over into the water, a grey column of light at the horizon's end of this stark corridor. Three strands of barbwire hovered about a meter above the water in the near distance, a patch of vibrant green in the water in the foreground. This is the image that struck me most at Dachau. I do not know why, perhaps I saw it as a bleak but somehow also hopeful vision of the future. An ambiguous beauty to it, just on the border of a concentration camp.

It was difficult to really absorb any real concrete feeling from the camp memorial site with all the tourists taking picture of every little thing, not really seeing it with their eyes, just recording it as proof they have been there, seemingly. Even with headphones on to try to block them out, try and create my own little world (though I did discover the perfect concentration camp visiting mucic: Max Richter's Memoryhouse) did little good. I feel like with hallowed ground such as that and other sacred sites, where respect is due, it is best to experience it all by yourself. To get a real sense of solitude with the site, to establish a connection with what has happened there, without having to endure people, their flashes going off, navigating through their ranks, etc. It just felt a little like a weird spectacle of suffering with all of the hubbub going on. I know this is impossible, experiencing it by oneself at any rate, though. Anyway, I would feel pretty weird sneaking into a concentration camp at night to try to establish a more enriched connection.

A Rock and Roll Christmas

The Rolling Stones play Paint it Black from a recent tour (well, recent by their standards, like, in the past ten years)... they really have gone down hill, Mick Jagger sounds like some jerk off the street that has just walked in and started singing karaoke. Before that it was No Doubt before their superstar album, Tragic Kingdom when they fancied themselves a ska band with a song called OI! to the World back when Gwen Stefane wore those mid to late 90s super baggy pants with a wallet chain that reached her knee. I liter never seems like much like say in a plastic bottle or some such container designed to carry soda or milk.. Now a westside sign waves in the air to an unbeknownst to me until now pseudo boy group's song Cupid's Chokehold, you know that song that goes ´take a look at my girlfriend shes the only one I got not much of a girlfriend never seem to get a lot´... anyway, until that is you order a liter beer in one of those German style mugs that are a workout just to lift it to your thirsty maw... then a liter seems like a lot. A german man with curly greasy hair to his shoulders, glasses sliding down his slick nose, is singing along to, now Iron Maiden, while his date watches the screen in the mild amusement that doubles as mild impatience. Thinking about it I realize that I have been guilty of that look on more occasions than I care to count. I can't help but wonder if my friends have noticed and have seen it as patronizing and/or condescending. I find myself wishing for/fantasizing about being a spy in this place, pretending to write in this journal but actually sending highly confidential data to headquarters. In this fantasy world, I await my partner, a sensuous curvy Spanish woman named some shit like Emerelda to arrive with our next mission, our relationship strictly platonic despite an obvious high level of sexual tension between us. As I walk to the bathroom, of course scanning the available exits, I tag small surveillance devices to underneath tables. I do this everywhere I go, expanding the ever-growing eyes and ears of my prescient organization. These devices also, with a high frequency transmission destroy any biological evidence of my presence, fingerprints, hair folicles, dead skin cells, oils, pheromones after I leave when I press a button on my watch.

We choose the Hard Rock Cafe as a rendezvous point on Christmas, because obviously no self respecting criminal mastermind would set foot in such a pedestrian establishment, especially on a holy day as this, our lord and savior's birthday (in my spy world, the criminal masterminds are always in cahoots with the vatican, that penultimate of criminal mastermind organizations. I'm not being blasphemous, what better of a disguise than the Catholic church?).

Yes, I am in the Hard Rock Cafe in Munich on Christmas. I was dropped off a couple of hours ago, dropped off my pack at the empty dormroom and set out in search of life and love and laughs, and this is what I found. You would think that in Munich of all places, you would be able to find a regular bar to have a couple beers at, let alone a normal restaurant to eat at, but after a couple hours of searching, walking randomly around the city center, I decided to just settle on the Hard Rock Cafe. It also didn't help that virtually nothing is open here on Christmas day.

I am finding a wonderful absurdity to being at this establishment on Christmas. Instead of my family, I am spending xmas with Roger Waters's guitar, a portrait of Phil Collins staring extremely intently at me (does he have any other way he stares?), Lenny Kravitz's guitar... countless other rock stars' guitars, and a drumset that says 'Dope' above me... is that a band? Also a very generic looking Christmas tree by the door. I wonder why they didn't do a rock and roll themed Christmas tree. A place where when you descend the stairs to the bathrooms, all of the tiles are diagonal which adds to the affect the music creates by sounding like it is underwater. Whether this is purposeful or not, I cannot say. Where even some of the music that I love turns out had some of the worst music videos I have ever seen (the 80s and 90s really did butcher a great deal of artistic expression) and realize also that this decade, whatever it is called, is not looking much better. Where I realize that, as much as I don't want to be a music nazi, and want to be able to find something enjoyable either intellectually or viscerally, it doesn't matter which (though not ironically, it is a tired cliche to have ironic love for a music you cannot stand, its patronizing and obnoxious (which could be the most elitist thing of all)), I just cannot identify with a vast portion of music that is out there. A place where thoughts like, 'I wonder what Pink's target audience is...' cross my mind. Ah shit. I gotta get out of here. These two liters of beer are going straight to my holiday head.

Merry Christmas.

A Bavarian Christmas

My hosts are going Xmas shopping today and needing a little downtime I have elected to stay here citing my distaste for holiday crowds and my addiction to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

My hosts are a very sweet couple, Liz and Marcus. Liz is a professional guitarist and teaches guitar and yoga. Marcus is an elementary school teacher. They live next door to Liz's mother and her uncle and grandpa live down the street. They have two cats who, if outside, arrive every evening when it gets dark in Liz's mom's arms because she does not want them to get cold at night. Very cute. Liz is glad for the cats partially because they diffuse the attentions of her mother a little, and as I learn later that is a small part of the reason why they are having couchsurfers over this Christmas this year, to diffuse the stress/annoyance factor of Liz's fam being in such close proximity. Fine by me.

There are two other couchsurfers here, a young, about 23, married couple from New Jersey living in Geneva for the boy, Chris's, internship. The girl, Tory has the extremely annoying habit of saying "that's so amaaaaaaaaazing!" or "it's beeeaaauuuutiful!" in regards to everything she sees or tastes or is shown or otherwise presented with. This translates into her saying one of these phrases about every 20 to 30 seconds it seems like. Not only that but profusely thanking our hosts with about the same frequency. It is this limited vocabulary extreme over-politeness that at first made me feel bad for my seeming infrequency of thanks-yous and fake awe-struck impreessions of things like their fucking SNAILS. There was a quote in Infinite Jest that I can identify with: "...acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else." Seeing as my threshold for things like this, i have found, can be pretty high... sometimes, I do not think I will be fatigued enough in the 2 days I will be in contact with this person to accept her, so I am resigned to silently hating her, occasionally shooting psychic knives at the back of her head from my eyes when no one is looking. Though then I started feeling bad for hating (ok, not really hate, of course, just extreme annoyance, which everyone knows can feel like hatred) this girl for being so Freaking Nice!... and then started resenting her for making me feel bad (it is amazing the multitude of thoughts and emotions that can go through your head in just a couple of seconds of sitting on a couch shooting knivies from your eyes)... and then decided to just accept the fact (fatigue?...) that I really do not like most people, let us just say I have a very refined taste in those who I choose to associate with... though others would, I know call it questionable, it's all relative, and it is ok for me to not like someone for just being too nice. It doesn't make me a bad person. It brings to mind a quote from some speaker on an episode of This American Life, "...I find racism very intriguing, of all the reasons to hate people, why of all things choose skin color?"

Anyway, enough of that. We went to the longest castle in Europe, but was a little disapointed as the castle itself was not over a kilometer long, but all the courtyards and walls surrounding them. Bastards got the moniker on a technicality. We also went to a pilgrimage site which was unique in that it had paintings by hundreds of people who had allegedly received a miracle from making the pilgrimage. So all the walls were covered in art from the early 1900s to the present day.

On Christmas day I get a ride from Liz and Marcus to Munich where I will be staying in a couchsurfers dormroom while he is not there until Teagan arrives on the 30th.

Arrival in Munich

I have arrived inMunich, sitting in the only place where I can eat and have a beer that is not overcrowded with mad holiday shoppers. I am scheduled to meet, Liz, my Xmas couchsurfing host in two hours at a bookstore that looks like it could possibly be the most crowded store in the city. I am a little upset with myself for having forgotten to get a gift for my hosts while I was still in Paris, we were just so busy. Now I have to sally forth, slightly delirious from what turned out to be more of a 14 and a half hour bus ride with my huge pack knocking over shelf displays in one of these madly packed shops and buy some stupid box of chocolates or something.

