England is a place of contradictions and contrasts. Many of the cities are designed like American ones– freeways circling the city– while most roads we found ourselves on, outside the cities, were one-laners being blocked by tractors (Ireland much?). Or how you’ll be going down a leafy road and there’ll be a traffic camera (Orwell much?). How it prides itself on being the home of higher education and great literature, but you hear more about the riots in soccer stadiums than new universities. How it also prides itself on being a country of labour, of the working class, yet the divide between “Chav’s” (council housed and violent) and the posh Eton kids is growing larger and larger. As my new British friend said, “we’ve got 2000 years of history. We’re a little complicated”.

            I’ll give you an example. My aunt and uncle live in a refurbished former industrial workhouse (now housing three what used to house fifteen), a couple steps away from formerly the largest dye factory in central England. It’s now a leafy forest and some stones. The second day we took a walk up the hills around their area. The British countryside is gorgeous. Going to school in Vancouver, being able to look out on mountains on one side and the ocean on the other, you tend to get a little arrogant nature-wise– ‘what’s so special about some hills?’ ideology. But there’s something eminently peaceful about the lands here; walking up you’re with Wordsworth, and for the first time I actually understood the guy.

So we’re walking up gorgeous hills where our only company is the sheep and the cows, reach the top, and Manchester’s on the other side. On one edge of the hill you have rolling green; on the other miles of red brick towers and honking screeching cars. And both of those, beside each other, is what makes England so fascinating.

            Manchester’s an interesting city. In 1996 an IRA bomb (which my uncle insists was a conspiracy with city planning) blew up most of the city’s center, so now central Manchester really is just one large shopping mall. The parts that weren’t bombed were bulldozed. At the same time, the place is hard-edged, still has that industrial working class feel even though the factories aren’t running and the workers aren’t working. Everyone seems just a little angrier than just about everywhere else. It’s a hard city to understand, and any of the industrial history is long gone.

            However, as far as history goes, Manchester is definitely more of the exception than the rule. England’s history is in every gravestone and each little village we drove by– every village happening to be older than Canada (of course). In no city was this quite as striking as York. Originally one of two Roman outposts in all of England (the other one being Londinium), York has history ingrained. Walking beneath the catacombs of the Cathedral, many of the Roman walls and even a few of the frescoes were still there, relatively untouched. It was a pretty chilling experience, being able to touch the walls of a Roman bath while eight hundred year old bells ring above you. Meanwhile the town itself is an extremely well preserved; medieval, full of curled alleyways leading nowhere, wood houses and the grand wall ringing the city, and the tremendous cathedral taking up the center of town. The city has obviously focussed on its heritage and has become a major tourist attraction for Englanders, so at times the city felt just a little too Disneylandey, with its souvenir shops and strangely high end clothing outlets. But the industry hasn’t killed all of its magic: walking to the edge of the city, in a little park there was a graveyard with heavy trees and a little church that seemed untouched since the 19th century, while near it was the ruins of the Norman cathedral, toppled for the Gothic one that looms before it. Incredible.

            As far as history goes, none was as striking for me as my own. Halfway through the week we travelled to my dad’s hometown where his parents owned a pub for most of their lives. It was also where I’d spend a month every one to two years when I was little, so going back there was a nostalgic overload– still the dusty windows, the weeping willow by the river, and the market in the center of the village five minutes away. Inside was a different story, with anything that gave the place character or warmth (memorabilia, pictures) had been taken down, leaving just bare walls and a few customers. It’s part of a trend in Ireland and England, where classic family-run pubs are being closed in favor of your more North American style bar– it may have been still there but it wasn’t the same. Still, going there to have a Guinness and see “Scanlon’s Bar” on the window was worth the trip.

