An American in Ireland

While some people find cooking to be the most stressful chore in the world, I find it relaxing and therapeutic. It’s something that sets me at ease and reenergizes my spirit, at the risk of sounding melodramatic! To me, there are few things in life more enjoyable than dabbling in the kitchen with some piano music in the background (Dustin O’Halloran is a new favorite, thanks to my friend Aoife for the recommendation!) with a glass of wine in one hand and a spatula in the other.

Life has been quite hectic for Mountaineering Man and me lately; it seems every weekend is booked with long-standing plans or some sort of obligation so it was a much-welcome relief when we found ourselves with no plans last Sunday. We went to Chapters Bookstore for a bit of browsing and then stopped into a cafe for coffee. For dinner we thought we’d hit one of the Mexican places in town, but found all four of them to be closed! So we did one better and hit the supermarket where we gathered some avocados, tortillas, tomatoes and a few other bits and headed home to cook.

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Twinkling lights of downtown Los Angeles

I’ve been a bit MIA for a while, and for that I apologize. Things have been crazy busy around here lately, and though I’m not ready to reveal everything just yet I can say that big changes are afoot!

One of the changes that I can talk about is the launch of my new website, The Hollywood Craic. It’s basically an entertainment news and gossip blog that brings the best of Hollywood news to the Emerald Isle. I decided to branch back into entertainment journalism simply because it’s been very difficult selling food and travel-related stories here in Ireland, so I needed to expand my repertoire.

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I recently celebrated my [age not important] birthday here. I spent the first five years of life in Japan, a few in Arkansas and several birthdays in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. This was the first in Ireland, a landmark occasion of sorts. There are days when I still pinch myself…and a few days where I want to punch myself.

I kid, I kid! Even with all the political turmoil and recession depression, I love it here. But I still find myself mired in figuring out the little things. While in some ways I’m quite settled, there are new discoveries almost every day. I’m still trying to distinguish between regional accents that everyone else seems to recognize and I’m struggling to wrap my brain around the culture of Irish Travellers. Whether it’s a type of bread I’ve never heard of (Mountaineering Man recently introduced me to barmbrack – yum!) or political parties (it’s Gaelic but I find it amusing that the main party has the word fail (Fáil) in its name, so appropriate!) it’s trying to understand all the details of daily Irish life that consumes my time.

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I used to be afraid to say the words, “I don’t know.” One of my biggest fears was admitting I didn’t know something, whether it was how to scuba dive or where St. Charles was located or how to properly light barbeque charcoals. For a long time I got away with a confident nod and a smile, which would deceive people into thinking I knew what I was talking about when in fact, I had no idea.

There was a particular period in my life where this whole charade became utterly exhausting and more trouble than it was worth. It was shortly after I graduated from college and I was living with roommates in a very hip part of San Francisco called Hayes Valley. Within a few months of living there I befriended a number of people in the neighborhood and became good friends with a couple of guys who lived down the street. Both exuded this almost tangible sense of cool; one had a very exotic and odd Finnish name, even though neither he nor his parents (or grandparents, for that matter) were from Finland. The other was tall and lanky and played guitar and spun records on his Technics 1200s in his spare time. Together they were the hipster poster boys for our stylish little ‘hood: all vintage threads, Swedish minimalism and wispy indifference. All the hipster girls in the neighborhood vied for their attention.

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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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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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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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A while back, I wrote a blog post about What I’ve Learned since moving here to Ireland. Now, on the six-month anniversary of my move here, I’d like to present what I love about Ireland and about living here.

*High visibility jackets: I know you think I’m crazy right about now. OK, I don’t really love the high visibility jacket in and of itself, but I love what it represents. About a month into my relocation, my friend and I took a walk down a country road sometime in the early evening. It was still quite bright outside, but as we walked we were stopped by four separate people asking us why we were not wearing high visibility jackets. These people literally pulled their cars over, rolled down their windows and gave out to us (as they say here).

“You’ll get hit by a car!” said one. “The sun is going down and it’ll be dark soon, what are you thinking?” asked another. Even a week later my friend’s cousin, who was one of the people who’d stopped us, scolded me again saying, “I still can’t believe yous (<– slang for you girls, you guys, you people) were out on the road with no high vis jackets!”

I found all this fretting about high visibility jackets touching, really. Out in rural Ireland it gets really dark at night and therefore everyone who lives there owns one of these jackets. It’s as essential to the country wardrobe as Wellies and rain slickers. Whether you’re walking your dog or changing a flat tire, if it’s anywhere close to dusk you’ll be sporting one. In Los Angeles, the only people wearing high visibility jackets are road crew workers and night-time cyclists. I’ve never owned one (or even uttered the words “high visibility jacket”) my entire life. I remember that was the day I understood I was in a totally different place.

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The metropolis of Dublin, which deserves to be represented – along with the rest of Ireland – in the media.

I was spending time with a friend over the weekend when she expressed her dread for the upcoming work week. “But it’s a bank holiday on Monday!” I told her, thinking she’d be pleasantly surprised upon realizing she forgot about the three-day weekend. “Oh that’s not for us, that’s only for the UK,” she replied flatly.

The reason why I thought today was a bank holiday is because for the last week, it’s been mentioned in a lot of television advertisements. One cable channel was running a campaign for the Jennifer Lopez film, Maid in Manhattan, publicizing that it would be played twice “on bank holiday Monday!” A grocery store chain had an ad that promoted specials for “the upcoming bank holiday Monday!” Since these were ads playing in Ireland, I’d just assumed the holiday applied to us. Not so. Quite cruel, if you ask me.

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Nancy (right smack in the middle!) with her siblings at a recent birthday celebration for her brother.

Being from Los Angeles, I have a pretty specific definition of the Independent Woman. She’s single or dating someone (or a few people!), has a successful career, rents a nice apartment or perhaps even owns a condo or house and has a social calendar that involves lots of fabulous restaurants, bars and friends. She not only brings home the bacon (or maybe some organic chorizo), but she can fry it up in a pan, toss it on a bed of farmers’ market vegetables and have it all ready for an impromptu Friday-night dinner party for a few of her closest pals without breaking a sweat.

Suffice it to say, I was that Independent Woman living in Los Angeles. And though now I live in Ireland, I’ve worked hard to maintain that IW lifestyle – though it’s not always easy. I do rent a fabulous apartment and have maintained my writing career but there are not a lot of great restaurants or bars in the town of Drogheda, where I reside. However I still have my dinner parties and nights out and I’ve made some incredibly fabulous friends. But the more time I spend here in Ireland, the more I’m realizing that there is a whole other type of independent woman out there, and she is the polar opposite of me.

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