Drogheda Ireland


westport027 I know I’m turning Irish because this is yet another blog post about the weather, and everyone knows that the Irish are obsessed with weather. But it’s snowing here. Snowing. Considering I hail from a place where it never snows, I can’t NOT write about it.

Waking up to see a winter wonderland outside your window is something us Angelenos only dream of, so when it happened the other day I was as giddy as a kid at Christmas. As I pulled back the curtains I could see that everything had a good dusting of lovely white snow and as the sun rose the powder sparkled like flecks of sparkly diamonds. I actually gasped at the sight. Of course as I came to find out in the coming day, marveling at the snow from the comfort of my hotel room is totally different than the reality of being in and dealing with the cold wet stuff outside.

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When I visited friends in this area October of last year, the idea of actually living here was barely a twinkle in my eye. I’d wanted for some time to move abroad, and as a travel journalist doing a fair amount of globetrotting I was always considering the various places I visited as a potential place to land.

About half-way through my 10-day visit, it dawned on me that maybe Ireland could be the place. After all I have a good number of friends here (when I was in college in San Francisco I lived with a gang of Irish and we kept in touch all these years), it is an English-speaking country and it’s in Europe. It was a beautiful, sunny autumn day and I was sitting with my friend Sinead on the lovely patio of her cosy Irish country house when the idea first sprang to life. Maybe I could move here, continue my freelance writing, and get a little apartment in town…my brain buzzed with the excitement of possibilities.

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street musicians

With Ireland teetering on the brink of economic collapse, it’s hard to stay positive around here. Some worry, others blow it off as a phase and a few actually want the ax to drop. At least then we can all stop holding our collective breath in anticipation for the worst.

Still, people around here are surprisingly cheerful and it seems there is a concerted effort among folks to keep their chins up. I think for a lot of Irish there’s just really nothing else to do but be optimistic in the face of overwhelming negativity…it’s just how they’re made. All of this reminds me of a story I wrote about New Orleans, which I visited shortly before moving to Ireland, and I thought now would be as good a time as any to re-post it here.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Though the Irish tend to wax ad nauseum about the weather, they don’t let it get them down. They don’t avoid going outside when it’s freezing cold or when it’s raining because if they did, they’d never leave the house. Irish people just put on a bigger coat, whip out the umbrella and get on with their lives.

Strangely enough, I’ve noticed as the temperature goes down people seem to get more chipper around here. In Dublin last weekend it was probably about 4 degrees Celsius (that’s 39 degrees Fahrenheit for all my American friends) and I witnessed the most cheerful exchange between a visibly shivering elderly man and a store clerk. The clerk asked, “How’s it going?” and while the old man could’ve gotten away with a smarmy remark he answered, “Ah, not a bother at all! Not a bother!” complete with a huge grin and a boisterous cackle. I think I was in the middle of whining about how cold I was when I caught that little burst of positivity. Then I passed the guy whose sole job is to stand in the driveway of the car park and wave cars in and out. For hours, he stands out there in the freezing cold, sporting his high-vis jacket and a genuine smile.

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IFBA

There’s an air of excitement to something new; that just-discovered, fresh burst of possibility that fills one with a sense of hope and vigor. And that’s exactly the sentiment felt by those present for the introduction of the Irish Food Bloggers Association, a brand-spankin’ new organization formed by food journalist and blogger Caroline Hennessy and book editor and blogger Kristin Jensen.

The announcement was made at the Food Camp, an event that  – fittingly – made its debut at this year’s Savour Kilkenny Food Festival. The association, known simply as the IFBA, is the first of its kind. As food blogs in Ireland gain more exposure and popularity, its writers are finding a desire to connect and the IFBA offers a place for that. Here, bloggers can share everything from recipes and food styling tips to culinary event invites and hosting ideas. It’s also a place for food producers, restaurateurs, farmers and anyone involved in the food business in Ireland to link up.

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obaachan and clare 2

It seems in Ireland, grannies play a pretty important role in the lives of their grandchildren. For a lot of my Irish friends, their Granny was an integral part of the household, living with them and their parents and helping with everything from cooking to homework. And for a few of my friends here, especially those who were the first-born son, Granny was more a mother to them than their Mammy. She took them into her home and essentially raised them from infancy to adulthood.

Although I didn’t grow up around my grandmother or Obaachan, as I would call her (that’s Japanese for “grandmother”), I have great memories of the brief period I lived in Japan as a child and of the visits we’ve had over the years. I’ve been thinking a lot about her lately as last Saturday she turned 101 years old. It’s really mind-boggling to think of all she’s experienced in that time: her marriage to my grandfather, which lasted for 73 years until his death; giving birth to five children, two of whom she has outlived; witnessing the transformation of her beloved city of Osaka from a quiet town to a bustling, modern city; leaving her house of 50-something years to move into an elderly-care facility and learning, later, that it had been torn down.