There was no passport check anywhere on the bus journey. It is a strange sleep you fall into on a long busride like that. Hard to describe. Not sleep, sort of like closing your eyes for a long time, but not being conscious. I had no dreams, never a deep sleep, too uncomfortable for that, but not even that half sleep where you have those hybrid daydream/fulldreams. It is not a limbo, more of a no-sleep. Just darkness and the slight humming and revving sounds of the bus in the nether regions of your brain.

Departing Paris...

I am at the bus station in Paris about to depart for Munich. A 12 hour bus ride. 12 hours. 10pm to 1045am. More like 13 hours. I am nervous about crossing the border even though I am a day within my 90 day limit.

The air here smells fetid, like a long unmaintained subway tunnel even though there are ducts of various shapes and sizes snaking their way all around the ceiling, which is painted a brilliant blue and looks like styrofoam. A young woman paces slowly and juggles talking on her phone and listening to music on her phone as if she is interacting with the device as opposed to what it transmits, she has that semi-concentrating look on her face where she stares in the middle distance intently. Occasionally pigeons fly around under the ceiling. I love it when pigeons make it indoors, like a little fuck you to mankind, you cannot keep nature out, as hard as you try. Though these busstations can hardly be called indoors, even though enclosed. Sort of a middle space, neither one nor the other. A bus maneuvers a nearly impossible route between two concrete pylons. My bus. I am going to Germany for Christmas, my first Christmas away from home, from my family. No mom, no dad, no sister. The bus says Deutschland-Paris and with its mirrors looks like a giant bug. It is my bus. It is gonna eat me up. Eat me up, maybe check my passport for some tense seconds, and spit me out in Munich. Goodbye Paris, France.

Chateau Brametourte

We have made our way to just outside Toulouse, France... the nearest village is Lautrec, in fact. We are living in a 12th century chateau, helping to renovate it. We have been here for about four weeks and it's our last day. Tomorrow we leave for Paris tomorrow, taking a night train from Toulouse.

The chateau is a small, three storey fort built mainly for defense, nothing too fancy, but some arrow slits in the side make it fun to pretend you're fighting off ancient invaders. It is at the bottom of a hill with a woodland on top of it. Next door is a field that was full of dead sunflowers until the day Teagan and I went to have a photoshoot in it and but an hour later a huge truck/machine thing came and mowed them all down, leaving nothing but a barren field. Brametourte (www.brametourte.com), which stands for wailing dove, is owned by an English couple, Paul and Allison. They have been having volunteers like us for about a year now, I think, and when we arrived there were about 6 others. There are now only three others and everyone is clearing out for Christmas as Paul and Allison's family will arrive on the 21st. They have been mostly americans and english, with the exception of an Aussie and a Canuck. There are also two Romanians here who don't really associate with anyone due to the language barrier. There are here on a contract and work 12 hour days, 7 days a week to feed their families at home. It is amusing watching Paul and Allison try to communicate with them, as the Romanians speak a little Spanish, and obviously Romanian, but Spanish is the language Paul and Allison know the most of, which is very little, if any at all. Despite the language gap between them all, everything seems to get done. We sleep in a fort in the temporary kitchen area, all sheets and blankets hanging from the ceiling blocking us off from the public view. We watch a lot of movies and have hardly left the castle, the cold keeping us in hibernation mode not noticing the time go by. It's been a month and we have felt like it's been a few days, nearly all of the grandiose plans we had for passing the time here going undone.

There is a spring on the land where in the days of old, people on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage would stop and wash their feet. Two yew trees tower over the spring where the lord and lady of Chateau Brametourte are buried under. James, one of the land caretakers who stayed here for about eight months, carved an axe handle out of the yew wood of the lord's tree to have his power behind the axe. The black mountains loom in the distance only peeking out on the occasional clear day all jagged and covered in snow. A small cemetery is just down the road a mere ten minute walk away, right across the road from an old gothic style cathedral.

We made a day trip on bicycle to Castres, the nearest town of a significant size, Lautrec being only a two or three pub town (for those not in the know, I have a habit of measuring the size of small European towns by how many pubs they have, it started in Ireland, where is is, admittedly, most apt). We had heard of a Musee Goya, boasting many Goya paintings, which we found odd, as Goya was a Spanish painter, but upon arrival at the museum, we came to discover that it only has three Goyas, but a cool collection of antique guns; luckily it was a mere 2 euro entrance fee. We hoped to go to the 'Yankee Grill' which is a TexMex restaurant in Castres, but in typical French fasion it only opened at five, leaving us doubly unfulfilled and dishing out torrential rain for our hour bikeride back home to the Chateau. We were left with a bitter taste in our mouths for the out of doors and our thoughts often wander back to that occasion when we think of how long time passes before we realize we hadn't been outside for a few days. Last night we finally got a taste of the Yankee Grill as Paul and Allison like to ceremoniously take volunteers who stay a few weeks there. A little frenchified and not quite as good as what you'd find in our neck of the woods, but it still satisfied our appetites for some Mexican food.

Tonight we head to Toulouse to catch an overnight train to Paris to spend a week there with Teagan's mother, Sandra. Her friend, Ann, a librarian, has had a romanticized view of Paris her whole life. Now in her seventies and never yet been to the place she has fantasized about her whole life, Sandra has insisted upon taking her on a tour of the City of Light. We will spend a week in Paris doing the tourist thing, taking a vacation from our vacation, before Teagan and Sandra head off to Vienna for a cruise up the Danube, leaving me all alone for Christmas. Not to worry, though, I have found a host on the couchsurfing site that are opening their home near Munich for a traditional Bavarian Christmas. I know not what a Bavarian Christmas entails, but it's a place to stay with some cool people, so I'm not wandering the streets of some unknown European city alone on Christmas... though that would be kind of cool. Teagan and I rendezvous back up again in Munich on the 30th to spend New Years there. We will then head back down to Spain, near Malaga on the coast, forget this coldass weather! for a helpxchange host where we may be able to earn a little bit of money to perpetuate our wanderings. See you next year, friends!

Skinheads and Michael Landon in Granada

There is this amazing bar in Granada called 'El Rincon de Michael Landon'. It's all decked out in Michael Landon photos and other cheesy 70s and 80s Tv show themed memorabilia. Given the subject material I assumed, of course, there had to be some sort of ironic wink and nod implied in the decoration of the place. Then I learned that these shows- The A-Team, Knight Rider (both of which I watched syndicated as a child, religiously), etc. made it to Spain a little late, probably around the time I was actually watching it. This was all in the decade after Franco died and there was mad social revolution and upheaval going on, pretty much when they were having their equivalent of the 60s for us. Imagine thinking about sexual liberation, throwing away traditional values, coming out of the grips of a rightwing regime that has held on to your nation for forty plus years and the image of the A-Team, Mister T jumping out of a helicopter onto a moving train comes to mind, or David Hasselhoff and his leather tight leather pants and his talking car named Kit. Shit, I'm surprised this nation isn't a lot goofier.


The Rincon de Michael Landon is where, the night after Halloween, Teagan and I were drinking and fell in with a group of Spanish skinheads in Granada. These were the anti-racist kind of skinheads, which we were both more than a little baffled to find in Spain, or any kind of skinhead for that matter, since we'd always associated the movement with British, Irish, or American working class. Walking through Granada that day we had seen no shortage of anti-nazi graffiti, but never gave it much thought since none of it was really aesthetically pleasing. Seriously curious about how this movement made it to Spain, a place that seemed to us pretty much devoid of any sort of Arian nation movement (I mean, it's not Idaho or anything, it's Spain), we tried to ask a couple of them who they were protecting with their adamant and zealous anti-racist behavior, but couldn't really get a straight answer. Partially due to language barrier, but also I think because they didn't really know who they were protecting either. Arabs? we ask- "Not so much, the Arabs." Ok, seems a little hypocritical, but at any rate they must be doing a good job in their self-appointed and self-righteous work, because I didn't see a single Nazi in Granada.

Anyway, we fell in with these skins, who for all their theoretical and sort of conformist dogma flaws were wonderful people who accepted us tagging along with them, because they said they were going to a reggae show and we were in need of some live music. It turned out not to be reggae, but ska, and the good old school traditional ska the likes of Desmond Dekker. I don't think I've danced, excuse me, skanked, so much in my life, even when I was into that shit as a teenager, and likewise I don't think I've seen that many skinheads in one place, I mean hundreds of them. Seriously, how are there so many skinheads in Spain? Is it that, just like Michael Landon and the rest of those guys made it here 10 years late, the same is happening with the third wave ska revival that plagued our nation in the late nineties? If so, they have it better than we did, because apparently they were able to cut through the crap mallpunkska shit we got and got right down to the real shit like Dennis Brown, Augustus Pablo, King Tubby, and Desmond Dekker, the genuine stuff you can't really find, unless you really dig in the states.