            Though in the end Oxford topped everything this week. Few places in England are as proud of its history as the university town. Walking through ancient libraries, sneaking into old colleges (finding dining rooms untouched since the 1500s and thinking “I can’t believe people actually eat here– the plague was around when this was built!”), it’s hard to believe anything about the place has changed in five hundred years. People come and go, but the university doesn’t move. And maybe that’s not altogether a good thing: one of my biggest reasons for choosing UBC is the fact that it’s an up and comer, not one of the ‘established’ (cough McGill). It’s willing to shake things up; we still read Shakespeare but throw in some Highway for good measure. Going to Oxford could be a bit maddening, and there’s definitely a danger of becoming an academic snob in the worst of ways. At the same time, walking along those rivers and the rowers and the bells from every tower, the peace that’s there, then the notion that Waugh or Johnson are watching down at you from the walls– well there’s something enchanting about it all alright.

            That’s Oxford. Then we travel for an hour and we’re in the heart of London. Well that’s England. 

            

             So I walk into a bar. It’s loud and it’s packed and people are definitely smoking in here. The band’s great and everyone’s happy; there’s no cover and people are filling out onto the street. It’s 2 PM on a Sunday (with a crowd about as good as the best night at the Blarney Stone). It’s Dublin. Remember what I said last time, about the Irish stereotypes and none of them being true? Okay fine, some of them are true, at least as far as Dublin is concerned.

            Dublin isn’t a big city– at one and a half million people, it doesn’t come close by even Manchester standards, and the ‘good stuff” can be traversed in a day or so. Dublin also isn’t an old city, at least by European standards, with only a couple buildings being older than 1800 (sure  in Canada that’s amazingly old, but I do have London and Paris in periphery here). So yeah, viewed from a Wikipedia facts page Dublin doesn’t seem that special, and as my photos unfortunately reveal, the pictures in no way do the city justice.

            Because there’s something about Dublin; it’s a lot older and grander than it appears. Its university holds one of the oldest books in existence, its castle is totally open to visitors, its museums are free, its abundance of writers all have their houses converted into museums. Oh yeah, the literature? About that. Joyce Yeats Beckett Wilde Shaw… and so on. I’m generally not one to get overly proud of heritage (it starts to get a little creepy), but on this one, I get a little excited. Because there’s a lot. Out of all of them, Joyce really owns the city: you see his influence everywhere, from art to statues to the streets itself, since after Dubliners and Ulysses there’s very few corners of the city he hasn’t brought to life. It’s been nearly a hundred years, but going to the Dead house brings that amazing short story to life.

            That being said, possibly the highlight of the city for me was the Yeats exhibit, which had on display his original family photo album, all his notes, recreations of different rooms of places he wrote, and kept entries of his diary. It ended in a padded room which flashed various symbols of his on the wall (Byzantium, the fairy, the tower) while a voice read out his greatest poems. Incredible. It was there I realized I was in the right major. As much as I love history, it couldn’t bring that city alive the way the literature had. I mean, I didn’t even like Yeats until my incredible Honours Prof gave us her rundown of the poems. I can’t imagine going there even a year ago, thinking of all the Irish books I’ve read since. Eventually I’ll actually get down and read Ulysses, and the city will be new all over again.

            Though I don’t want to make Dublin sound like a mothball-ridden mausoleum of a city. It’s the opposite, really. Dublin has an edge to it, from the streetart-grafitti along every wall, the numerous and excellent buskers in the streets, to the drinking culture. Now my biggest regret about my weekend in Dublin is that I didn’t get a chance to truly drink with the Irish, as we got in on a Saturday night, and my family was too tired. We went out on the Sunday, but apparently that’s the quietest night. But hey, now I get an excuse to come back, right? Not to mention the cousin we were staying with lived in a renovated workhouse from the industrial revolution. The factory? Guinness of course.

            Dublin is where I started to realize I’m, well, in Europe. It was a city I’d never been to before, so I came to it completely new, and it blew me away. I had one and a half days there, and although there’s a lot more to see, it was enough time to get a feel for the place. It was the place where suddenly an English degree didn’t feel so worthless; suddenly it was more valuable than pretty much any other degree at UBC, since I was able to get so much more out of such a rich and interesting city. It makes sense to me now why you do a Go Global exchange on the in the middle of your degree: the first two years you spend delving into your course subject and getting to learn how to live on your own; this semester those independent living skills will be put to the test when that happens to be Europe, while all the things you learned in class suddenly become valuable; come back for the last two years and you’re empowered. (So this is all just empty conjecture, but hey, it has a nice rhythm to it– we’ll see.) Dublin was amazing, while London and Paris are only weeks away. Hoh boy. 

