Theres something I’ve always found

interesting about the way that national flags are used differently by different cultures and viewed differently by different cultures. This can be how the flags of the different culture in question is being used or how the flags of alien cultures are treated by that culture. I think it says a lot about how a civilization views it’s place in the global landscape.

Above can be seen one of the other students in this class. They are waiting for a bus. Above them, high above, a single Irish flag hangs limply in the rain, rolled into itself several times. It’s a rather sad picture for our last day in Dublin and the Republic of Ireland, and not one that is an entirely accurate  portrayal of the attitude of treatment of their flag that I observed among the people of Ireland.

While there wasn’t a flag on every house and business, as you might see in the United States, the flag of Ireland was still quite conspicuously flown on many properties throughout the city of Dublin. So, too, were the orange, white, and green colors of that flag present on everything from clothes to wallpaper. As we explored the city, I was left with the definite impression that the Irish were proud to be Irish and ready to declare that pride to anyone who would listen.

Interestingly, the British Union Jack was occasionally flown in panoplies of UN flags in the city, as well. This was not the most popular move, I came to find out, with one of our tour guides in Dublin, adorned with an orange/white/green lapel pin indicating his allegiance to the sin feinne political party, pointing to a Union Jack in Dublin Castle and stating he never thought he’d live to see the day the British national flag flew in Dublin Castle once again.

In the picture above can be seen a number of Irish visitors or citizens of Japanese descent playing Japanese taiko, or drums, at a festival on the green of University College Dublin.

Japan and Ireland actually have a fairly developed history of cultural exchange, despite the vast distance that separated them. Irish artists of the last century or so have been influenced  by Japanese aesthetic principles and mention of Japanese cultural products cannot be seen in quite a few important Irish artistic products, including the poetry of WB Yeats.

Nor is the exchange entirely one sided, especially in the modern era. A number of important contemporary Irish and Northern Irish artists have visited Japan to work, and products of Irish culture can occasionally be seen there as well.

Even as a fairly well traveled American, I often find myself centralizing the way the world functions around my home in the United States. I consistently think of individuals who originate from other cultures by terms such as “African American” or “Japanese American,” for instance, which not only fails to properly credit the right of other people to my nation (as a “white” or “Caucasian,” my citizenship does not, apparently, have to be affirmed by my title and is instead assumed), but also limits individuals of such heritages from existing as citizens of other nations. When I was an undergraduate student, for instance, I had a roommate who was British of Ghana  descent. I still called him African American until one day he politely corrected me: “I’m just British, mate. That’s all you need to say.”

In the picture above, a self-professed “triple gold equivalent” pop street band is performance bombed by a man in a Leopold Bloom costume on Crown Alley off of Temple Bar in Dublin on Bloomsday. While the street band was quite good, they clearly had nothing on Leopold Bloom. Mr. Bloom, who might have been a bit on the tippling way, spent a solid twenty minutes dancing for the crowd and playing air guitar on his stately cane. The band, for the most   part, seemed amused by his antics, though the lead singer, of course, did not.

The first time I saw a musical street performer was in Dublin. This is odd, because I had certainly visited cities before that one. I had even lived in (or in close proximity to) a couple–first Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which I went to highschool near, and then Burlington, Vermont, where I attended college. I never lived IN the city of Philadelphia, though, and Burlington is Vermont’s equivalent of a city–that is, rather small.

It’s rather interesting to think about what the different types of performers in a city might say about that city. I found Paris had mimes in an abundance in public areas, and the musicians could only really be found in the connecting points between metro stations (though there is one old man who has been lip syncing opera in the same square, day after day, since I was at least the age of twelve). I’ve always gotten a sense that the culture in the more tourist oriented destinations in Paris is largely designed to be exxaggerated in order to more clearly communicated to a diverse audience. the other hand, Dublin seems mostly to be filled with living statues and musicians. Given the city’s tumultuous history with both memorialization and music, this also makes sense. In any case, it’s interesting to see people literally performing the values of the places they live and work in.