We danced all night and before the show we hung out in a carwash stall next door getting our pre-game on, drinking and singing. We ended up taking a cab home for a less than ten minute walk, because we had absolutely no clue where the hell we were. It was the night after Halloween and I think it satisfied our needs because we were surrounded by people all dressed up as things they weren't (Spanish skinheads... come on), but finding it community in it, and that's what Halloween is all about - and drinking, of course.

A weekend of Graffiti in Granada

We went to Granada for Halloween weekend. We were going to get tattoos, but it fell through because the tattoo artist we wanted was sick. The weekend was eventful, though, with skinheads (the antiracist kind), car washes, and ska shows. I wish I had time right now to reflect on the wacky experiences just mentioned, but Granada is covered with graffiti. I took lots of pictures. Here they are.

Bayacas

We have been here at Kate's in Bayacas for nearly two weeks now. Here is a list.

1. The Land. The land here is amazing, Kate owns pretty much a whole valley to herself. There are about a 1000 olive trees here for harvesting and two of my favorite fruits grow wild here, pomegranates and avocados... heavenly. There are countless veg patches and most of our food comes from them. There is a mountain path that separates us from Bayacas, the nearest village, that we can take to Orgiva, the nearest town of any significant size. At the bottom of the valley is a river and a small dam built by the Moors, all of the irrigation channels and olive trees were planted by the Moors as well around 500 years ago. There is running water here, but no power but solar, which means you only get 12 volts, we use a solar shower and compost toilets and all that other rustic eco friendly good stuff. We heat our little place with a wood stove (which hasn't been necessary yet, except to roast chestnuts and dry clothes). Our little house is a restored ruin and we have our own room with a common area and kitchen powered by gas. It´s gorgeous here.

2. The People. There are eight of us here now, including Teagan and me, here are the others:

1. Kate owns the land. Teagan and I didn't quite know what to think of her at first, thinking she was a little cold and distant. There wasn't much of a warm welcome towards us on her part. But as we have gotten to know her she's warmed up to us and is quite nice, just perhaps a bit socially awkward or uncaring towards the obligatory small talk social customs that we generally don't give a second thought about. She is a British expat, I'd say in her 40s. Unlike most of the British expats we've met around here she is fluent in Spanish, it is important to her to take part in the community she lives in. She is in the process of starting a sort of foundation to protect the valley. There is little of the valley she doesn´t own, and she is slowly buying the rest little by little.
2. Ruben lives permanently on the land with Kate in his own separate house. I think his story is that he was a WWOOFer once and chose to stay around 4 or 5 years ago. He is originally from the Basque country and speaks hardly any English but wants to learn, but I don't think Kate will be of any help as she only speaks Spanish to him. He works on the land and manages the WWOOFers. He is probably in his early 30s.
3. Andrea is a WWOOFer who has fallen in as Ruben's lover. She has been here a little over a month and looks like she has done manual labor her whole life, she is very strong and a damn hard worker. Her and Ruben are in that new couple stage and she's just moved into Ruben's house, out of the WWOOFer house that Teagan and I occupy. She is Argentinian and speaks English pretty much fluently. She and Ruben uncannily have the same beautiful green eyes.
4. Linden is a 19 year old from Sweden. She's pretty much our best friend here so far. She's sassy witty and not a bad artist. We all like to play dominoes, cards, and question games together.
5. Carl is only here for a couple of weeks to help build the yurt. Another British expat, he lives in the Pyrenees on the French side of the border with his partner. He met Kate about five years ago when he was WWOOFing and returned to help build the various structures on the property. He is mainly a builder but knows loads of other stuff as well. He is the president of WWOOF Spain and has done tons of traveling. He lives in a small hamlet in a very radical valley, where apparently they voted 95% socialist in the last election. He was born in Malaysia because his father was in the army and grew up in England.
6. Fabien just got here day before yesterday. A 19 year old German, this is his first time WWOOFing, he likes to smoke hash and drink wine and isn't a very hard worker. After finishing school he has just been traveling around for about a year and has lived in Barcelona for about 9 months so he is pretty much fluent in Spanish. He is much younger than Linden, despite their same age.

3. The Animals
1. Burra is a 25 or 35 year old donkey. She doesn't do any work, and we could have used it in carrying loads of stuff down for the building project. She just trims the grass and guffaws into the air at no one in particular. She makes it difficult to walk with her as she always stops to chomp some vegetation she particularly fancies. She's alright.
2. There are two chickens, they're new. I helped put the finishing touches on their roof before they arrived. There will soon be more.
3. There are quite a lot of cats on the property. Legal, semilegal, and illegal. There are only two legal ones. Pequenita is Kate's cat and Menina, who is a kitten that belongs to Ruben. Then there is Ursula, the eternal mama cat, who we named Ursula for the mother in One Hundred Years of Solitude. She is Pequenita's mother and, I think, Menina's grandmother because the look so much alike, but I"m not sure. She is semilegal because Kate feels sorry for her because thinks she thinks she is dying of cancer because of a lump on her chest, so we can let her in our house and give her some scraps of food. She is very sweet and likes to cuddle, Teagan and I have semi-adopted this semilegal cat for our stay here. Then there are the illegals: a mangy white mother and her four kittens of about four to five weeks of age. We're not allowed to feed them or let them in because it will just encourage them and they'll tell all their kitten friends and then it would just be cat madness... like my parent's house. Just last night we left a window open and they stole our last three muffins. And earlier today, I witnessed the cream colored kitten get shocked by the electric fence surrounding the veg patch; it screamed and ran a couple of meters away, its fur all frazzled... it was kind of funny and kind of sad at the same time. Just a little while ago there was one distracting me because it was meowing from being separated from the rest of the litter, but they came trouncing down the hill to its rescue after a while. Its a little hard for me to not let them in and feed them, but they seem to do ok by thieving and hunting little critters, so its bearable.
4. There are tree frogs, we hear them but we don´t see them. I´m training Menina the cat to hunt them, so I can sell them at the market in Orgiva.
5. There are wild board, we hear about them but we don´t see them. Except once, when we saw a dead boar on the back of a hunter´s car in front of a bar.
6. There are regular frogs too, we see them but they jump into the water when we get close. They hang out on a little floating piece of wood that Linden put in the reservoir connected to our house.
7. There are geckos. One lives in our house and another lives in the compost toilet.

4. The Work. We are building a yurt, well, not so much a yurt, but reputting together a terribly constructed (it was held together previously solely by brackets...) round house. By far the most difficult part was carrying down all the ridiculously awkward heavy and large pieces down the valley, through the twists and turns, hanging prickly branches, ups and downs finally into the building site. It's fun work and very rewarding being able to see the progress day by day. Plus, Carl has improved the structural framework by putting in actual joints.

5. Fruit. As I said, avocados and pomegranates grow on the land, but there are also pears, lemons, and persimmons. We've also discovered an amazing fruit that's new to us, though doesn't grow on our land. Chiri moyes, or in English, custard apples. The English name is pretty right on, a juicy sweet custardy pulp under a textured green skin. They're about the size of a melon maybe a little smaller and have black almond sized seeds inside them. They're glorious and I want to send a thousand home.

