Bring It CLON

…As the locals call the city Clonakilty.

Well, I finished up on the farm Thursday this week. It was rather bittersweet – my cabin fever was overjoyed that I’d be seeing new places, but I was going to miss having good food, a real home, and a family of sorts to come home to.

View from one of my windows, showing the polytunnel (greenhouse)

All in all, my experience on the Van Dam farm was great. Some people have asked what an average day was like while I was WWOOFing, and while it’s no longer relevant to my life at the moment, I will share one response I sent! To Matt LaChance!

One of my $18 work gloves after only three weeks. It's hard to tell in this picture, but the first three fingers are completely open at the tips, and it's starting to rip up one side.

“Average day, hmmmm. I wake up at 7:30 AM, make myself a simple breakfast in the mobile home, and get out to work by 8. There's a coffee break around 10 or 11 with my hosts, and dinner (lunch) is at 1 PM, a nice big home-cooked meal with fresh veg. That usually goes until 2 or 2:30 ("half two" as they'd say) and then it's back to work until....well, the end time is relatively undefined, so far it's ranged from 4:30 and 7:30, but usually around 6 or 6:30. Then, usually, I go back to the mobile home, cook myself some dinner (with ingredients they've provided/grown) and take a bath(!!!) around 8. After that I'll fart around reading, listening to music, watching a video or two (luckily I torrented the entire series of "Earthworm Jim: The Animated Series" shortly before leaving). If it's cold I'll light a fire in the heater-stove (which is pretty ineffective outside of the room it's located in, actually). I generally get into bed around 10:30 and that gives me plenty of sleep to wake up at 7:30 the next day!”

The Wall and its soil, the weeding/digging/leveling of which composed the single longest-running job I had on the farm.

The Van Dams were great to me, too. I was allowed basically full access to their personal garden (leek, onion, potato, spinach, chard, parsley, oregano, rosemary, thyme, lemon balm, spearmint, chive) for my own cooking, and the food they made was always delicious. I even surprised myself by enjoying two dishes composed primarily of eggs! I don’t think I could stomach them straight-up, but apparently my tastes have changed enough to tolerate them when mixed with more-flavorful things. The Spanish omelet was my favorite. Maybe I’ll try a quiche next! They brought me along on many family outings – in the process, helping me to get out of the immediate area and, probably, further helping me get through my depressed period! Then there’s the sharing of their home-made beer and wines, all of which were delicious and deceptively strong and led to good conversations. Also, their twin boys were adorable and very fun to babysit when I was tapped for such a task.

View from another of my windows, showing the backyard.

My only complaint – though perhaps one that can’t be helped – was that Mark and Debbie would argue rather frequently, even while I was present. It made me super uncomfortable whenever it happened. If they’re reading this right now, I hope they don’t take it too personally. At least I got to see their loving side as well, so I'm not too worried!

…There is, of course, the issue of the aforementioned bad period. I think it was a combination of boredom, separation anxiety, homesickness, and cabin fever. True, for the first couple weeks, I really wasn’t doing much at all after work. On the other hand…that’s totally normal for me. When I’m at home and I have a busy day, I’ll spend the evening just relaxing. So, I don’t think boredom was a HUGE part of it. But getting out more certainly helped the healing/acclimating process.

Are you familiar with Ryan Air? They are the super-budget airline that goes all over Europe for small handfuls of euro. They’re super cheap, but as the saying goes, “you get what you pay for”. I just tried booking my flight to London and I got a “fatal error”, then I tried re-booking and got the same “fatal error”. After that failed, I started booking through another airline. A few minutes later, luckily before I’d booked with the other airline, I got a (single) e-mail giving me confirmation on my flight through Ryan Air. Way to get off to a good start, dudes. I just hope I don’t soon find out that I’ve been charged for both errored bookings….