            This is probably one of the hardest entries I’m going to write for the blog, there’s just so many memories wrapped up here, it’s hard to find a proper balance of being personable and not ‘me-breathing-down-your-neck’. Here it goes:

 

            Driving east towards Dublin, I see green pastures, healthy farm animals, and quiet warm villages grouped around Churches. It’s probably the image most people have of Ireland– that and a smoky rowdy pub here and there. But it’s an Ireland I’ve never known, this is the first time I’ve seen it. The Ireland I know lies on the western coast, past the mountains or the farmable pastures. It gives you a very different picture of the Emerald Isle.

            “That there is the last British Manor,” my Dad pointed out to us as we went west of Ballina a couple days ago. “It’s only bog from here on out.”

            County Mayo is beautiful, but in a very austere sort of way. The rolling hills are probably closer to jagged peaks, while that emerald is probably more a yellow. There’s an openness and an emptiness to the lands– there’s villages all over the place but there’s four maybe five families left in each of them; going into pubs you’d see at most seven people at a time. Hotels, pubs and even houses: foreclosed and abandoned. (But, as my Dad points out, at least they have real roads now.) I went five days without seeing a McDonalds, Mall or the internet.

            But I wasn’t surprised, because nothing had changed, not really. I hadn’t been in nine years, so I had been expecting a huge kind of, I guess you could call it an “awakening”: a discovery of where I come from, a new appreciation of Canada and everything I have. But everything was exactly as I remembered it. I was here, and it felt like just another place I’d been to. Maybe a little nostalgia, that’s about it.

            I guess part of it comes from the fact that I had always been affected by Mayo without realizing it. I have my Grandma to thank for that. She ran a pub in western England, and one Christmas when we were staying with them she told me a story of how, growing up in Ireland, the most she ever got for Christmas was an orange, except the one year her uncle brought her back a little straw doll, how it was the best gift she’s ever been given. Maybe it’s just because I was a selfish brat that only cared about presents, but that story’s always affected me. I always knew where my grandparents came from; going there could never be as powerful as still hearing her voice swell talking about that straw doll.

            Over the five days, however, County Mayo began to take hold of me. Time seems to stop while there– I’d step outside and all I could hear was the distant crash of the waves, the mooing of mountain cows, and my own heartbeat (honestly, it really started to creep me out after a while…). It would have been neat to have gone directly from the hustle and bustle of my Vancouver life to the solitude here, but it was still arresting coming from Winnipeg. At first that quiet made me irritated: we’d spend hours in the day just driving from one ‘significant rock’ to another, and while it was really great to visit family, the only people in the same age decade were my brothers (which became harder to accept when I had no internet the whole time I was there, so I couldn’t even exchange some messages with friends). Worst of all: the Irish aren’t coffee drinkers, so all anyone ever had was instant (yeah I won’t miss that part in Paris).

            Over time it began to settle into me, get under my skin, like it had always been there.

            The first great day we had was in climbing Crouch Patrick Mountain.

 

Crouch (pronounced “crow”, like “you’re a crow John Snow”) Patrick is a significant site in Irish history: St. Patrick fasted on the summit for forty days and forty nights, after which he was able to banish the snakes out of Ireland. Since then it’s become a central site for pilgrims, some who choose to do it in bare bleeding feet. Today, there are far more tourists that visit the mountain; trade in frocks for backpacks and rosaries for water bottles. The mountain sits across from the Ocean, where the water feeds the rivers so as you go up the water grows to fill the whole glistening countryside. As far as climbing it goes, well, it’s no Grouse Grind (for my Vancouver friends), being fifteen hundred feet less– twenty five hundred feet? no problem. At least that’s what I thought most of the way up. Then the rocks started. After a certain point the mountain levels out and there’s only one way up from there: a nearly vertical ascent, made harder by the fact that other tourists are raining rocks down on you as they huff and puff above. After a certain point I just had to keep moving, until I reached the monastery at the top and effectively collapsed on the doorsteps. So it was a day of struggle up the mountain (“it’s not supposed to be fun!” as my Dad says); up a mountain where three times’ll get you into heaven; up to a monastery dedicated to St Patrick of all people. Oh and we had a couple Guinness at the local pub at the bottom after. Can’t get much more Irish, eh?

