From Union Jack to Old Glory

Monday, September 8

When I wrote my last entry, I had visions of being welcomed home to America in style. I would fly over the Capitol and the White House on a glorious sunny afternoon, and there might even be trumpets playing as I went through customs. (Okay, that last bit is an exaggeration.) As I'm sure you've guessed, this idealized vision was not fulfilled.

My flight from Dublin to Amsterdam was delayed by a half an hour. I sat in tense anxiety for the last twenty minutes of the flight, hoping I could make my connecting flight to D.C. I ran through the Amsterdam airport, computer backpack and purse bouncing against my body the whole way. I reached the gate with several minutes to spare. Out of breath but relieved, I passed through security and got in the boarding line. They scanned my ticket but there was a problem and I had to go speak to someone at a nearby desk. Apparently while I had made it to the gate on time, my checked luggage had not. I'd been re-booked for another flight the same day. I was disappointed, but the next flight was just a couple hours later, so I assumed I'd still have a somewhat shortened afternoon/evening with Ann.

No such luck. When I got to the desk to pick up my new ticket, I found out that my flight wasn't direct. I'd have a layover in Newark and arrive in D.C. at 9:50 p.m. I was seriously fighting back tears at this point. My time with Ann was already going to be short, and now it was going to be diminished by a whole day! Plus I was really frustrated about having to transfer yet again and waste more of my life hanging around in airports. (I realized rationally that I was lucky not to have to spend the night in Amsterdam, but I still felt annoyed.)

After a long flight across the Atlantic, I finally made it to Newark. I didn't realize I had to re-check my baggage, but fortunately I figured it out. Even more fortunately, they didn't weigh it so I didn't have to pay the overweight fee (they hadn't weighed it in Dublin either). I waited out my 2-hour layover more or less patiently--or at least resigned. When I found out that this flight had been delayed as well, I was mildly annoyed but too exhausted to put any real passion into it. And I wasn't in the least surprised. It just seemed to be my luck that day.

I finally got on the plane, but it had to taxi around on the runway for a while. The captain announced that we were 25th in the queue to take off and we'd probably be leaving around 10:00 p.m. (That's ten minutes after we were supposed to arrive in D.C. originally.) Again, I was too tired to feel more than a slight twinge of frustration and have the interesting thought that what had started as a half-hour delay had become an eight-hour delay for me. We did end up getting bumped up in the queue, so we got to D.C. around 10:45. Ann and I then spent almost two hours on public transportation (including waiting time) with my massive luggage. We got to her place around 1:00 a.m.

The next day, I realized that the American sunshine I'd been dreaming of was not to be. In fact, I'd chosen to come to D.C. right as a tropical storm was coming up the coast. But I genuinely thought this was hilarious, mostly because I was enjoying being with Ann and was relieved to finally be in D.C. We walked to the Library of Congress (which was really magnificent and fascinating) in the hurricane rain. We were soaked but enjoying ourselves. There was quite a stark contrast between the sites I'd been seeing in the UK and the D.C. sites. For one thing, all the "historical" buildings in D.C. obviously seemed so young! For another, I was a bit amused by their idealized views of America. For instance, the ceiling of the Reading Room in the Library of Congress portrays America as the culmination of western civilization (Greek philosophy, Israeli religion, English literature, French and Italian art or something, etc). The entrance hall was designed to mimic the Italian Renaissance style, and one of the distinguishing features of this style is cherubs lounging on clouds. The designers decided that American cherubs wouldn't just sit on clouds, so they sculpted cherubs that were busy creating, inventing, and working. I thought this was so hilarious, and it was one of my favorite features of the Library.

Later that afternoon, the weather cleared up beautifully and we walked past all the major sites, including the Washington Monument, WWII Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Vietnam War Memorial, the Capitol, and the White House. They were all quite stately and impressive, and I really enjoyed seeing these icons of American government.

The next day, we went to a church that meets in the AMC movie theater in Union Station. It was a fun location, and it was great to go to church again because I hadn't been for probably two months. After that, we went to the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian, which was an exceptionally good museum. We saw a version of the Lunar Module, which neither of us could believe actually made it in space. There was also an exhibit called "Exploring the Planets" from which Pluto had been recently excluded.

That evening, we went to a show called Shear Madness at the Kennedy Center. It's a humorous murder mystery that involves improvisation and audience participation. At one point,, they have the audience vote on which suspect they think committed the crime. "Whichever way you vote, that's the way we play it," they told us at the end. So whoever gets the most votes is portrayed as the guilty party. The actors were all really good, and it was so fun to see such a unique show!