Let There Be LIGHTHOUSE

I’m writing this bit at 11:15ish PM on Thursday, two weeks after arriving on the van Dam farm. I am currently quite buzzed thanks to Mark’s home-brewed ale (which was quite delicious, rather cider-like and fruity – maybe I’m developing a taste for beer after all!) and feeling totally good. Today was actually a great day. I got to move away from weeding and on to post-holing (digging holes for posts) in preparation for erecting a fence along one edge of the property. I was still kneeling the whole time, and my legs are again killing me, but it was a nice change. I don’t know what it is about weeding around bushes, but it just inspires evil feelings within me. Listening to my iPod as I work helps, too – it prevents my mind from dwelling on saddening things. Later, Mark and the twins and I drove a few km to the nearest beach mid-afternoon. The ostensible purpose was to collect sand for future cement-production, but we had good fun there, too. I tried skipping stones for the first time in several years and did quite well, I thought. Then Mark started, and outstripped me like mad. Farther, faster, more skips…it would be hard to be more beaten in such a contest. It was still a good time, though. The kids are really fun. I’ve never spent a long time around toddlers (is that what you call a two-and-a-half-year-old?) and while it has been occasionally tiring and annoying, they’re really quite nice and funny and friendly.

I worked for a bit after the beach, and then Mark and Debbie and I moved to the…well, I don’t quite know what to call it, but it’s a corner of the property with a big pile of drying branches/weeds/roots/grass. We went there and started up a fire in an old oil drum and burned maybe a quarter or a third of the stuff there. It was actually a grand night. Earlier in the day Mark had gotten hold of some free second-hand beer tap equipment and was able to extract the newly-gasified remnants of a “five years old” home-made beer. So as I was pitchforking dead roots into this fire (which in itself was nice, since burning leaves and yard waste has been prohibited back home all my life) Mark and Debbie came out with a pitcher of beer and the three of us shot the shit as the sun slowly lowered. For reference, it starts looking sunset-y around 6:30 or 7 and doesn’t actually get dark until maybe 9:45 or 10. It’s quite nice. We talked about all manner of things, some of the larger topics being children, WWOOFing, aging, and self-discovery. We finished as it got too dark to further feed the oil drum and we went to our respective homes and that brings me to where I am now!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m feeling much better now than I was when I wrote that blog post. My mood has improved incredibly – thanks to everyone offering kind words of support, as well as to the van Dams for earnestly attempting to involve me more after I had told them that I was interested in leaving early.

While I’ve been here, I have been sleeping really well, but I’ve been having really bizarre dreams. I hear (thanks to Esquire magazine) that certain vitamins can cause overactive subconscious, so perhaps my taking a multivitamin shortly before bed is contributing to my odd dreams. None of them have been lucid, but I have been writing down all the dream details I can remember because I hear that is a good way to progress one’s mind towards lucid dreaming. I still don’t know exactly why it’s such a big goal, though…frankly I’m quite happy letting my subconscious decide what happens, because it seems like a whole new self-contained story instead of something I’m making up as I go along.

Written on Saturday (sober, by now):

Today…was a great day. I’m incredibly pleased (as I hope you are, Constant Readers) that I’m more fully enjoying myself here in Ireland after that period of despair.

Saturdays are my “half day” of work on the farm. Since it was drizzly when I woke up, I quickly finished up the job I’d almost done the night before (smashing stones with a sledgehammer to make concrete) and then retreated inside the caravan to assemble a couple of garden benches – my “rainy day” task, natch. I was more-or-less done by 10 at which point I joined Mark in town for another Tai Chi lesson. I further learned that what I have done in Mark’s classes isn’t Tai Chi Chuan proper, and isn’t even a martial art; rather, it’s a series of meditative movements intended to loosen/stretch/soothe the body and mind, heavily inspired by Tai Chi. The real Tai Chi is in his earlier class (the one that I watched and pathetically tried to follow visually last time before doing these movements). Oh well! I still want to find out more when I get back to Ann Arbor.

The twins had a birthday party to attend, and Mark didn’t want me to feel like I was working while he and Debbie weren’t, so they gave me the afternoon off. From 2:30 (after dinner) to around 7 I finally took an intense walking tour of the area. The vast, vast bulk of this hike was just going through/between/around farms and houses, but there were a handful of goals. Actually, come to think of it, each goal was a separate branch off a single “main” (not big at all) road. First I made my way to the second-closest and first-ranked pub in the area – just as a waypoint, not to get a pint at 3 in the afternoon – and beyond it to a small, rocky beach. I found a piece of coal and, of course, used it to write “P.G. ‘09” on a rock in an area that might not get rained on often. Then I went back to the main road and walked a ways up it further until I saw the sign saying “Galley Head – 3 km”. I turned up that and walked to the end and back, for Galley Head is the local lighthouse, said to be quite picturesque. I’ll talk more about the lighthouse in the next paragraph, because there’s quite a bit to talk about there. After seeing that and coming back to the main road, I kept on going to Red Strand, which is a fairly short but pretty local beach. There I met a curious couple – an Oregonian and an Irishwoman who live in Germany. At first, I just took a picture of them like they asked, but later they drove past me hiking back to the farm and gave me a lift. All in all though, I was walking a solid four hours. It was refreshing!