            It was on the fourth day there I really started to feel the land take hold. We went to a rocky cliff that could have been the edge of the world– crashing tides limestone cliffs and a misty sea looking out on nothing but the arctic. With the wind battering and the holes the British threw Irish revolutionaries down, it looked like a scene out of Wuthering Heights.

Around that time I started to really get into Yeats’ poetry. Most poets have a streak of misery in their verse, but with Yeats it’s always struck me less as a “poor me” attitude (even though there’s a lot of that in there) and more a sadness of the ages– ageing and death and being forgotten. It seemed to have been made for these lands, where stone ruins of houses only fifty years old are eaten by the grass and torn by the wind (incidentally, his home province was Sligo, just north of Mayo). It gave me a totally different feel for the land; for the people, for the culture, and for God. Crosses on the hills, looking down at you, everywhere you go. It ended with me sitting on the beach the morning we had to leave and not wanting to; this land is a part of me, and I still had so much discovering to do.

            Oh and the language politics here is fascinating: Gaelic, the Celtic language, is their only official language, even though probably about ten percent of the population can actually speak it. It’s symbolic for them, since the British forced them to lose the language as a means of controlling them. It’s amazing that they can take their language back, and although some of the politics with it today (signs, what’s acceptable where) is similar to what goes on in Quebec, I feel it’s more like languages such as Cree almost lost because of similar colonial techniques in Canada. Perhaps Native Americans in Canada could do something similar in preserving the language of their culture.

            So Mayo is amazing. Go there and you’ll meet some of the greatest people in the world. Everyone waves to you, will strike up a conversation anywhere (including the urinal, a favorite place to chat in pubs, apparently), and will make you feel at home after a couple days. The people– my family– are so so smart, wise in such a way that seems to answer for everything, makes you wonder what all this university scholasticism is for. And the pubs may be mostly empty these days, but it’s still so much warmer than any bars you’ll find in Canada. I’ve left Mayo. Mayo won’t leave me. 

This was written August 5th, but this is the first time I have proper internet: 

            Across from me right now I’m watching the green shamrock of the Aer Lingus jet begin to glow in the morning sun. It’s around now I realize I’m almost in Europe; a couple hours ago it could have been any old flight from Vancouver to Winnipeg or vice-versa. But to see that sun– to feel like you’ve just woken up when you haven’t slept a second– I realize exactly how different this flight is. And I didn’t realize I was going to Europe.

            That probably has something to do with the circumstances surrounding this flight and my trip in general only a couple days ago. Because my adventure started a whole week before I got on any kind of plane.

            The initial plan: a nice family trip to Ireland and England, visiting all the relatives, before dropping me off in Paris for the semester. We’d drive down to Chicago (a 16-hour drive us expert road-trippers are used to by this point), visit with the relatives there, then fly to Ireland on the Sunday. Easy-enough, right?

            Until you throw in the little complication that is the French Bureaucracy. I had to apply to the Toronto French Consulate for a student visa, but since I was going through a University Exchange I didn’t need to be there in person to be approved for the visa, just had to send off my passport with all the necessary documents. We sent it off a full four weeks before our planned departure date, a healthy amount of time, I would have guessed.