This morning, Ann and I got up early to come to the airport. My suitcase weighed almost 70 pounds! Needless to say, I had to pay the overweight luggage fee, which was $80. I thought it was only going to be $50, but I'm not complaining since I only had to pay the fee once. I'm now on the plane to JFK in New York City, where I have a 2-hour layover. And then it will be on to Minnesota.

Thanks to everyone who joined me on my "Albion adventures." Throughout my trip, I occasionally saw the word "Albion" and I tried to take a picture of it any time I saw it. To conclude this blog, I will post a picture of a pub called The Albion which I saw in Bristol. I hope you're all doing well, and hopefully I can see you all soon!

Facebook Photos--Bristol, Stratford, Glastonbury

Bumming Around in Bristol
"Mecca" x2

The Land of Eire

Written 4 September

My second day in Sligo began with breakfast in Molly's Diner. This thoroughly Irish breakfast was served with ambience of the American South. There were bumper stickers that said things like "American By Birth, Southern By the Grace of God" and there were pictures of other typically American things like Harley Davidsons and the cartoon '50s woman. It was all rather amusing.

Then I went to the Sligo County Museum that had rooms devoted to Countess Markievicz (heavily involved in the Easter Uprising of 1916, promoting Irish nationalism), Yeats, and other random Sligo claims to fame (like they had teeth from a whole that was beached on the county's shores). Of course, I thought the most interesting room was the Yeats room, and the most interesting thing in that room was Yeats's Nobel Prize for Literature.

After that, I went on a cruise on Lough Gill past the Isle of Innisfree, immortalized by Yeats:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

While a beautiful poem, I think many of Yeats's other poems are even better. I really like The Second Coming and some of his poems about Maud Gonne (a political revolutionary involved in the Easter Uprising of 1916, like Countess Markievicz). Yeats loved her for years, and he proposed to her twice and was rejected both times. (She apparently preferred men of action to poets.) This poem is called No Second Troy:

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

On the Lough Gill cruise, we also passed Church Island with its ruins of an old Celtic monastery (think Patrick, Brigid, and Brendan). The whole area was absolutely gorgeous, and I'm bummed that none of my pictures do it justice. The lake was peppered with lovely islands and surrounded by rolling mountains, interesting rock features, and foliage in every imaginable shade of green. Because Irish weather frequently involves sun and rain at the same time, the lake reflected many different hues on its mildly choppy waves. The cruise director quoted some of Yeats's poetry and played some Irish music to further set the mood.

Before and after the cruise (for a half-hour each time), I got to visit Parke's Castle. It was rather small but still picturesque with Lough Gill and the mountains in the background. Once back in Sligo town, I visited the ruins of an abbey. They were fun to explore and find "hidden treasures" carved on the crumbling walls. That evening, I ate in a pub and had a half-pint of Guinness. (Ireland is world-renowned for its Guinness beer.) It was really strong, so it wasn't my favorite. But I can see where some people would like it because it had a rich taste and was actually quite refreshing.

The next morning (this morning, actually), I got a train back to Dublin. After checking into my hostel and arranging for a taxi to the airport tomorrow morning, I went to the James Joyce Centre. It had a few interesting artifacts of Joyce's life and it had quite a bit of good infomation on Joyce and his works (especially Ulysses) and on the publication of Ulysses (different editions, the controversy the book caused, etc). The best item the museum had was the actual door from No. 7 Eccles Street, the house where the Blooms lived in Ulysses and where Joyce's friend lived in real life. I touched the door knocker, thinking how Joyce had assured it touched it as well about a century ago.

Next, I went to the Dublin Writers' Museum which had quite a good audio guide and collection of artifacts from a ton of Irish writers, some of whom I hadn't even heard of before. I decided for the second time in my life that I need to learn more about the Irish Literary Revival, connected with Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats, and the Abbey Theatre. Then I went to Merrion Square, which is a nice park surrounded by houses where a lot of writers lived, including Yeats and Oscar Wilde. There was also a clever memorial to Wilde in the park with a lot of his best quotes written on it.

And that, my friends, concludes not only my time in Ireland but also my time in the British Isles (for this trip, at any rate). It's been such a good trip and I can hardly believe it's coming to an end. But I really can't afford to keep travelling, so I better go home and find a paying job. That will be kind of exciting but I'm sure it will feel mundane and boring after a while. (Probably a short while.) But I'm trying to learn to enjoy whatever I'm currently experiencing instead of always dwelling on the future. So for now, it's on to Washington D.C. and a much-anticipated visit with Ann!