Okay, the lighthouse. Interesting tidbit I got from Debbie: it’s the only lighthouse on the island of Ireland that flashes inland, and it does so because an earlier owner of the nearby castle Castlefreke was very vain and demanded that his beautiful castle be illuminated at night if they were going to build a lighthouse anyway. Well…it was just your average lighthouse, and I couldn’t go straight up to it. But that’s not why I gave it a separate paragraph.

I want to say that I love this dog:



As I was taking a picture along the road to the lighthouse – I was probably four fifths of the way there – this beautiful yellow lab came bounding out of the nearest house and sat down next to me. There were no people visible in or around the house, so I pet him and he turned out to be quite friendly. Then, as I continued walking to the end of the peninsula, he continued to accompany me. Sometimes he was at my side, sometimes he jumped up on the low stone wall separating road from cliff, sometimes he ran a few yards ahead. The lighthouse itself is private property, but there was a little grassy clearing at the end of the public road, and you could go down a relatively safe portion of the cliff. When we reached the clearing, he happily jumped around and sniffed around the edge of the cliff. It was…shockingly nice to have him there. Having a companion – even (especially?) one who didn’t talk, but was just always there at my side wagging his tail – was extremely reassuring.

Also, the supper I made myself today was by far the best I’ve made in my time here. I will tentatively call it “spaghetti with sauce” but only because I’m not sure what really goes into spaghetti sauce so I made it up. Here is the recipe:

1 fresh home-grown leek
1 fresh home-grown onion
2 sprigs fresh home-grown thyme
1 sprig fresh home-grown rosemary
1 sprig fresh home-grown oregano
1 sprig fresh home-grown parsley
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 leftover frozen chicken leg
Vegetable oil
Ketchup
Mustard
Soy sauce
Salt
Pepper

1. Prepare by dicing onion, slicing leek into rounds (including the long green leaves [totally edible, guys – just cook them a little longer]), chopping herbs (leaving them separated), opening can of tomatoes, and removing chicken from the bone and cutting into manageable pieces.
2. Heat a pan with a tiny amount of vegetable oil, then brown chicken along with salt, pepper, rosemary and thyme. Set chicken aside.
3. Add a bit more oil to the dregs in the same pan then cook onion until nearly caramelized. Add oregano about halfway through this step.
4. Add leek to the pan and fry for several minutes (this is the one thing I did wrong – my leek leaves were still a bit crunchy in the final product).
5. Add can of tomatoes, followed by a generous squirt or two of ketchup, a small bit (maybe ¾ teaspoon?) of mustard, and a dash of soy sauce. The odd mix is because I wanted to make things interesting - don't worry, I know spaghetti sauce isn't supposed to have those things in it. Stir thoroughly.
6. Allow to simmer for several minutes. Add chicken, then simmer for several more minutes.
7. Salt and pepper to taste.
8. Add sauce as desired to the pasta that I assume you prepared alongside this pasta sauce. Didn’t make pasta? You are goddamn retarded.

…Anyway, yeah. This was a hell of a long post, but it was fun and hopefully entertaining. And I have finally started to love my time here. Here’s hoping it continues!

A Bridge Too FARM

This isn't an interesting or well-planned post, so it doesn't get an interesting or well-planned pun. Sorry to disappoint, Constant Readers.

I realized that I never filled in the correct number of days that a roll of toilet paper would last me, because at the time of my posting it hadn't run out yet!

The answer is, "Eight days, almost to the hour."

The duck head count on the farm has been as follows: 2, then 4, then 3. We are now up two laying females and down one jackass male (who was probably eaten by a fox).

Yesterday my hosts dug up the first of their home-grown potatoes. They were delicious, and I felt almost TOO Irish eating them.