The rock in the picture above is a quernstone. Fascinating, yeah? Look at all the holes in it. Quernstone’s don’t look the way they do naturally. They’re rather manmade objects–large stones carved into flat shapes to provide a surface to mill grain on. They’ve got a pretty intense history, and variations on the idea they represent can be found all over the world. The British outlawed their use in Scotland in a bid to leave tenant farmers in that country more dependent on their landlords since their landlords were much more likely to be able to afford the more expensive and technologically complex mill. This law has only been repealed in the last decade or so, though I expect there aren’t many Scottish citizens who ran out to carve their own Querns when it was.

The particular Quernstone seen above is located in the Irish Museum of Archeology in Dublin. It’s quite interesting to me from a personal perspective because, before seeing this stone, I had no idea whatsoever what a Quernstone was. I had, however, seen one unearthed to much consternation in the farm my family once owned in West Virginia.

it was a really glorious hunk of rock, Granite worn through with hundreds of small, equally distributed divets. My grandfather had no idea what it was. He sent it to a friend of his who taught archeology at the university of West Virginia and the friend sent it back. He was baffled, too. Perhaps the rock back home isn’t a quernstone, though it doesn’t look it. It does remind me that the home I’m missing now is a home other people missed before. I don’t even know the Native American tribes that would have inhabited my former home, milling grain on that quernstone my grandfather later unearthed. Have their descendants stopped grieving for the home they’ve lost? Are there neW homes they’re grieving for instead? It can be hard to remember that the joy you’re forgetting losing was made from the joy another lost. Place is funny that way.

Green Nineteen is one of the best restaurants I’ve ever eaten at. A locally produced ingredients based restaurant, Green Nineteens off kilter, creative reinterpretation of classic food s like cheese burgers and onion rings blew me away. Their vegetables were imbued with the warmth of having been freshly plucked from under a rare warm and sunshiney Dublin day, and they were ripe to perfection. This blog post isn’t going to focus on the food quality of what I strongly suspect is a contender for best restaurant in Dublin, however. It will instead focus on the way food informs my understanding of place and my place in place.

Every time I move to a new place, I know there will be one specific food that in going to miss. Whether it’s from a particularly good restaurant or a combination of unique local ingredients, there’s always something that I’ll miss enormously. In Burlington, Vermont, for instance, there’s an all-night sandwich  shop near the edge of Church Street in Burlington, Vermont. I get powerful cravings for their Cajun Chicken Philly Cheeseseteaks. I crave, at times, the Croque Madames of Paris, and at other times the biscuits and red-eye gravy of my native Appalachias. Whenever I think of a place, I think of its food first, and there seems to be something in food, I think, that reveals the soul of a place. The rules of place often seem to be outlined by the rules of places’ foods and getting to the heart of place can be done most pleasurably through food.

When I graduated highschool, I went on a trip to the American Southwest. On that trip, I went on a hiking expedition through the river canyons of Zion National Park. The hike was an incredible, revelatory experience, and it opened me up to new perspectives on my role in the natural world. For the purposes of this blog, I won’t be focusing on my experiences with nature, however. Instead, I will be considering the actions of certain individuals I observed in Zion National Park and contrasting them with the actions of some children I observed in Dublin today.

In the picture above you can see a child suspended in mid fall from the mast of a replica coffin boat in the River Liffey. This boat has been used for some time as a museum and the children have clearly snuck their way on board.

Whatever you might say of the foolhardiness of their adventure (and it IS foolhardy), you can’t deny the symbolic power of their actions. The boat they have commandeered represents the wound inflicted on the Irish people by the British Empire during the potato famine and, by taking control of that representation and refiguring it as a tool for their own enjoyment, the children here have transformed the coffin boat into a symbol of healing.

that said, this scene still conjures up an event that occurred while I was in Zion nearly a decade ago. Hiking through the river canyons, I came upon a group of college students jumping into a deep part of the ri we from the top of one of the curling canyon walls. Much like I was struck by the children on the coffin boat, I was struck by the figure of slender, tan figures tumbling down the canyon into the dark river. On my way back from my hike, however, a helicopter hurtled past my head moving toward the heart of the park. I would later discover that one of the students had landed in the shallowest part of that stretch of river, shattering both her legs.