6. And last but certainly not least. Las Alpujarras is the hippy capital of Southern Europe, maybe all of Europe. They're everywhere. A main reason being Beneficio. It's about an hour walk from Kate's near the village of Canar. It's one of the biggest and well known hippy squats, probaably in the whole world. It's nestled in a valley and it's hard to say how many people live there, but the self proclaimed welcoming committee, a Dutch guy named Stephan said about 200 to 300 in the summer and 400 to 500 in the winter. Teagan, Linden, and I went there on Saturday. You descend into the valley on a dirt track and come upon a carpark that is not officially Beneficio, so the cops can kick them out any time but never bother. It is full of itinerant vans and cars, some more permanent than others with patios and the like. After the carpark, you walk through a eucalyptus forest and come into the official Beneficio (it belongs to them because they squatted there long enough that they are due rights to the land by law). The first part is a flat open area where more transient people, just passersby, can pitch tents and stay a few days. There is also a community teepee. As you venture further in, there are more permanent structures for people that have lived there longer. We had community dinner in the community teepee, of course after the community hippie drum circle and community hippie dance... ugh. The dinner was decent vegan food, pretty much shit thrown into a pot and cooked. Dinner was followed by the obvious and obligatory singing of songs, drum circles, didgeridoos, and of course, loads of hash and marijuana. At any given moment there were at least three to five joints being rolled. I couldn't help but intellectualize the whole thing as I sat there taking part in what I would call a static movement. All these people with so much potential getting extraordinarily stoned and singing songs about peace and love and the moon and flowers and mother earth while the only veg patch I saw in the place was going to complete shit. Thinking they're living outside the system but still buying most of their food and drink (and drugs) in the nearest town, Orgiva. It's the most extreme end of the hippie lifestyle I've encountered, and as expected I didn't like it. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. Dream catchers, the yin yang symbol, and prayer flags are fine and all... on their own, but not when the yin-yang symbol is tie-dyed and they're all hanging in the same teepee with forty hippies singing about singing together in love. No thanks. Though, a great thing about the place was the plethora of nationalities that were present there, there were at the very least 15 or 20 nationalities present in one small confined place... and the didgeridoo player could actually really rip it up, and I usually hate didjeridoos.

Departing Steve

We´ve been here at Steve´s, the mad Brit´s, for about two weeks now and we´re definitely ready to go. Just a few days ago, he apologized for his odd behaviour and confessed that he and his girlfriend had just split up on the day we had arrived. Bad timing. After this confession, he has been a lot better, but he´s still a manic, arrogant, lecturing pain in the ass sometimes. Not to say he doesn´t have his charms, he´s been very kind opening up his house, showing us some great cooking, we just hit him at a bad week, we´ll miss him in a way, but it´s definitely time to go. He very kindly gave each of us a hat. Me, a nice Panama hat and Teagan, a sort of Spanish cowboy hat, they look very flash. (Note: the photo shoot in the slide show is of Simon´s hats, our fancy new hats have not been recorded to the digital world yet.)

Teagan and I have just finished today putting charging bulls on the wall above his barbecue, and it´s turned out looking beautiful. We also laid stones to make a walkway to his pool.

The other day we went to Steve´s friend, Simon´s, house to help him make wine. He has many vines on each side of his property. And his property was something else indeed. It´s like a James Bond villain´s headquarters complete with winding corridors to get lost in and a helipad. I guess it´s not so much like a Bond villain´s headquarters, perhaps I just say that because apparently he was in some old Bond film that neither Teagan nor I can remember the name of. His full name is Simon Munro Kerr, and he is the epitome of posh. Literally, his parents owned one of the shipping freight lines that went from Britain to India. Posh, incidentally, means acronymically (we learned this from Bob Dylan´s Theme Time Radio Hour) port out starboard home, that is, on the shady side of the ship when going from England to India and back- P.O.S.H. would be stamped on your ticket. Simon is trying to start up a business at his place, a retreat of sorts, the website just got up and running at www.lajarilla.net, go to the gallery to behold its splendor. The real posh shit is in Simon´s living room, which isn´t in the gallery and I, unfortunately, didn´t get any pictures of, but lets just say he likes his dead animal heads. He also had loads of fancy hats, so we had a little photo shoot.

The making of the wine was great fun. We picked them, then put them through a machine that cleverly de-stems them, then pressed them and pumped them into the vats where they will distill. Teagan and I wanted to smash them with our feet, but sadly the old ways are dying out.

I have decided to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, my favorite novel, in Spanish, or Cien Anos de Soledad, if you will. This is partly for to help my spanish and partly just to soak up the beauty of the language. Yes, I know it seems like a back-asswards approach to learning a new language: with very rusty old rudimentary basics of Spanish (about three years in middle school and high school... that´s over ten years ago...) and jumping into a highly advanced verbose and labyrinthine novel, not the best way of going about things. I read about a page in half an hour and don´t understand most of it, but I´m enjoying it and pick up little tidbits along the way. It helps, though, that I´ve read the book twice, the second time a mere three or so weeks ago, so it´s pretty fresh in my memory. I´m expanding my vocabulary loads, but I don´t know if I´ll get a chance to use alchemical laboratory in a sentence any time soon. Just you wait, I´ll be a master soon.

A short entry, but we´re on to our next adventure tomorrow, where I´m sure we´ll be working hard as there´s olive harvesting, fence building, donkey tending, and a myriad other jobs to do.

Dublin to Barcelona to the middle of nowhere...

It´s been a while and we´re a long way from Carraig Dulra now. We are now staying in a georgeous finca in the middle of nowhere in Spain. It is situated near Orgiva, which is about an hour or two out of Granada. A mad Brit named Steve is living here with his three dogs, Patches, Zaphyra, and Rocky. Teagan and I have our own room separate from the house with its own bathroom en-suite. The house overlooks a huge valley with desert like mountains on either side and at the end you can see the Mediteranean. On a very clear day, supposedly you can see Africa, but while the weather has been beautiful, we haven´t been able to see that distant coast. This helpstay is actually a happy accident because of a little dose of miscommunication with the host we had originally intended to stay with in this area. We needed to kill a week or two before going to this other finca and already had a night train from Barcelona booked to Granada with nowhere to stay. We scrambled to find another host and Steve was the first person we called.

We stayed in Dublin for only two nights and had a pretty relaxing time. Seeing as how we were only going to be in non English speaking countries after Dublin we decided to seize our last chance at seeing a movie in English and saw the Goofy Pineapple Express. The next and last night in Dublin we went to an improv comedy open mic night, which was, in all honesty, pretty terrible, but fun nonetheless. Teagan and I did some heckling and played the dumb Americans (Europeans like it when you do that sometimes, its endearing). After the show we messed with the heads of some silly Finnish tourists (what isteen spirit...?). We also did some museums, a W.B. Yeats exhibit being a highlight, art hanging on walls, all that good stuff. The Jameson distillery tour was another big highlight.

Dublin was fun and we could have spent a lot more time there, but the country of Ireland is not easy on the pocketbook by a long shot and the weather was beginning to short circuit our brains so the next day we booked it to Barcelona. Teagan almost didn´t get let on the plane due to her not having any ticket to prove she was going to leave the country after 90 days so we had to rush over to the ticket booking stand for Iberia airlines where she bought the same ticket to Casablanca that I booked for those exact reasons.

We arrived in Barcelona at around 930 at night feeling pretty tired. To make matters worse, my backpack was somehow the only piece of luggage misplaced on the flight, so after giving the luggage people all the pertinent information for its return, trying to figure out trains and subways that weren´t running, and ending up taking a taxi, we got to Marc´s (our couchsurfing host) at around 1130. The airline delivered the backpack about 24 hours later to Marc´s apartment... damn... if they had taken any longer I could have bought some flashy new Spanish clothes on the airline´s dime. The rest of our time in Barcelona we just did a lot of walking around. The Gaudi park up in the hills, went and saw about five minutes of a jazz session before it ended as we arrived too late, just walking around soaking the sights, sounds, smells, Tapas, and everything else in. We went to Figueres on the train for the Dali museum there, which was pretty spectacular. After a while of traveling for a while, being from Seattle and so used to having a good dose of rock n´ roll every now and then, both Teagan and I were feeling a bit sluggish and the Pharmacy (a Seattle band, go figure) came to our rescue and reinvigorated both of us. Teagan´s friend Alex is roadying for them, so we had a heads up on the show. We went and saw another band the night before, which was Spanish and whose name we didn´t catch, but it really didn´t do it for us. I know I generalize, but I don´t think Spain knows how to rock n´ roll. Sorry, Spain. Our last day in Barcelona we decided to just shlaze it on the beach until we had to catch our overnight train to Granada. When we got to the train station about a half hour before departure, we realized that we were at the wrong station and the right one was on the other side of town. We were informed if we hurried and took a cab we would make it. A few frantic dozen minutes later, we were on the train, hearts steadily slowing down from the near panic of hitting every. single. stoplight. red. I´m pretty sure it´s completely impossible to drive through a large metropolitan Spanish city without hitting at least 85% of the lights red. And there are a lot of stoplights. Once again, I know I generalize.