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If you would have told my parents a year ago that they’d spend their next vacation visiting me in Ireland, they’d have laughed it off as an amusing but silly joke. To be honest, I probably would have as well. Funny how quickly life can change.

Last week my parents came over and got some insight into my new life here and what it all means. They partook in some of my now-daily routines, like breakfast of sliced McCloskey’s Cottage Brown Bread with a medium-boiled egg served in an egg cup (something not at all popular in the U.S.). They did their laundry in my tiny washing machine/dryer combo, and managed to hang everything properly on my indoor clothes horse and realized it would take approximately 24 hours for those clothes to dry. And after a few searches in the dark, they grasped that the bathroom light switch in Ireland is always, always outside the bathroom! And they experienced all little things that used to drive me crazy, like the nonsensical pricing scheme of Irish Rail tickets (Dad: “How is it 12 euro for one way to Dundalk when it’s 14 euro to go all the way to Dublin and back!?”). It was fun to watch them adjust to all the oddities I struggled with upon my arrival here. It reminded me of just how settled I feel now.

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Anne Clare Child

Me (left) and my sister in Kamakura, Japan

Walking along the beach here a few months back, I spied hundreds of washed-up jellyfish on the shore and was immediately reminded of my childhood home of Japan. My sister and I spent the first five years of our lives in a beach town called Kamakura, and we used to spend hours scooping up jellyfish with our little plastic buckets. God knows why but we would cut them up with scissors (I know, horrible!) because we were fascinated by their soft texture. I think we just saw them as jelly, not live creatures of the sea. It was innocent, really, just like our life there.

Much like small-town Ireland, Kamakura was a place where you knew your neighbors and where it was perfectly safe to let your kids run around outside without having to check on them every two seconds. So safe was it that my sister and I used to take the train to preschool every day. Though we were all of four years old, we along with a couple of neighborhood school mates would walk down a little stone pathway to the train station. We wore school uniforms, including a hat that bore a colored button indicating which train we were to take. I remember our button was yellow. The station agent would look at the top of our hats, see the button color and put us on the corresponding train. Our teachers awaited us at the other end, and then walked us to our school. If we got lost on the way, various neighbors would put us back on the right path. They all knew our school, they all knew us and we could count on them to help us find our way.

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Few things are more humbling than moving to another country on your own. After the novelty wears off and the dust settles and you realize just how far away you are from home, it knocks you back a bit. And God knows I needed to be knocked back a bit.

To be honest, I’ve never been the humble type. When I was younger, I said everything that came to my mind and put my foot in my mouth on a regular basis. I often think about an incident from back when I was a lowly newsroom assistant in my early 20s. My editor, a wiry, pencil-thin woman named Jondi Ward, was someone I decided right away I didn’t like. She was good at her job but was absolutely stone-cold to me no matter how well I performed my duties and was fiercely critical when I fell short of her expectations. I never approached her about my concerns, because at that age being right was more important than a resolution. I chose to talk smack to anyone who’d listen, particularly to the night-desk crew. This was the group of guys who’d stumble in for their 2 p.m. shift, bleary-eyed from another late night of putting the paper to bed topped off with a few (or several) nightcaps. The night-desk chief, Grant Condy, a slightly gruff, mid-40s man with a soft-center of a heart, was my go-to ear for my Jondi b*tch-sessions.

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I always went for shock value when speaking of my ill-feelings toward Jondi; I’d pepper my rants with the “c” word and other colorful insults. In my immaturity I felt very punk rock about the whole thing and was convinced I was a crusader, the Brave One, someone willing to speak out (though never to Jondi herself!) about the mistreatment I had to endure – oh how the world revolved around me back then! Grant always responded with empathetic nods and a few neutral yet wise words of wisdom like “Just hang on in there!” Though he never partook in the sh*t-slinging, I felt he understood. He just got me.

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pub4

In a place like Los Angeles, most Irish bars try especially hard to capture the essence of a real pub in Ireland. There are the dark wood accents, the Guinness on tap and the thick-accented Irish bartenders (or at least struggling actors pretending to be Irish). It’s a bit like the theme restaurants at Disneyland; while they’ve manage to capture the look and feel it lacks the  spirit of a true Irish watering hole.

There’s probably no Irish drinking establishment more authentic as the auld country pub in Ireland, and I’m lucky enough to have found one where I’m becoming a semi-regular [cue the theme song from “Cheers”]. The place is Mathews, which is bewilderingly pronounced “Mat-te-tis” and it’s an old pub in the middle of tiny Collon village, about a 15-minute drive from my place. On any given Friday or Saturday night, I know that my friends Bushman and Richella will be behind the bar, and that at least a few people I know will be wearing holes into the old barstools. On the weekends there will be some choice covers (think Garth Brooks and Air Supply) performed by a well-meaning and painfully earnest musician and by the end of a long night there might be a drunkard or two being thrown out on his ass by James, the barman you just don’t f*ck with.

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