An American in Ireland

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.

(more…)

When I was visiting my friends in Collon last September (this was the trip that basically got the wheels turning about moving to Ireland), I noticed red and black checkered flags all over the village. Pubs, houses, telephone poles – they were everywhere. I soon found out that these flags bore the colors of the Mattock Rangers, the local Gaelic football club, and that the team was close to securing a spot in the 2009 finals. The anticipation and anxiety of the village was evident in the bits and pieces of conversation I overheard during my visit. It was as if the entire population of Collon was holding its collective breath, careful not to jinx a victory by too much talk while at the same time silently agonizing over the thought of a loss.

I went back to America before the final match but heard from friends that the Mattock Rangers clinched the championship the following month. I saw video and photos of the three-day celebration around Collon village, and it looked absolutely mad. The guys were jumping on tables, the team paraded through the streets on the back of a huge flat-bed truck and it seemed the entire village was out partying for those three days and nights – kids, moms, dads, grandparents, the whole lot. I didn’t quite understand the passion and, most importantly, the significance of the team and what they meant to the community until I saw that evidence. For the village of Collon, the Mattock Rangers represent its hopes and dreams; it’s not just a football team, it’s a way of life for many in the community.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

I’m not going to lie: Sometimes Ireland gets to me, and not in a good way. Lately I’ve been feeling quite cranky, to be rather polite, and it seems every little thing gets on my nerves. Whether it’s a silly thing like the lack of “plain” clothing I can find (what is up with this country’s obsession with bows and floral patterns?) or something more serious like the blatant sexism I witness on a weekly basis, there are times when I feel like Drogheda itself is squeezing every last bit of sanity right out of my soul. The constant hay fever, the zillions of greenfly in the air and lackadaisical approach to customer service drives me nuts. The other day I had to go to three grocery shops just to find the ingredients for a pretty basic meal. As I searched yet another store for fresh basil, I found myself muttering under my breath like a crazy old bag lady, “What is wrong with this place?!”

The weather doesn’t help either. While we’ve had a relatively mild summer so far, the last week brought monsoon-type rain showers that made everything more difficult. The other day I was walking to the store when another downpour suddenly occurred and I had to struggle to get inside the shop because customers were all standing in the doorway, waiting for the rain to subside. I wanted to physically push them aside but I value my freedom so I refrained. We had 5 days in a row of lashing rain with no letup in sight and even though I was warned about the Irish summers before I came, it’s nearly pushed me over the edge.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

All the ladies in the house say “Broomfield Festival!”

Ladies’ Night. The term has many meanings. For my generation, it usually means a night out on the town with your girlfriends involving – in this particular order – dressing up, dinner at a nice restaurant, a trip to the local hipster bar and way too many cocktails followed by a ruinous shot of some hideous liquor at last call. And if we’re being really bad, a visit to the local fast-food joint in an effort to stave off tomorrow’s hangover with copious amounts of greasy but deceptively delicious junk food. Occasionally, someone will get sick and, like true ladies, we’ll always hold her hair back while she pukes into a toilet. Can you think of anything more ladylike?

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a real ladies’ night, courtesy of the Broomfield Festival’s “Transform Yourself Beauty Extravaganza” at the local community center. Broomfield, an area in Collon about the size of a postage stamp, hosts a festival every year and the extravaganza evening of fashion/skincare tips/tea/etc. is one of its most popular events. Local shops display shoes, handbags, makeup and accessories at stalls around the main hall and tea and cake is served to all attendees. The main event includes a mini-fashion show, skincare presentation and a how-to on makeup application.

(more…)

Fresh sashimi sushi, one of the foods I miss! 

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and there are still many days that I’m smacked upside the head with this realization. It’s been nearly three months since I upped sticks and moved from the urban metropolis of Los Angeles to small-town Ireland, but every day still brings a fresh realization of how different life is compared to the way it used to be.

I’ve mentioned before that living here reminds me of just how entitled I, and a lot of Americans, can be. In America, the customer is king. In Ireland, the customer is…well, just like anyone else. I recently went to Brown Thomas, a high-end department store in Dublin, to return a bottle of makeup foundation I had purchased the week before. Though the sales clerk let me try the makeup before I purchased it, the color of the makeup he put in my bag was much darker (I believe he grabbed the wrong color). When I got home and poured a tiny amount into my hand, I realized this, so I boxed it back up and took it – along with the receipt – back to BT.

(more…)

Though I spent most of my life in America, I wasn’t born there. Before Arkansas, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles (all places I’ve lived at one point or another), there was the country of my birth: Japan. Officially I am half-Japanese, half-American, and retain dual citizenship.

This may sound absolutely crazy, but after living here in Ireland for a few months I’m starting to see some striking similarities between the two cultures. The most obvious (to me) is a shared love of alcohol. While the Japanese have a reputation for being quiet and relative conservative, they can drink with the best of them. It’s not unusual to see a drunken salaryman on the first train at 5 a.m., still reeking of liquor and exhausted from a night of post-work drinking with the boss. And while my Irish friends have their fare share of hilarious drunken tales, nothing beats a story from my friend Kayo. She once fell asleep in a ditch on the side of the road; she’d gotten out of the car to get sick then decided to take a cat nap instead (love this type of drunken logic!). I should note that she was not driving, but the driver fell asleep in the car waiting for her to come back. Area residents who could see her from their windows called the police, thinking there was a dead body in the ditch. The only thing she remembers is being poked with a stick by a policeman, who realized she was just intoxicated. He lectured her about being drunk in public before sending her on her way.

(more…)