We got to Granada in the morning, and near panic hits me once again when a cop stops me at the station and asks to see my passport for a random check. I had to wait outside the police station while they ran my information, then they sent me on my way. We stayed and napped for a few hours at some couchsurfer´s apartment and caught a bus to Orgiva. Upon getting off the bus we met Geraldine, a 20 year old Belgian girl, who was just going to Orgiva from Granada to kill some time before she started a two week Spanish course in Granada, but didn´t have a place to stay. She went on her way right before Steve, our host, pulled up in his jeep. He gathered us and we went and searched for her, finding her we discovered she had already payed for a hostel, but she decided she´d try to hitchhike to Steve´s the next day. ¨Not a chance, I live in the middle of nowhere¨ he says. The next day we get a call from someone who had picked up Geraldine. She had hitched the wrong way. We went and picked her up in the middle of a drunken haze of a day, in which we had tried to work on his fountain, but Steve started feeding us beer at 11 in the morning, took us to the bar about an hour later and that´s where we got the call from Geraldine. It´s rather like resort-help-x-ing here, with pretty lush surroundings and accomodations, beer flowing fairly freely, and a host that ¨really just wants us to enjoy ourselves¨. Steve is a great guy, really really likes to take the piss, chain smoke and drink. He´s very intelligent and does work for OXFAM in Africa, but mostly likes to work on his finca out here in Spain. There is already a pool, but he has plans to heat it solarly, put a sauna and a jacuzzi in and basically all around pimp out an already pimped out little spot. We set stones into cement into a Moorish pattern as a walkway down to his pool that water will run over, and I must say it looks pretty flash. Next we´ll be making a fountain outside his kitchen window and setting a mosaic of bulls into the wall above his barbecue. Steve is also an excellent cook and almost every night shows us how to make food the ´right´ way, as he would say (he´s always right). My favorite being Chicken Tikka Masala.



We are here for about a week longer and Geraldine left for Granada yesterday. It is just Steve, Teagan and me. We are actually the first helpxers that he has had. Steve is not quite used to having other people around but it´s all running fairly smoothly and, I think, helping Steve in a lot of ways with different points of view and just all around good company.

Carraig Dulra

Teagan and I have been here at Carraig Dulra for about two weeks and unfortunately are leaving in a mere couple of days. We arrived on sunday the sixth dead tired from our last night in Galway - rewind two weeks and to the other side of the island, in which we went with our Merchants Freaks' housemates and a bunch of their friends to Castle Menloch, just on the outskirts of Galway. It's a small castle right on the River Corrib, which runs torrentially through the city, but is pretty calm where the castle is. We had a bonfire, drank and played games in the beautiful nightime moonlit scenery right between the water and the ancient broken down castle. A great late night of shotgunning beers, and overall crosscultural drunkenness with a couple of Aussies, a Kiwi, a brit, and even a couple of Irish, for once. It was all fun except for when Teagan and I decided to go to bed and some of the housemates decided to stay up all night on drugs making it hard for Teagan to sleep - I just powerslept through it.

At any rate, we were in somewhat decent shape to meet Mike and Suzie, the owners of Carraig Dulra. They were leaving for France the next day for a week for a wedding and just showed us the site and gave us a few things to do quickly before leaving. Timothee, french, and Martin, German, were already there. We were all four in charge with definitely less than a weeks' worth of work.

The week went by and we got to know the two others and did the work, made up other jobs and quickly ran out of work. Martin's girlfriend had just broken up with him and feeling he had to do something somewhat rash, decided to go straightedge for a hear and branded a small X onto his wrist. Martin exuded kind of an annoying youthful arrogance/naivete, whatever. Timothee, on the other hand, was quiet at first but Teagan and I won him over and brought out our favorite person on our travels together so far, and probably both our favorite frenchman ever. An extremely hard worker, we would have to fight him to let us do the dishes. He had a constant sense of humor that spanned the relams of the sick and demented, the intellectual, the punny and mostly the just plain potty humor (he farted a lot and loved it). He rode an old cruiser bike here on a ferry from France and went to volunteer at Electric Picnic, pretty much the biggest summer festival in Ireland. He just left a few days ago to go to his sister's wedding and then to harvest the grape in France (which we may join him in hopefully) and we miss him already. Martin also left because his ex, Hannah, was arriving. She was only here a few days and was kind of a princess and we didn't like her. Vito, an Italian, also arrived a few days ago and is still here.

Carraig Dulra is wonderfully rustic, there is no electricity or running water. Where is a yurt with a woodstove for warmth, a covered kitchen with gas burners and a vegetable and herb garden where a lot of our food comes from, there is a spring we draw water from down the hill also. We have worked on a few community and school gardens in the area, saving them from the outrageous overgrowth resulting from the rampant rain of the summer. We've also helped Gary, the neighbor, to move his sheep.

Let's see, what else is there. The rats are a nuisance, but sometimes fun in an annoying way. Teagan stubbed her toe while frolicking in the grass naked.

Now here is a Carraig Dulra exquisite corpse exercise Teagan and I did:

Stone ridden land we watch this farm, stove stocking, feet in sheep's fleece we rest. Raain torrents hinder imaginative huckleberry finesque escapades. Conversations in an array of foreign accents punctuate the brisk evening air. The candlelist face of an abandoned heartbroken youth gazes through a telescope attached to a stick. It's pointing out the window of the yurt into a cloud filled sky, the pleiedes just barely peeking through as the wind sweeps them across the canvas as if the turbines off the shores of our consciousness were propelling them. Suddenly he turns to us, "I will be straightedge!" he says and just as suddenly he leans out the window and vomits up all his heartbreaks, his lovers past present and future and, of course, his lunch. As the rats came to feast upon his expunged emotions we laughed at his partial suicide and turned the telescope to the neighboring field. The moon illuminates the night activities of sheep showering in naive ignorance of the iminent death, consumption and role as butt warmers. All those who reside at Carraig dulra are shown the joys of repetition by Cal the 14 year old collie, who is fortunate enouch to be deaf to the wild Frenchman's daily abuses and advances. The frenchman, who once considered smoking his own eyelids bbefore realizing he had swallowed the ghost of a captured IRA soldier who was tortured to death in his sleep. For days he would pick different varieties of leaves and roll them into cigarettes or smoke thime in his hazel root pipe until his voice was grizzled like that of an old drunken Irishman. We decided that an exorcism was in order, for our sanity and overall quality of life was at risk otherwise. Everyone enthusiastically offered up traditions known to them by their own culture or folklore. The German wanted to strong-arm the situation whilst the Franchman and Italian had more romantic ideas involving cloks, smoke and ceremony. Being a product of American cult classics, we decided that locale was the most important detail and ushered the group to the highest rock on the site. Even Cal mosied along and joined the mob. But once on top of the lookout point the group quickly forgot their purpose as the winds picked up again, this time far more fierce and torrential than any of us had ever before experienced and picked up the yurt and sailed it away towards the fiery horizon, its canvasses resemblinng the wings of a phoenix in flight. The wind was so fierce, in fact, that it flung the clothes off our bodies and we were overcome with the desire to frolic in the tall grasses as if babies newborn into this world. Though amid our frolicking the wind threw us against the rocks again and again so that before too long were bloody and bruised and broken, rolling in the grass in apocalyptic ecstase. That's when Mike and Suzie returned.

Galway

It was, without a doubt, the nicest day in Ireland I've experienced on this trip. Good thing too as it was my first attempt at a long-haul hitchhiking trip. It wasn't all coming up roses, though. Following direction from a hitchhiking wiki (the infamous wiki... never to be trusted again) I took a bus to the outskirts of Cork, where it was said I'll be on the road to Limerick. My goal for the day was Galway, about 110 miles I approximate; a little ambitious, given I had a bit of a late start, around 1:30, and these are all roads I don't know at all. I stood thumbing, with a sign that said "Limerick! ...or... Galway!" for about two hours, changing locations, trying to deduce where to best hitch with the turnoffs on the road around me. Finally a man stopped and informed me I'll have no luck on this road as it's the old Cork-Limerick Road that no one really uses anymore. He dropped me off at the main road about a half mile away where I ran into another backpackerk, in his 40s probably, dressed fully in camouflage, saying he was going to Dublin in a thick unidentifiable accent. I thought it was a little strange as he was heading north like I was and Dublin was to the east, but I didn't say anything. In a half hour I caught a lift with a youngish redheaded Irish fellow who nearly caused a three car pile up when he stopped for me. He took me as far as Mallow, about 30 km up the road.