Speaking of Irish foods, they gave me some black pudding as part of my cook-for-myself supplies. For the unfamiliar, black pudding is packaged like sausage, but the contents are pork (about 25%), pork rind, pork blood, oatmeal, spices. When cooked, it has an enjoyable crispy almost-meat-like outside and a disturbing squishy pudding-like inside. I didn't despise it, but I won't be ordering it again intentionally. Maybe I should try white pudding instead (substitute milk for blood).

I'm going to try and get out more. I talked with my hosts about leaving early (which I will, by just a couple of days) and they thought my main problem was just boredom. It's probably a factor in my sometimes-rotten mood, so I'm going to stop spending my evenings cooped up in the caravan. Wish me luck! Next post may just have a Clonakilty pun, since that's the first place to visit!

Please Contact My Next of KINSALE

By the way, I write these throughout the week and then upload them when I get the chance. Hopefully that explains any weird time discrepancies you may notice – such as “today” referring to two different days in the same post.

Thursday – after a full week on the farm – I got my first rain worth speaking of. It…was kind of nice. The land in the distance was all misty-looking and made me feel kind of poetical. And luckily for me, it was only misting until I finished my job (clearing weeds from around the fruit trees and re-mulching the bare spots) and went inside, at which point it picked up.

For dinner I got lazy and ate baked beans – some of them right out of the pot they were cooking in – and I also happened to have soot all over my fingers from setting up the heating fire. I felt kind of like a hobo. But don’t worry! The rest of the time I’m eating fairly well, with fresh “veg” (as my hosts invariably say) straight from the garden.

…I am having some issues, though. Loneliness and such. I feel very isolated from, well, everything. The only people I have to talk to are the husband and wife who own the farm and their two-and-a-half-year-old twin boys. That, plus I don’t have the constant on-demand internet access that I’m accustomed to. The net result is that I’m kind of trapped inside my own head. Sometimes when I’m doing menial tasks (for some reason, sitting down and digging weeds was particularly bad for this) my mind is totally unoccupied and it begins going places that I’d rather it not be going. I start thinking about how far away from all my friends I am right now, and the fact that I may never see some of them again. Even weirder is how I’ll sometimes start thinking about high school, and about how I might have missed out on some vital experiences or about mistakes I made. Is that weird? Also: I am terrified about the real world.

In conclusion, I think that three weeks per farm was perhaps biting off a bit more than I care to chew. But we’ll see how I feel by the end of May, whether or not I think it was ultimately worth it to spend that much time. Right now two more weeks seems like a VERY long time, but on the other hand, it hardly feels like I’ve already been here a week, so maybe it’ll go quickly.

Saturday I got a free Tai Chi lesson from Mark. It was nice, invigorating, relaxing. Probably with repeated practice it’s even better – I’m not entirely sure what the benefits of it are, as I didn’t feel “worked out” afterward, but maybe it improves your flexibility and lowers stress and such. I felt kinda out-of-place since everyone else knew a bit about what they were doing (it was one of his regular lessons that I was just sitting in on). He said I did well for a beginner, which is always good to hear! For those few who will know what the hell I’m talking about: the whole time I was doing it I had waterbending in the back of my mind, and it was totally awesome. I even found myself noticing specific moves that overlapped the two!

Sunday – my day off – I was invited to go to Kinsale with the Van Dams. Mark plays saxophone in a latin-fusion band and they were playing a gig and wondered if I wanted to come along. Since I would have otherwise just lounged around the caravan, maybe taken a walk, I eagerly agreed. Kinsale is a charming (as all small Irish towns seem to be) town about an hour’s drive from Conakilty, with a thriving water-based community. That is to say, fishing and yachting are the biggest pastimes. When we arrived, we witnessed some kind of a boat race consisting of dozens upon dozens of young-teenaged kids racing little sailboats (maybe six feet long) surprisingly quickly down the river. I wandered around town, got a few nice pictures, listened to a busker play accordion while I ate a sandwich for lunch. I once again regret not being more confident and straightforward in general; there was this really cool-looking hippie girl sitting on a wall eating lunch who smiled at me when I walked past. I wanted to take a picture of her, but I felt awkward just asking a stranger something like that (though obviously professional street photographers must do the same thing all the time). By the time I’d made up my mind to go back and talk to her she had already disappeared. C’est la vie, I guess!