            But having your passport in the hands of a body you cannot even contact through the phone grows worrisome over time, especially a week before you leave. Especially five days before you leave. The only contact I had was through the Manitoba French Consulate, who told me that the visas are processed in Nantes, and that neither he nor anyone in the Toronto office could comment on the status of my visa (note: I later learned this is most definitely not true). When I finally got a response from the Toronto Consulate, they gave me one sentence:

                  As per your application, you are leaving on the 26th of August

            And my family entered crisis mode. During my application, I was crazy enough to be honest and told the Consulate I was entering France on the 26th of August; they took this to mean I was leaving the country that day (more likely: used it as an excuse to drop my application to the bottom of the pile). It suddenly seemed like everything was drifting away from me: my parents and brothers would have to leave without me for Chicago and then Ireland so they didn’t lose their own flight tickets, I would miss the Ireland portion of my trip and possibly the British Isles in general as– well– who knows when I’d get it?

            My Mom and I got to work that Tuesday trying every angle available to us: Campus France (“out of our jurisdiction”), UBC getting in touch with Sciences Po (“out of our jurisdiction”), our MP (“out of our jurisdiction”), the French Embassy (“out of…” you get the idea), and finally passport Canada asking if a new passport was at all possible– a particularly memorable hour when we both almost broke down in front of the passport ladies. The more that day dragged on, the more I felt I was lost in some faceless system of letters and doors. When I’d read The Trial only a month ago, I couldn’t understand why Joseph K subdues so quickly to the monstrous system that ensnares him– one second he’s the haughty banker who won’t take shit from anyone, the next he’s bending over and letting them decapitate him. In less dramatic terms, I’m starting to understand: when you’re faced with something so faceless you can’t even hear a voice on the other end, you start to feel it’s all pretty hopeless. You stop feeling like an individual at all.

            Wednesday morning at 11 AM:

                       Hello, your visa and passport are in the mail. Good day.

            One sentence, and everything changed. It’s weird to think that all this happened over the course of 48 hours, but when something so surreal happens so quickly, it becomes just as surreal when the weird circumstances disappear as quickly as they came. I had a great conversation with the Manitoba Consulate after that, who actually turned out to be a great guy when you aren’t pressuring him for a visa. All that was left was to wait for it to arrive.

            And then Canada Post lost it.

            Over the course of Wednesday and Thursday, it hadn’t shown up in the system at all. The problem: since it’s Xpress post, it would take two days to get from Toronto to Winnipeg. The bigger problem: as it hadn’t shown up by Thursday, that would, theoretically, mean that it would start shipping Friday– and there’s the August long weekend. That means I wouldn’t get it until at least Tuesday.

            So by this point I just felt like shit– I’m not usually the “woe is me” type, but luck really wasn’t with me this week. By the end of Thursday I didn’t even want to think about Ireland or Paris. And then that night I got a call from my Mom, telling me that not only was the passport in Canada Post’s tracking system, but that it was already in the Winnipeg facility.

            It hadn’t been entered at all.

            So like any neighborhood dog I waited by the door for the mailman all morning, till my Mom decided to just trail him with her car until she found him and got him to give her the post (hmm, I guess I wasn’t the only anxious one here).

            And now I’m on a plane. As if going to Europe for the first time in nine years wasn’t insane enough.

            Dealing with an international organization has really given me an interesting perspective: seeing how little my own government could do for me really shows how careful I have to be in countries that aren’t my own (now I know how North Americans find themselves rotting in Arabic Prisons for decades). I can appreciate exactly how much of an opportunity this is for me to get to study in France– as much as they dicked me over, they gave me my visa and I didn’t have to drop an extra 500 to get it in Toronto (not to mention it’s fucking Paris!). I’m becoming increasingly fascinated with the nature of intergovernmental organizations; diplomacy, and how nations interact with each other. An example: the same week the French Consulate was giving me hell is the same week Canadian Consulates all over the world have been striking. What if, because students in Paris are probably dealing with a hard time getting into Canada, the French Consulate became that much more ‘blasé’ to a Canadian student? It’s hard to say, but it’s all connected, isn’t it?

            And now we’re hitting the West Coast of Ireland, where my family lived in the same spot for a thousand years. Wow.