While thumbing in Mallow I was thanking the gods for the good weather as I was coming down with a cold, when a bee stung me on my finger as I was brushing it from my shirtsleeve. I was brought back to 8th grade english class, the last time I was stung by a bee, also from a bee in my shirtsleeve. I noticed it there and stood up and started flailing around trying to get it out. No one took me seriously because I was a bit of a class clown back then. So, feeling an odd combination of misery and blessedness in my situation I waited about 45 minutes until an Englishman from South Africa picked me up and took me as far as Buttevant, about 20 km south of Limerick. In Buttevant, a bit of a ghost town, about half of all the shops abandoned, it was about 4PM, when once again I ran into my fellow hitchhiker friend. "I though you were going to Dublin!" I said to him. "I don't speak language," he said, "from Chech Repooblic." I realized he might not even know where he was going, just rambling in the truest sense of the word. He just said Dublin earlier because it was the only city he knew of in Ireland, an automatic response. He put two fingers to his mouth in the international symbol for a cigarette, I let him roll one, and he goes about 50 yard down the road and sticks his thumb out. Fifteen minutes later a guy of about 30 years stops and says, "You goin' to Galway?" I says to him "Hell yeah!" and hop in. Jackpot. This came at a point when I was resigning myself to staying the night in Limerick, about the halfway point between Cork and Galway. I realize that my wasted two hours on the wrong road helped deliver me to this point, to be at the right place at the right time to catch this straightaway spin all the way to my destination.

His name was Karreth, he works and lives in Cork City, and was on his way to Galway to see his family for the weekend. I really lucked out with him, we had great conversation and even smoked a spliff. He drove me all the way into Galway city, even though where he was going was in the suburbs. "Don't go too far out of your way for me..." I said to him, to which he responded with something akin to what I feel I would say, "What, it's ten minutes out of my life and I'm helping someone out" We xchanged email addresses and parted ways. He dropped me off at an internet cafe where I checked for any responses to my last minute couchsurfing requests. No such luck, so I stayed in a hostel and took it easy for the night. I walked around aimlessly for a bit and ran into a couple of rickshaw drivers and got a promising lead on where to rent them and make a little bit of money...

Yesterday I woke up, checked out of the hostel and found a positive response to my many couchsurfing requests. I followed up on the rickshaw lead before meeting with my host and my hopes were dashed away, all the rickshaws were booked up through the week, I walked off disappointed, but the guy called me back saying he had one available at 7:30 or 8 that night. Shit yeah.

I met my host at 4:30, another Pole. His name is Paluch and he lives real close to the city centre. When I returned to the rickshaw place, the bossman was a no-show... I knew it was too good to be true. I had given him Paluch's phone number and he called around 10, saying he had one still, but it was a case of too little too late. Hopefully he'll call sometime next week... I was really really looking forward to driving a rickshaw around Galway.
I'm now at internet cafe, where I'm getting free usage from Paluch's Australian roommate who works here. Galway is a great city, very similar to Rennes in France. It's known as a the party city of Ireland, there are two universities here. I'll stay here for about a week, Teagan will arrive on the 2nd, then we'll head to Wicklow.

First Helpstay

I have been at my first helpstay for about three and a half days. Many of my presumptions have been proven wrong. The main one being that this is not an organic farm at all, in fact he hardly grows anything, just some tomatoes, peppermint, and cucumbers, and not much at that. It is the home of a German man named Thomas Wiegandt, he is a musician who's main focus is on African music, though he is interested in everything. He was sort of active in the Krautrock era in the 70s in Germany and has been to Bali, Indonesia to study a little Gamelan. The property is about ten acres or so with two houses he built himself long ago. I'm staying in the one he lives in and right across the way is where his girlfriend Eileen and her two kids Sean and Eva, both about ten to twelve years old, from a past marriage, and Rafael, about three, who is the offspring of Thomas and Eileen. Today, Mora and Leesha arrived who are Thomas's daughters from HIS past marriage. Ok, now pets, there are four cats who live outside who are very nice, two of which I often wake up to in my window which I enjoy and Tippy the dog, also a sweetie.
That's all of them. Also, Thomas has a fierce mullet.

I have been working pretty much exclusively on the drive up to the two houses, which is about 100 yards long. It is one of those primitive roads that you see all over Ireland. There is a patch of grass in the center and for the tires of cars are two strips consisting of rocks and dirt and gravel. On the sides are the age old Irish walls simply made of rocks stacked upon each other. My work involves taking up sod on any side that is becoming too narrow for cars and trucks, carting it in a wheelbarrow somewhere else and dumping it. Then if the ground beneath the sod has become compromised, that is, if it's soil that grass may grow up on again or if there are holes, or if it's too slippery, I arrange rocks upon it in such a way that it is flat. I imagine that it's like building the Irish rock walls (which is something I'd like to do at some point), but a lot more simple. This is the kind of road that you take for granted until you realize how much work is required to maintain it.

I also trim back the brambles, or blackberry bushes, if you will... this is a job I'm not too keen on. They are constantly fighting their way onto the drive, and as we all know, they are fucking relentless and grow like mad. It's the kind of work that always needs doing, but no one wants to do it.

Sometimes I help mind Rafael, who is a handful and talks and talks and talks. He seems to have taken to me quite well, he'll come up to me and say 'Hi dan hi dan hi dan...' ad infinitum.

The weather here is still absolutely terrible. It was my first day off on sunday and I was hoping to do a little hiking or hitchike to the nearest town, either Bantry or Ballydehob, but no. It didn't stop raining all fucking day. Though, when I'm working it has no problem being relatively nice and dry, ah well, Murphy's Law right? It's cold and wet here. The exception being Saturday, luckily enough, as we went to the annual Ballydehob street festival. Ballydehob is just up the way, a town of about 1,500 or so. The festival took place on the small main street which is on a hill. The whole thing was all quite silly, really. The first event was for the kids, it was a turnip race in which the youngsters have to throw a turnip up the hill race after it, pick it up again, throw it, and repeat the process until reaching the finish line. The second event was the dog races, in which dogs of varying sizes raced up the hill, quite a lark. And the final event, my favorite, was the wheelbarrow race. This was for the adults and they had to push their partner up the hill in a wheelbarrow and stop at a station where the rider has to chug a bottle of beer before they continue up to the next station, of which I think there were two or three. At the end of it all, Rubicon, a celtic rock band played on the back of a truck. Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed the band, the electric fiddle player had a cordless device set up, so he could rip it up on the fiddle and mix in with the crowd. Grand.

On sunday, we went to Fossett's circus, Ireland's national circus. It was kind of standard Barnum and Bailey's style fare, but smaller and very well done with all the clowns, acrobats, trapeze artists, the big round metal cage with the motorcycles going round and round in it as the finale. I was picked by the clown to participate (the second I made eye contact I knew I was in for it) in a little stunt in which I and three other men of similar size were made to sit in four chairs arranged so as we could each lean onto the other's lap. At which point, the clown pulled out each chair one by one until we were laying down on each other with our knees at right angles supporting ourselves with nothing else holding us up. It was a laugh riot. Grand.

With all the shitty weather I've just been reading a lot, really. Upon moving into my room I found that a previous WOOFER left Dave Eggers's 'What is the What' and decided to give it a try. I attempted his 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' but got 3/4 through and found it intolerably egotistical (yes, I know this is alluded to in the title, self-referentiality whoopdeedoo, even taking this into condideration, I found it absolutely asinine), conceited and trite. But I find I'm rather addicted to this one. Eggers adopts the subject's almost childlike way of speaking and it's quite refreshing, not to mention it escapes everything I hated about 'Heartbreaking Work...' As depressing as the subject matter is, it's deeply moving and enjoyable to read. I'm almost done already.

I am now without facial hair. No more 'stache. It's been a few days and I still think it looks weird and surprising when I see my reflection. I'm sure you'll be happy, Deidre.

One last thing: the stars. At night the clouds seem to clear up more often than during the day and I'm thankful for it. It reaveals a blanket of stars that I'm used to having to trek to the mountains to see. I found this to be the case in Donegal also. It's not that populated out here or in Donegal, and thus the light pollution is not that bad. The towns are far more simple than ones, even the smaller ones, in the states because they're far older. It's beautiful and I find it wonderfully refreshing to see.

In Bodhran

I was only in Cork City for a handful of hours but I wrote a few pages while there as I often like to write down my surroundings, the sights, sounds, smells, overheard conversations, descriptions of people, speculations etc. while sitting in a pub with nothing else to do. It's a good writing excercise and can beget many insights in retrospect.

The Velvet Underground's plays 'Venus in Furs in a pub in Cork City. It started pissing down rain as I was looking for an internet cafe to kill time, waiting for a bus that leaves in about three hours from now to Bantry where my first farmstay will pick me up. I guss a downpour is a good enough reason to order a pint of Guinness. As I look around me it looks as if many others are of a similar mindset. Outside, people huddle under awnings, some have umbrellas, some just bear the wet, used to it by now. It's like New York was, random torrential downpours that could last long but usually fizzle out after ten to thirty minutes. It's just a lot more extreme here, and whereas in New York it was warm rain that you knew would end soon, this can get quite cold and has the potential to last for hours.