P.S.: I am not becoming as ripped as I was kind of hoping to. This has not been the kind of farm work I anticipated – less bucking bales of hay and more crouching and digging. Not terribly muscle-intensive. Perhaps this will change over the next two weeks.

P.P.S.: I am delighted to announce that, given my prodigious free time without internet access, I have finally slogged through my four-hundred-plus playlist of “songs to listen to” that I had torrented/been given but never actually tried out for myself. Phew.

KILKERN-ing Time

Today I found the coast.

On my last day off I decided to hike for the afternoon and attempted to find the ocean. It’s visible from our farm, but there’s a few miles of farmland in between us and it. That day, I just set off in the general direction of the ocean, taking whichever fork of the road seemed like it might help based on educated guesses (read: randomly). After two separate instances of “reaching the top of a hill expecting to see the road leading straight down to a beach and being disappointed” I decided I hadn’t done it right and went back to the house. It was a nice walk, though!

Today I actually made it there! …I am kind of sad to say that I didn’t find it through trial and error, but rather got directions from the Van Dams (so are named the farm owners). I borrowed a bike this time, though frankly this area is hilly enough that I get really pissed off biking uphill and should really just stick to hiking briskly. The beach was wonderful. I arrived around 5 PM and the sun was over the water – not nearly “setting” yet, but low enough to give things nice dramatic shadows. It was beautiful. There was a nice sandy beach area as well as a very cool rocky cliffy area that I walked/climbed for a time.

Actually, today was very satisfying as far as getting work done. ‘Til today, I hadn’t yet finished a single job – they were all ongoing, particularly clearing the weeds from the wall. And yet, today I: leveled the now-weed-free soil near the wall, de-soiled and removed grass sods from all over the yard, painted creosote (weatherproofing gunk that looks like crude oil) all over some fence posts, removed the mulch from the duck shed, and began clearing grass/weeds away from the bases of some berry bushes (the only one of today’s jobs that will carry on in the future, I believe). It’s really nice to actually have stuff behind me for once.

Also, Jesus Christ are my ears sunburned. I had noticed that they felt very warm even when the rest of me was cold at night in the caravan, and I hadn’t been putting sunblock on, but somehow I hadn’t made the connection until this morning. Oww. Another thing I’ve learned tonight: you need to re-apply sunblock every few hours! You know what that means – they got even worse as the day progressed! Humph.

Posted at 9:35 PM local time.

What a CORKer!

It has occurred to me that I will never, during my three months abroad here, look “cool”. I’m carrying 90% work clothes that I care nothing about (save for one Dude and Catastrophe hoodie), my everyday walking shoes are clunky hiking-boot-style things, I haven’t brought a razor, my coat is three sizes too big, and – icing on the cake – instead of a wallet, I’m carrying money and cards in a cream-colored L.L. Bean money pouch that loops around my waist and zips up for security. No, I think I will always look like a farmer or a dork. This is something I must come to terms with.

So, Cork City.

Night 1: I sat around for much of the afternoon recuperating from the travel. I went out into town and found a Tesco Value store (roughly equivalent to Wal-Mart, but seemingly less reviled by the public). There I purchased half a loaf of bread, blackcurrant jam, and “American-style” crunchy peanut butter. These would be my primary sustenance for the next two days. That evening, I got to know my roommates – four girls from Toronto who had been all over Europe over the last several months and were all around my sister’s age (weird). We joined Bret from California for a night on the town, culminating in one girl having forgotten all forms of ID and getting rejected from a club. When she taxied back to the hostel to get her passport, Bret and I called it a night and walked back. Good people.

Day 2: Got some more advice from Paddy. Walked to the English Market in town (somewhat like an indoors Eastern Market, selling all kinds of marvelous meats and fruits) and got a sausage sandwich for lunch. Wandered town aimlessly, eventually happening upon St. Fin Barre’s cathedral – beautiful on the outside, but I didn’t go into it on account of the €1.50 fee. Went back to the hostel and met two Aussies (strangers to each other ‘til about an hour before I met them) and a Brit (dating one of the Aussies) who collectively invited me to comedy at a local bar. One bought me a Murphy’s, which wad darn good considering my usual taste for beer (i.e., none). Comedy turned out to be open mic, but still not half bad. The highlight was when one fellow took a sip from his neat quadruple-whiskey while performing and said “Aah, ‘tis like mother’s milk. If…your mother was a raging alcoholic.” One odd thing – the final comic made fun of her Catholic upbringing like it was no big thing, but right after her bit, the emcee guy wrapped things up by thanking “our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” Nobody laughed, so I presume it was serious. Strange juxtaposition.