Free Internet?!?!

I'm currently in my hostel in Sligo and you'll never guess what they have! (Well, you probably will, if you've read the title of this post.) That's right; they have free internet! (Of course, they don't include breakfast, so I guess there's always a trade-off.)

So since I have unlimited internet, I will pick up my story where I left off in Edinburgh. The next day was Saturday and, after a huge breakfast, I went to another Festival event. It was the matinee concert of the Beaux Arts Trio (piano, violin, cello) playing Mendelssohn, Kurtag, and Beethoven. I decided that I like listening to small ensembles better than full orchestras, in some ways, because I can listen to all the voices at once, whereas I have to focus on the voice playing the melody in orchestras. I guess I don't think I'm very 'skilled' at listening to classical music and I'm certainly not one of those people who can say things like, 'Ah! Listen to how the composer is echoing his original theme in this countertheme, blah blah blah.' But I really enjoy it nevertheless. In fact, this trio made me think that classical music is the Platonic ideal of music because it's in such a pure form. Of course, it's probably ridiculous to classify one type of music as more 'pure' than another, but that's what I thought in my enraptured state in the middle of the concert.

After that, I went to the Palace of Holyroodhouse and the ruins of the Holyroodhouse Abbey. The palace is the Queen's official residence while in Scotland, so it's still a 'working palace,' which was pretty interesting. (I think I'm becoming one of those weird people who are unduly interested in the royal family.) I also toured the new Scottish Parliament building. The Scots had been ruled solely by the Parliament in Westminster (and Wales still is) from 1707 to 1999. Then some of the powers of the UK Parliament were 'devolved' to Scotland, and their Parliament reconvened. The new building was completed in 2004. It's a prime example of modern architecture, which I always think is interesting.

A lot of people complained about its appearance--and granted, it is quite different from the grand buildings that surround it. But I'm always pleased when people in the 21st century build something that isn't just economical or practical but something that is artistic and will be something people will find interesting in 200 years. The tour explained all the symbolism in the building; it's meant to physically represent the four pillars of the Scottish Parliament--accessibility, accountability, transparency, and equality. Some of the unique features of the building have no fixed meaning because the builders wanted to emphasize the power of the people; each person can decide for him- or herself what these features mean (hence, it's a postmodern building, not just modern!). Just as a sidenote, in the Scottish Parliament, each person who speaks must limit their remarks to four minutes in order to prevent filibustering. This seems like such a simple solution, and I don't understand why we haven't implemented it in America (or England, for that matter).

That evening, I went to a choir concert called 'A Child of Our Time.' It was written during World War II about Kristalnacht, when a Jewish boy shot a German officer for persecuting his family and then the Nazis retaliated by pillaging Jewish homes and businesses and killing a bunch of people. It had some really good ideas in it (Sir Michael Tippett, the writer/composer, drew heavily on Jungian ideas of the shadow, which was interesting), and the music was fabulously performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. He also inserted African American spirituals at key emotional points of he piece, which I thought was really powerful. However, the lyrics themselves were not the greatest, I didn't think. Unbeknownst to me when I chose to go to this event, Tippett was friends with T.S. Eliot and asked him to write the final lyrics for the piece. Eliot originally agreed, but then read Tippett's stuff and thought that his words would be too 'poetical' for what Tippett was trying to do. That might be true, but I think it would have been nice for them to sound a little bit more poetical. Maybe Robert Frost's type of poetry rather than Eliot's, but still. Eliot's ideas definitely influenced the piece a bit though. There was a particularly interesting line that said something like, "Beyond the desert lies the garden." This line further confirms one of the main points I was trying to make in my senior thesis, but I'm not going to go into that now.

On Sunday, I had a rather laidback day. I ate a leisurely breakfast and then went back to my room and slept some more. Then I went to the Balmoral Hotel and asked the concierge in a kilt if that was the hotel where J.K. Rowling had finished writing Harry Potter (as if I didn't already know that it was), and he confirmed that it was. I asked if they still had the bust she had signed which said, "J.K. Rowling completed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this room (652) on this date (she wrote the actual date)." He said that they did and that it was in a glass case in the room where she stayed. I said, "Oh, so I suppose there's no way for the public to see it?" And he said there wasn't. So that was too bad, but oh well. Then I had a late lunch and then climbed the Walter Scott monument, the tallest memorial ever made for an author. It gave some really good views of the city, so it was worth climbing up another narrow spiral staircase. (This one got even narrower than the one leading up to the top of York Cathedral.)