The bartender just leaned against the back of the bar and said 'I can't take it anymore...' put the remote control to the telly to his head and clicked a button; the power button? the mute? did he change the channel? I guess I'll never know. There is a jolly drunk old man two seats down from me at the bar. There is no shortage of those types here in Ireland. A friend and I decided that jolly old drunks are one of Ireland's main natural resources. I only hope that the rest of the world doesn't catch on to this fact... I pray there will be no jolly old man famine...

I have struck up a conversation with the bartender between his serving other customers... or rather he has just started griping at me about his patrons, just talking to him about mundanities of their life, he doesn't care, damnit! He is Scottish, says he just got drunk one day and came here, and now it's been seven years. Actually he has three stories he's told me and others as to why he's here in Ireland, in another he went to the airport to have drinks at the bar there and to look at the departures list, drunkenly deciding to hop on a plane, just sort of a variation on the first one, and in the final story he claims that he's not welcome in anymore bars in all of Scotland. He seems like the kind of guy that gets drunk all the time or, at least puports to, doesn't remember half of it and makes the rest up on the spot, and to him it might as well be the truth. He is fairly thin with short cropped hair and sharp features. He just took a shot of Jagermeister when he thought no one was looking. He says he doesn't drink whiskey anymore because he just gets too crazy.

A new jolly drunk old man has moved to the seat next to me, the previous one having departed a few minutes ago. This new one is drinking Beamish stout down like it's water. I look at his full pint glass, just ordered, a minute or two later it is gone and he orders another. It's amazing how the Irish can put away this thick stout, also amazing how expensive it is for being the usual drink of choice, the standard price of it being now about 3.70 euro. He started out coherent enough, he said some things to me with the thickest of accents so I couldn't understand but I knew he was making words. Now he is literally bumbling completely unintelligibly 'bubbada bulbada blebbebeedoo...', I kid you not, on and on. It is puntuated occasionally by him laughing to himself, so I think that he's faking it, just getting a kick out of making people feel uncomfortable, the volume of his blathering fluctuating almost reaching a near-yell at some points. The bartender leans to me and says, 'there's some real nutters in this city...' and winks at me.

Farther down the bar are two kind enough fellows around my age but a little older. I never caught their names but I've had a few conversations with them at the bar and while huddling in the doorway outside smoking cigarettes. One of them, with a faux-hawk and scars on his face, just got back from Vegas where he says he paid $150 to shoot a bazooka, says he couldn't pass up the opportunity; I'll call him Vegas for ease of writing from now on. The other, wearing a leather jacket, is being prodded and harassed by some punk-ass I'll call Hilfiger because he's wearing a Tommy Hilfiger sweater. I could tell he was looking for trouble the second I laid eye on him. Through my short experience I've learned there's plenty of these types in Ireland as well. We were outside smoking and Hilfiger was literally stepping on people's toes, Leather Jacket politely tells him to watch out and Hilfiger, this time purposefully, steps on his toes a couple more times. He then taps my toe, leans to me and says 'there's a lot of crazy people in this damn city...', I just roll my eyes and give him a yeah-wouldn't-you-know-it kind of look. Hilfiger then proceeds to position his cigarette behind Leather Jacket's head as if he's gonna just sink it into the back of his neck. Someone notices this and asks the coward 'You alright, mate?' and he desists in his infantile harassment.

Back in the bar Hilfiger is continuing to harass Leather Jacket, putting his fist up to his face repeatedly as if punching his chin. Leather Jacket says to him, 'See that in front of you?' referring to his pint, 'We're here for the same reason, mate.' Hilfiger just continues to harass him, 'Look, I'm trying to be your friend.' I have to give it to Leather Jacket, he has patience, even though I'm sure he knows this Hilfiger isn't one to be reasoned with. He's also harassing Vegas, 'What's wrong with your face?' he asks him, 'it's all fucked up.' Vegas responds that his scars are a result of having cancer removed from his throat, this shuts him up for a bit but then he follows Vegas outside Hilfiger outside to bum a third cigarette from him. I hear, in between the door opening, Vegas refusing to give him another, saying he's losing his patience with him. The door closes and I hear banging and half of me is hoping it's Vegas giving Hilfiger a good beating, finally. But alas, Hilfiger comes back in unscathed. Only to find our faithful bartender has poured out his pint. 'Here's your money back for your pint, mate. I can't serve you anymore. Sorry.' While he was outside, Leather Jacket threatened the bartender that there'd be trouble if Hilfiger kept harassing him, as he surely would have, and the bartender did the right thing and took care of the situation. That was that, Hilfiger left. Vegas came back in and asked the bartender to look after his laptop while he went and 'took care of that punk'. Vegas looks like a guy not to be fucked with, while the scars on his throat are from cancer, the scars on his face look like they're from fighting. He leaves and comes back a little later with a shopping bag with a book in it, maybe he was all talk. While there's plenty of punks like Hilfiger here, there quite outnumbered by the good friendly people always open to newcomers like me, the Hilfigers are only a problem when they roam in packs.

Just before leaving, I'm having a smoke with the bartender. He offers that I should take a break from the farm and come back to this bar some night he's off work, 'I'll take you out for drinks and we'll pick up a couple o' tramps.' I say that sounds good and make my way to the bus station, smiling to myself and thinking 'goddamn I love the Irish.'

To the Poles!

This was my first night in Dublin and only one night as I am waiting at the Dublin airport the morning after awaiting my flight to Cork, in the southwest of Ireland. It was also my first couchsurfing experience. My host was an adorable twenty yearold Polish girl from Warsaw named Marta, a transplant just wishing to travel and live some place new, and I figure just sort her life out as we are all wont to do at that age before jumping into a career.

I knocked on her door at 11AM and being her day off she was still sleeping. I let her go back to bed and took a nap myself (a long week in NYC and six hours of jetlag - not even sleeping pills can cure that...). An hour and a half lter she knocks on my door (I lucked out: she had an extra room!) and invites me to take a short train ride out of Dublin to Howth, a small outcropping of land to the northeast of Dublin, with her and her friends for a little hiking on the coast. We walk to her friends', a group of Polish boys all around our age, where Voyt, the most outgoing towards me of the group, tells me of how at some god-awful hour in the morning they were trying to sober up/kick the impending hangover. They decided to paint the common area of their flat. That was their solution. Just imagine a group of shitfaced 20something Polish guys painting their communal common room with the sun coming up outside!... 'How do you think it looks?' he asks me. I must say, they did a pretty good job. It was about one or two in the afternoon and these fellows were already breaking out the Scotch. At this point I knew these kids were obviously a wild bunch, but what I didn't quite expect was that these were to be some of the most loving, affectionate and all around wonderful people I've met. They come from an area in the South of Poland that is very industrial, working class with a lot of mining. There was a whole grip of them, Voytek and Mytek being the ones I talked to most as their english was best and they were the more outgoing ones. So, we make to Howth at around 3 or 4 and it's a beautiful hike with some cliffs and a lighthouse on the coast... yeah yeah, very stereotypically Irish, but beautiful nonetheless.

And as is also very Irish, the rains come down in torrents rather unexpectedly. We're pretty deep into the hike, so we huddle under a nearby copse of trees and finish the whiskey and drink a bottle of wine to try to wait it out. I was reminded of Bothell, huddling in the woods in the rain and drinking... these are my kind of people. After about 40 minutes the booze is gone and the rain is still very present. At this point the drink is normalizing my sort of spacey delirium of jetlag and exhaustion. After a while we realize the rain won't let up and we walk a little ways and catch a bus back to the city center. On the bus we drink another bottle of wine procured at a local shop, obscuring the bottle with a hat for the sake of the camera staring at us from the front of the bus. We get back to the boys' flat and I realize that there's even more Polish in this building, practically a little community of them. We all change clothes and they generously offer me pants, a shirt, shoes... everything really, but I was the most prepared and only needed a pair of socks which were generously offered up in haste.

The plan for the night was to go to a dinner party at Voytek's older brother's girlfiend's flat in Dublin 4 (we've been in Dublin 2 this whole time). I always heard that the Polish had a reputation for being hard workers and hard drinkers and they didn't dissapoint. These kids can drink, and it's a different kind of drinking than I'm used to with friends. There's always a round of shots ready and waiting to slip down the collective throat and they never had to wait very long. I'm pround to say I could keep up, but kept an eye on myself being all too fully aware of my physical state and the forethought of catching a plane the next morning.