Now I’m on the first farm! It’s called Kilkern, and it’s on the southern coast near Clonakilty. Things are pretty good so far. I’ve got my own little mobile home to live in, with most of the amenities. It gets quite cold at night and I need to light my own heating-fire, but that’s okay. Every day I start work around 8:30 or 9 in the morning, break for a large, hot lunch (or as they call it, “dinner”) around 1, then keep working until 5 or 6. Then I wash up (by this point the hot water in my caravan has been heated up properly) and fix myself some dinner with staples provided for me as well as vegetables from the garden that I have been given free rein to plunder. Chard, leek, lettuce, spinach, onion…apparently there’s an herb garden too, but I haven’t explored it yet. Saturday is a half day (plus an opportunity to join the family in town) and Sunday is my day off.

So far, the vast majority of my work has been weeding. Using a pitchfork, I turn the soil along the stone wall on one side of the property, then get on my knees and yank up all the roots I can see. Blackberries and stinging nettles are the biggest offenders here. I must say, while I would be happy to never see another nettle again, I am very impressed by their tenacity. The root systems for these things are incredibly far-reaching, tough (that is, hard to rip apart) and they even manage to criss-cross one another enough that I can’t just yank one big vine-like root all the way to its end because it ends up being held down by one of its comrades. I’ve also helped erect a chimney and aerated a vegetable bed (mixing in manure all the while).

FLIGHTS of Fancy

I hope you're all ready for a relevant pun for every entry title! Har har!

Here is a list of the most interesting things I saw from the airplane:

• A high-school football game (it was awesome, little red and white circles basically acting out those little X-and-O play diagrams you always see)
• A distressingly large and eye-catching Golden Arches sign
• Trees planted in a checkerboard pattern
• Oil tanks arranged like a smiley face
• Emergency vehicles assembling around the scene of an accident

Also, a message to all hypothetical stereotypical stand-up comics: "The Deal" with airline food is that it's surprisingly decent and very welcome on a transatlantic flight after being stranded in the airport for seven hours. Shame on you for complaining otherwise.

Yes, that's right! I got to the airport around noon, knowing I'd have plenty of time to check in for my 3 PM flight. Wait, I mean my 4:15 flight. No, 5:04. No, wait, 6:20.

We finally took off around 7:30 PM.

Luckily, this meant that I didn't have to sit in the Newark airport for five hours, and got directly on the Dublin flight! Sadly, I couldn't sleep at all on the Dublin flight (so forgive me if I stop making sense anytime in this entry, as I've been awake for about 27 hours with only minimal drifting-off-to-nap). I got grilled pretty heavily by the immigration guy on the Ireland side; he didn't like that I was spending 87 days in the country without a visa, but he stamped me in for three months anyway (because the limit is 90! hah!).

Now I'm sitting in Sheila's Hostel in Cork City which is delightful and clean and has free internet, though the hill leading up to it was quite...unpleasant while carrying a backpack, ukulele, and non-wheeled (enormous) duffel bag. The guy at the counter is a very friendly middle-aged fellow named Paddy. He reminds me of a well-built, moustachioed Ricky Gervais, in the best way possible. It so happens that his hometown is Clonakilty, where I'll be heading in two days to be picked up for the first farm. This (along with the name thing) may have encouraged him to take a liking to me. He's offered a plethora of suggestions for things to do while in Cork (but warned me NOT to order Guinness while I'm here, as "that black muck from Dublin" doesn't compare to the local stout, Murphy's) and seems like a very helpful guy. This is what I came to Ireland for!

I am going to go get a very late and very needed lunch (it is approx. 4:45 PM) and then maybe a fifteen-minute power nap to get me going again. Or maybe I should just plow through so that I sleep like a log tonight and reset my internal clock...

Curses, "personal storage" websites are blocked so you'll have to wait a bit to get pictures. Oh well, they're not important yet anyway - I took them all from the bus window on the way from Dublin to Cork.