After that, I just went back to my room, relaxed a little bit, and spent a while packing up. Then I went to the Bank of Scotland Fireworks Concert, the concluding event of the Festival. It was really fun because they coordinated the fireworks with classical dances (Brahms's Hungarian dances and Dvorak's Slavonic dances). So when there was an emphatic part of the music, there would be a few big fireworks. And when the music was fast, there would be a bunch of swirling fireworks or something. Best of all, the fireworks were shot off from the castle, which is up on a high promontory. This castle background distinguished these fireworks from any I've ever seen celebrating American Independence Day because, of course, we don't have any castles.

Then I had my awful travel day on Monday. I got up at 5:15 a.m. and was picked up by a taxi at 6:00 a.m. I got to the train station and paid my taxi driver. With the earliness of the hour and the preoccupied state of my mind (because I was ridiculously anxious about something going wrong in this lengthy day of travels), I managed to walk off with my purse and large suitcase, leaving my backpack behind. I hadn't put it on my back before paying the cab driver, but I must have thought I did. I got to my train platform rather early and moved to take my backpack off, only to realize that it wasn't there. Of course, I was freaking out but not letting myself fully freak out until I knew that my laptop and all my essentials had been irretrievably lost. I asked the first train worker I saw where my luggage would have gone if it had been found. He said the "left luggage" office, which I thought was incorrect because "left luggage" means luggage people have purposely left behind to store there for a while, not luggage that was accidentally left behind. Plus the office wasn't open. Of course, I went back to the taxi rank and, sure enough, the backpack wasn't there anymore. I asked someone else who worked there and they said, "Well, no one has turned anything in here, but maybe security..." and as he was talking, a security officer walked in with the bag. Of course, they had checked it to make sure it hadn't been left there with a bomb inside or something. When it was safe, they brought it to reception and I could have it back. So that was terrifying, but thankfully turned out just fine. I had to catch three trains (carting my huge heavy suitcase), each of which were only about an hour so I wasn't able to really relax or try to sleep.

Then I had to wait around for my ferry to Belfast. Once on the boat, it was a lot of fun! It must have been like a mini-cruise ship because it had shopping, restaurants, a place to get your nails done, lounges, coffee shops, video games, places for children to play, etc. Then I got to Belfast and took a taxi from the harbour to the train station. I couldn't believe I had taken two taxis in a day, but I was really glad for both of them. Sometimes it's worth it to pay a little extra money for something like that. I took the two-hour train from Belfast to Dublin. Upon arrival in Dublin (at around 8:30 pm), I had been planning to store my large suitcase in the left luggage facilities. Usually, these facilities are an actual office. In this case, they were just lockers right out in the open that didn't look that difficult to break into. And the large ones cost 6 Euros per day. I thought that was a bit steep for such shady facilities. So I decided to take my luggage to my hostel. I went out of the train station and could not get my bearings from the crappy map I had. A construction worker asked if I was lost and I said I was. I showed him my map and he couldn't figure it out either, but his friend knew the place I was talking about. They said, "Oh yeah, it's not that far, but since it's dark out, you should probably take taxi." I thought that was a little creepy because I'd gotten the same Dublin-is-a-shady-place song and dance from the Irish family I met in Wales. So I ended up taking a third taxi in one day! I was so exhausted, but my splitting headache (from all the stress) kept me up half the night.

Anyways, I was able to leave my large suitcase in that hostel's luggage room for the two nights that I'm in Sligo because I'm staying there again for one more night before flying back to the States. So that was a relief. The train to Sligo takes three hours, which was longer than I was expecting. After checking into my hostel, I ate a wonderful toasted tuna sandwich at a pub. Then I took a train to Drumcliffe and saw Yeats's grave and the famous mountain/plateau Benbulben. (Sligo's main claim to fame is that Yeats was from here.) Benbulben and the Bay of Sligo are really beautiful! I'm glad I came here, but some of my passionate enjoyment of my trip is wearing off due to exhaustion and stress. It's like I can't make the effort to really enjoy something right now, so I just enjoy it halfheartedly. That sounds depressing, but I don't mean it to. I'm still enjoying myself, but travelling solo is rather exhausting because there's just so many things to think about and so many problems to try to prevent. I'm really glad that I did this trip independently because I have gained confidence that I am able to do something like this on my own. But, like any challenge, it is tiring, and I'll be ready to go home when the time comes.