An American in Ireland

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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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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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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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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The other day while out to eat with my friends we got into a discussion about colcannon, the much-beloved traditional Irish dish of mashed potatoes and cabbage, spring onions or kale, depending on how your mam prefers to make it. Sinead and Earnan recalled how as kids, they always had a very specific way of eating their colcannon. They and their siblings would create a little volcano with the potato mixture and then put a lump of butter in the middle, resulting in a butterlicious lava flow that churned out from the center of the mash mountain. No one remembers who started the trend but they both recalled with great affection this small but crucial colcannon custom.

I am always impressed at how close my Irish friends keep their childhood memories; whether we’re drinking at the pub or taking a spin around town, the entertainment is often tales from their childhood, always told with smiling eyes and a kind of pure giddiness that’s usually limited to children themselves.

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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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I’ve always believed that food is an important reflection of the culture in any country, and as a food and travel journalist this is something I’ve been lucky enough to explore in a good few places. Since moving to Ireland I have learned that the potato is King, beef is a staple in most people’s diets and cabbage is almost always boiled and served with Irish bacon (which is more like ham for us Americans than what we know as bacon).

I’m also starting to get a better understanding of what flavors appeal to the Irish palate. When it comes to potato chips (or crisps, as they say here), the most common flavors are smoky bacon, cheese and onion and salt and vinegar. People especially seem fond of the bacon variety, at least that’s what I gather from my friends. And though a lot of Irish I know have an aversion to seafood, they adore the popular prawn cocktail-flavored crisps – something I’ve never seen in the U.S.

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Summer in Ireland means two things. The first is that there will be more rain during this season than nearly any other (but I think I’ve written enough about the weather so we won’t focus on that right now); second is that there are a myriad of outdoor festivals to choose from all season long. Clearly the two don’t mix, but one thing I’ve learned about the Irish is that they don’t let a little rain stop them from enjoying their summer activities. If they did, they’d never leave their homes!

Since I’ve moved here, we’ve had the Drogheda Arts Festival, the Samba Festival and last weekend the Prawn Festival. The latter used to be an annual event in the neighboring fishing village of Clogherhead, but due to the recession has been on hold for the last several years. Well this year it came back with gusto and three days chock full of events and activities. One of the main attractions was breaking the world record for most people buried up to their necks on the beach, a record previously held by the French with 324 people. The locals all came out with shovels in hand and smashed the world record with an astonishing 524 people! See official photos here. Other event activities included a golf classic, parade and live music.

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The good life: Sheep graze on Ciara’s farm

Being someone who has never lived in the country before, I have a typical urbanite’s image of what a farm is like. The sun is shining, the grass is a deep shade of emerald green and the little lambs and big cows and chubby pigs all play together while being watched over by a talking spider named Charlotte.

Of course the truth is that most animal farms I’ve encountered in the United States are the complete opposite of that fantastical picture I created in my head. The only ones I ever came across were on my drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but they were more like factories than farms. Thousands of cows kept in a field of mucky dirt and mud, covered in filth and baking in the hot sun – not exactly a good life (the “Happy Cows” ad series by California Cheese has to be the most blatant example of false advertising I’ve ever seen – these cows are miserable). The “farmers” were actually minimum-wage employees of some big corporation, and I imagine none had any real farming experience or much care for the animals.

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