Countess Markiovich, one of the coolest people ever

Countess Markiovich was a Cumann na mBan insurrectionist during the Easter Rising of 1916. She co-led a contingent of other rebels in holding Stephen’s Green during the rebellion and, when the Rising was ultimately (at least temporarily) thwarted, Countess Markiovich, along with many other women fighting for the Irish, refused leniency and insisted on being arrested at the end of the Rising.

The fight for Stephen’s Green is filled with amusing Anecdotes. For instance, throughout the fighting, the groundskeeper of Stephen’s Green refused to surrender his post. Twice a day he would leave his cottage in the Green and feed the park’s ducks and, twice a day, the British and Irish forces would hold a ceasefire to allow him to do so. In another story, countess Markiovich had a captured British soldier participate in a cucumber sandwich picnic.

These stories can in some ways obscure the fact that Countess Markiovich was actually a brutally effective commander willing to do incredible things for her ideals. She was also one of the best shots in the rebellion and killed an enemy soldier at least once during the rebellion.

Countess Markiovich is a fascinating figure in Irish history, and one who complicates many of the dominant representations of that history. To see her reimagined in a modern context, as demonstrated in the  picture above, and with commercial intent, enables the reimagining of the spaces that her representations pass through and the values of the people who inhabit those spaces.

I apologize fot fot the upside down image above. I will go in to fix it when I have access to an Internet connection on my laptop.

The above image was taken while hiking in the cliffs of Howthe, a short distance from Dublin. Howthe is a beautiful place at all times, but it is particularly beautiful while covered over in fog. Though you can’t see the famed Eye of Ireland, the way that the fog moves through the wind on the cliffs make it seem alive, as if hounds of mist or ghosts are playing around you, learning at you out of the palpable nowhere from the corner points of your vision.

I have experienced these fog hounds of Ireland elsewhere on the Island, as well. At the cliffs of Moore, where the wind blows hard enough to make UFOs out of stones, pulling them over the precipice they rest on and then sending them back, hurtling upward to crash against the cliff face above your head, the hounds are most active. They twist, and turn, and bite at each other’s heels, and their mournful cries to each other and the hidden moon blow so harshly into your ears it feels as if the wind will grate your brain.

Fog in mountains or cliffs has always fascinated me. I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in western Virginia and fog would curl down into the crevices of those blue mountains like a slumbering cat in a bowl. The fog in Ireland is different. It’s alive, like the magic that’s seeped out of the fog in the ancient Appalachias is still vital in the glacial formations of Eire. It’s beautiful and adds a fluidity to the static rocks of Ireland, allowing place to change while staying the same and allowing the land to live like an animal rather than lie like base mineral.

While walking toward Trinity campus and The Pig’s Ear restaurant yesterday, my study abroad group came upon a Guitar playing busker. He was quite good, and there was a large crowd gathered around. We were on a major pedestrian thoroughfare that I had visited often to shop at while on my undergraduate Dublin abroad, and hearing his playing reminded me of that previous time in this place. Though I could not remember the street’s name, I knew that I had heard buskers before, though perhaps none had been as talented as this guitar player.

The busker’s skill was not what had gathered the crowd around him, though. A young child with a cherry red plastic guitar was standing a few feet from him, legs splayed, leaning over the guitar to seethe strings and plucking at them with obvious joy. This scene was, of course, picturesque in the extreme and, even if it was fabricated, I was struck by it.

This blond headed child was living an experience of early childhood joy. Whether he was playing that red guitar with the busker in a moment of circumstance or had been brought to that street to draw in crowds for the busker,  this moment, or those like it, would form a foundation for his development over the course of the rest of his life.  It is a unique experience–and one enabled by the individual qualities of Dublin–and, were I to have traveled all this way just to have observed this moment in a miscellaneous child’s life, the trip would be worthwhile.