The dinner was a spagetthi with meatchunks and was almost as phenominal as the conversation. I didn't want the night to end, talking with people all around the world; Gael the Norman Frenchman, Inez, his beautiful Spanish girlfriend, the Brazilian girl was a darling, though I unfortunately forget her name, and of course the 8 or 9 Polish who were so affectionate for each other and welcoming to me that it really tugged at my heartstrings a little.

I feel like I could write a whole short sroty just about this one night, all the conversations, bridges gapped, spliffs rolled by the Frenchman, the rounds of shots... It was all rather overstimulating for my already boggled senses. I can only hope to stay in touch with at least a few of them (I have my two first foreign facebook friends) and hopefully see them all again when I'm in Dublin in September before I catch my flight from there to Barcelona.

It was an extraordinary introduction to couchsurfing for sure, though I thought it rather amusing that my first night in Ireland I hung out with so many people from all over the world, but not a single Irish person, and also drank not a single pint of Guinness.

A postscript of sorts: I noticed the name on the nose of the plane I boarded to cross the Atlantic to Dublin was named St. Colmcille, the patron saint of Glen Colm Cille in County Donegal, where I stayed with the Ireland Program in 2003. A good omen, I thought.

I'd like to request everyone, the next time they have a drink with their friends, they have a cheer to the Poles!

Street Hassle

I don't have much time as I leave soon for JFK airport to fly to Dublin. Can't figure out how to get pictures off my camera, so this entry and perhaps all future ones will be photoless, unfortunately.

Walking home late at night with drink coursing through the system, one can often trick oneself into thinking they're poetic and profound, when really they're just feeling a little sad, well, just such a thing occured to me and I stopped on the roof before turning in for bed at my sister's and wrote this:
'I stand upon a rooftop of Brooklyn and all I see is an ocean. An ocean of city. An ocean to get lost in and to lose yourself in. A labyrinth of people, routes, grids, ignition.
All sewing something up. Wishing to just soak up the minerals. Here the silence breathes deeper than anywhere else, but the silence only exists when the sharks are tearing you apart.
The moths can't decide if they're underwater or not.'

Yeah, make of that what you will. Feel free to poke fun at my emo bullshit, it's a rarity.

I've been seeing friends and experiencing New York's finest. I saw Radiohead at the All Points West festival in Jersey city last friday, my first time in New Jersey actually. Everybody's right, it does kind of smell.

Another highlight was David Byrne's 'Playing the Building'. An installation in the maritime museum on the southern tip of Manhattan. It is an organ in the middle of a large empty room, with these cords running from it to various parts of the building. You hit the keys on the organ and they activate various functions. There were three types: wind, percussion, and motor. You hit a key and, for instance, it would blow air through a pipe making a note ring out on the other side of the room, or you hit another key and behind you a motor would whir and create this droning note or another key would bang on a metal pylon. Very cool stuff.

There is always something going on here. What else? A DIY show in Williamsburg where I saw Growing from Olympia, I guess they moved here, after which we went to a sort of bike-hipster dance party in Bushwick.

It's just kind of a mess of events, a little too jumbled to write about. Future posts will be better, I swear!

I leave you with the lyrics to Street Hassle by Lou Reed which is so goddamn apt to New York City (just like, I suppose, everything that guy sings about):

A) waltzing matilda

Waltzing matilda whipped out her wallet
The sexy boy smiled in dismay
She took out four twenties cause she liked round figures
Everybodys a queen for a day
Oh, babe, Im on fire and you know how I admire your -
- body why dont we slip away
Although Im sure youre certain, its a rarity me flirtin
Sha-la-la-la, this way

Oh, sha-la-la-la-la, sha-la-la-la-la
Hey, baby, come on, lets slip away

Luscious and gorgeous, oh what a hunk of muscle
Call out the national guard
She creamed in her jeans as he picked up her means
From off of the formica topped bar
And cascading slowly, he lifted her wholly
And boldly out of this world
And despite peoples derision
Proved to be more than diversion
Sha-la-la-la, later on

And then sha-la-la-la-la, he entered her slowly
And showed her where he was coming from
And then sha-la-la-la-la, he made love to her gently
It was like shed never ever come
And then sha-la-la-la-la, sha-la-la-la-la
When the sun rose and he made to leave
You know, sha-la-la-la-la, sha-la-la-la-la
Neither one regretted a thing

B) street hassle

Hey, that cunts not breathing
I think shes had too much
Of something or other, hey, man, you know what I mean
I dont mean to scare you
But youre the one who came here
And youre the one whos gotta take her when you leave
Im not being smart
Or trying to be cold on my part
And Im not gonna wear my heart on my sleeve
But you know people get all emotional
And sometimes, man, they just dont act rational
They think theyre just on tv

Sha-la-la-la, man
Why dont you just slip her away

You know, Im glad that we met man
It really was nice talking
And I really wish that there was a little more time to speak
But you know it could be a hassle
Trying to explain myself to a police officer
About how it was that your old lady got herself stiffed
And its not like we could help
But there was nothing no one could do
And if there was, man, you know I would have been the first
But when someone turns that blue
Well, its a universal truth
And then you just know that bitch will never fuck again
By the way, thats really some bad shit
That you came to our place with
But you ought to be more careful around the little girls
Its either the best or its the worst
And since I dont have to choose
I guess I wont and I know this aint no way to treat a guest
But why dont you grab your old lady by the feet
And just lay her out on the darkened street
And by morning, shes just another hit and run
You know, some people got no choice
And they cant never find a voice
To talk with that they can even call their own
So the first thing that they see
That allows them the right to be
Why they follow it, you know, its called bad luck

C) slipaway

Believe me, that its just a lie
Thats what she tells her friends
cause the real song, the real song
Which she wont even admit to herself
Beat narrow heart, the song lots of people know
Its a painful song
Itll only say the truth
It lasts for sad songs
Penny for a wish
A wish wont make you a soldier
A pretty kiss or a pretty face
Cant have its way
The tramps like us who were born to play

Love is gone away
And theres no one here now
And theres nothing left to say
But, oh, how I miss him, baby
Oh, baby, come on and slip away
Come on, baby, why dont you slip away

Love is gone away
Took the rings off my fingers
And theres nothing left to say
But, oh how, oh how I need him, baby
Come on, baby, I need you baby
Oh, please dont slip away
I need your loving so bad, babe
Please dont slip away

To Live is to Fly

Won't say I love you, babe
Won't say I need you, babe
But I'm gonna' get you, babe
And I will not do you wrong
Living's mostly wasting time
And I waste my share of mine
But it never feels too good
So let's don't take too long
Well, you're soft as glass and I'm a gentle man
We got the sky to talk about
And the world to lie upon

Days up and down they come
Like rain on a conga drum
Forget most, remember some
Oh, but don't turn none away
Everything is not enough
And nothing is too much to bear
Where you've been is good and gone
All you keep’s the getting there
Well, to live is to fly awe low and high
So shake the dust off of your wings
And a sleep out of your eyes

It's goodbye to all my friends
It's time to go again
Here's to all the poetry
And the pickin' down the line
I'll miss the system here
The bottom's low and the treble's clear
But it don't pay to think too much
On things you leave behind
Well, I may be gone but it won't be long
I'll be bringing back the melody
And the rhythm that I find
We all got holes to fill
And them holes are all that's real
Some fall on you like a storm
Sometimes you dig your own
The choice is yours to make
Time is yours to take
Some dive into the sea
Some toil upon the Stone
Well, to live's to fly awe low and high
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eye
Awe, shake the dust off of your wings
And the tears out of your eye

-Townes Van Zandt

Anticipation...

Just a few days until my imminent departure. Flying to New York city on Tuesday to see my sister, Deidre, and a few friends. I'll be in New York for a week. The only definite plan for New York thus far is the All Points West festival across the water in Jersey City, where the main draw is Radiohead, but also Girl Talk, Grizzly Bear, Andrew Bird, among others.

The anticipation, along with the stress, mounts by the hour, but it will all dissipate the second I step on that plane... I hope.

Just today I booked a two week trip to Casablanca from Barcelona, to ensure my entry into Europe (I just had a one way ticket. In order so that they don't send me back, I had to buy a ticket out of Schengen territory Europe within 90 days of my arrival, now all is well, hopefully).

I plan on using helpx (www.helpx.net) to organize work exchanges on farms, wineries, communities, etc.

The only bad thing about this trip is I'm not bringing my cowboy boots so the title for this blog only has proverbial meaning. Shame, really.

Tonight I shall rock out to the Raggedy Anns at a house show in the U-District. It will be my last rock n' roll show in the States for quite a long time. The last time I saw them at this same house, it kicked off the summer stellarly (photos at top). I do hope they can do the same for this trip.