My Weekend Away

Disclaimer: don't expect blog updates until Monday!

The pace is beginning to pick up around here; the lazy atmosphere of the early start semester has been replaced by the hustle and bustle of a city gearing up for the arrival of 17,000 Irish students. Our apartment building, where we American students here for the early start have been the only tenants, is suddenly saturated with regular semester American students and Irish students as well. Moving things in, adjusting to the area, touring the campus and main streets of Cork with maps in hand. It's a nice feeling to have a head start on someone, for once, and I've even been able to give a few other Americans directions to buildings on campus or the essentials of the town: post office, la Guarda (to register with immigration), and of course the pubs most frequented by students.

Mostly, though, I am still out of my element. I use facebook frequently to communicate with the other American students here - mass messages and wall posts are a good way to let one another know about evening or weekend plans without using our costly Irish cell phones - but sometimes reading there about the activity of the semester's beginning at home is difficult. I miss the excitement of starting a class with a professor I love, hearing about friends' progress in their majors, watching freshmen new to K-State stumbling to early morning classes with hangovers, the first club meetings of the semester with newcomers spilling out of the room and sitting on the floor. (Of course, most of them never come back, but there's always that initial sense of possibility.)

Soon I won't have time for homesickness. We are going to Killarney, as I mentioned, this weekend, and we will get back on Sunday. Then, Monday we are attending Ireland's longest-running and most famous production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot Monday night, before leaving Tuesday for our stay on Ennismain, an experience I've been anticipating, now, for more than a year. Friends and I are staying in Galway the following week, from there to see Connemara and the Cliffs of Moher in addition to experiencing the city. The following week is the first of our regular classes, during which we've been instructed to attend as many classes as possible in order to ferret out the most interesting teaching styles and content. The weekend following we are tentatively planning a trip to London, the following weekend to Belgium, with our early-start exam the next Friday and the first of several weekends we'll actually stay in Cork. From there, my other "continent" must-sees are Spain and Germany, and I WILL go to Scotland AT LEAST once, though I'm still not sure when. Throw a visit from my dear dad somewhere into the mix, and I expect these three plus months to speed by at a pace I can't begin to imagine.

So, really, when I'm not here in my room wide awake at midnight (sleep schedules are ridiculous, ingrained things, and my mental clock STILL resists manipulation...it is on US time) there's not space or time enough for homesickness. When it hits during daylight, like it did yesterday, I spend the afternoon walking around the city despite the rain, amazed by the way the river intensifies the already vivid colors of this atmosphere in its reflections, ever-charmed by the way streets here so effortlessly combine the modern and historic. At la Guarda yesterday, where I went with my friend so she could register with immigration, the old stone barrack still stood, a walled fortress, around the rennovated interior building. It was like very confused time travel. I spent a moment pressing my thumb into the space between two stones, a faint seam in the adhesive binding them the only signal of deterioration.

There are so many things I want to write about in-depth, including the amazing role dogs seem to play, if not in all of Ireland, at least this area. Dogs are everywhere. I've been trying to photograph some of them in action, but I don't have a good sampling yet. I am slow to struggle out of my bag of school things and ready the camera, and usually by the time I do the opportunity has passed. I'm trying now to be more vigilant, camera at the ready on every walk, but it's a hard habit to form. No one seems to use leashes here, and there's none of that, "Oh, what a cute dog, can I pet it" business from passers-by. A friend of mine said that her friend who did this program a year ago instructed her to, I quote, "leave the dogs alone!"

Dogs roam the sidewalks unattended and uninterested in we strangers, doing their business boldly in the center of others' yards or the walk itself, wearing collars and licenses and more skilled than I at navigating the busy traffic. In the middle of a busy street, I watched a gray-muzzled black dog sitting at the intersection just beneath the left hand of his master, occupied with a stroller. When the light turned the dog trotted off in perfect pace with his family, reaching over at one point to brush the baby's fist with his tongue.

Westies are popular here, and I admit it's hard for me not to run over to them and scoop them up each time I see one. I've resisted so far, partially because they remind me of Jessie only in appearance. We all know her off-lead ways, but in two instances I watched these strangely reprogrammed terriers laying patiently at the feet of an owner occupied in conversation with a group of people, and sitting on the curb after jumping out of a taxi cab while the owner collected his baggage from the back seat.

Cork takes "dog friendly" to new heights, really, but I think it might be a characteristic of Europe that dogs are more savvy themselves and more readily embraced by society at large, without being fussed over. I see advertisements for dog walking services, and I'm thinking of offering myself up as free labor. The dog withdrawal is remarkable - it exists not only for Jessie and Joey personally, but the species as a whole.

I don't find the same longing for horses, which surprises me, since I expected it most of all. I am excited when I see them, and can't wait to ride tomorrow, but I feel also a degree of relief. Obviously my responsibility to my 1.5 head still exists, but there's an illusion of dissolution in the distance, I suppose, and I feel freer to it. The worry, the guilt about not riding more regularly, and the ever-present shackle of the monetary expense was taking a greater toll than I really knew. The daydream of coming home to no horses is bittersweet, but seems more appealing than upsetting, in truth. There seems to be in my future a better place to include horses in the long list of things occupying my attention and time.

Now that I've aggravated my sister, I think I'll go pack. This evening I see Riverdance! Tomorrow beach and mountain horseback ride in beautiful Dingle! Sunday the famous Ring of Kerry! Monday Waiting for Godot! Tuesday Ennismain!