I am now catching up furiously on blog posts, to prove that I don't just photos to Facebook and that I can procrastinate effectively. Look out! All the trees of the field will clap their hands and dance in joy. By that, I mean I'm listening to the Zombies, and not dorking out. At all.

Belfast
February 1, 2008

For some random reason, I had a line of poetry stuck in my head the whole trip: "this is a good country/there is no war here". I'm pretty sure it's Kenneth Patchen, but I can't detail any more of the poem, or even think of what it could be from. It was a thoroughly appropriate quote to have ringing between my ears through the day, because I am from a good country, and there is no war there. There is no war in the way there was a war in Belfast, or in Derry.

College students complain that no one takes us seriously, recognizes our committment to the democratic process or the world around us, but I don't know. Seeing the bullet holes, the flags, the murals, there's something that the kids of Belfast have experience, the boys and girls of Berlin, of Croatia, that as an American, I can't fully understand. It's a different sort of relevance.

True, in our current state, three or four dead on a weekend barely make the news. But we are so much bigger, and so less personal, and they are not dying in our streets and pubs, not the way they did there.

It's amazing, because I didn't really expect to see as many murals as we did. But it's true that once you drive down a Loyalist or a Republican sector, and you're suddenly hit with a thousand tiny (or in the case of murals, HUGE) reminders of who exactly you're not.

Labels: belfast, northern ireland, photos

I am 98% sure I have conjunctivitis again (the remained 2% is for the doctor to describe). Conjunctivitis is commonly known as 'pink eye', unless you get what I get, in which case it's called 'that thing that makes optometrists shake, your eyes go bright red like you're out of 28 Days Later, and you have to put steroids in your eyes'. Last time this happened, I was traveling Europe. Maybe there's a pattern. At least this time, I'm in a country where I kind of understand the people, and I don't have any bus trips from Prague to Budapest in which I sit there and pray the air conditioning breaks because the constant shush-shush stream of air on my eyes is pure hell.

Awesome.

In other bodily news, I think it's time for me to cut more animal products out of my diet. Since being in Ireland, I've gone back to eating eggs, and I've been eating a lot of cheese. Body= not happy. It's funny, because this strikes me as similar to when I gave up red meat, and after a few months my body couldn't take chicken. I'm not sure how easy/hard this will be, because right now the only alternate protein I've found reasonably priced is tofu, and dried beans. Dried beans are just not the same, and I love beans. I wish I could get nuts reasonably priced somewhere, to just have to throw into things.

At the very least, eggs have got to go (which is a slight shame since I've gotten pretty good at doing that whole fold thing when cooking eggs. FYI- if adding cheese to your eggs, try throwing in a few walnuts, with some thyme and a dash of pepper. It's good). I haven't drunk milk while I'm here, and I don't intend to start. I did get coconut milk though, from the Indian Grocery where I have become the token white girl (who buys a lot of bread), so I look forward to playing around with that.

Continuing the cooking story, last night I made (vegan) latkas (well, potato and carrot and onion silver dollar sized pancakes). It was a grease fest, but they're good. If cooking for me wasn't "well I'll throw a little of that in, and handful- ok, bigger handful- of that, and how about some paprika? Yeah.... let's add lots of paprika!", I'd totally put down the recipe.

Labels: cooking, eyes, vegan/vegetarianism, zombie diseases

When you ignore the fact that I initially set up this blog to you know, blog, as I entered and was physically in each country, it's not that bad that I'm writing about Barcelona a scant week after leaving. This time last Friday I was getting off a Ryanair jet on the tarmac of Girona airport. It was dark, and windy, and sort of strange to be walking outside when I'm supposed to flying being an inside affair- watching the planes fly over the car, watching the planes from the waiting lounges, walking through the snake thing that has a name that I can't think of but it's always impossibly long, and finally sitting inside the plane and praying you have an open seat next to you. I associate the outside with being bad, involving explosions and the movie "Alive" when the guy sitting in the very front snaps his neck and the back of the plane gets sucked out. There were a lot of random movies on TV back in my day.

In short- I would have loved to have stayed longer in Barcelona. It was absolutely gorgeous, and amazing to be someplace where I wasn't wearing a damp coat, or waiting for sunshine. However, in the 36-odd hours I was there, I saw a good bit. Park Guell, Sagrada Familia, and the soccer game we wandered into were the definite highlights. I've realized I'm the sort of traveler who enjoys just taking it easy and wandering. I'd rather rely on my sense of direction and metro maps than set itineraries and a list of notable sites.

Not to be misunderstood, I loved the Gothic Quarter and Las Ramblas was nice enough. I'd just rather see people interacting with their environment, than watch tourists gawk with me. If I want tourists, I can find them easily enough.

{Edit, with real (er) info}

I'm probably the wrong person to be keeping a pseudo-travel blog, because I don't really travel in that way. I summed up that up last time, but I thought I'd come back and talk about what I did love.
-watching kids playing soccer on this dusty field
-these old men who'd hobble through the parks with their wives, while kids were playing ping-pong with their fathers
-the architecture
- the kids playing in the dirt on that part of Park Guell, where you can look out and see Barcelona and the sea. That part was really lovely

Labels: barcelona, europe, photos, spain