Reentry Shock

It has been one week since I hugged Melina goodbye in the middle of Grattan Street, buried my face into my UCC sweatshirt, and let the tears roll intermittently through my 11 hours of travel.

Maryland is warmer than I left it, greener too, and I seem to have settled so seamlessly into life at home that I wonder (I, in fact, began to wonder on the plane) if I had ever been to Ireland, ever spent the last five months in a dirty student apartment on Cork City, ever flew to Germany, ever saw Rome, ever gone to the Quad or been a café regular. It all seems so distant from this here, now, my wide desk in my muggy room, screen windows and a bottle of Yuengling. Perhaps my high alcohol tolerance is that last remnant of that life.

I do miss it. I miss waking up to text messages asking for coffee or lunch. I miss the smell of the Lee and the availability of everything; the city on one side, the school on the other, and I miss walking. I have already done the two hour drive to dear Chestertown and the automobile is no longer a thrill, but a depressant, alone in a cell cut off from the air and the people and the noise. It is a kind solitude, but it is no longer what I want.

And so when it comes down to it I miss Cork. Home has not changed a bit, I can tell. Rather, it is me who has changed, and I know this. I do enjoy the sun and the feel of warm air and bare feet. All the books I have to devour (most of which are dear gifts from Ireland) sit in a milkcrate in the corner of my room and I simply operate in a place between what has ended in May and what will begin in September, and even more what will end next May and what path I will be lead on then. Someplace new again, I hope. I think it will be time again for new faces, although I already miss the ones I have met.

I think I may always miss Ireland, that someplace old and someplace new.

Cork in Photo

The Mariquita in Dingle

I received a message from Maria about two days ago asking if I’d like to go to an aquarium today. “Of course!” I replied via ecstatic text message, “Where is the aquarium?” Dingle, apparently.

So we set off on a rain-soaked bus at about 9.30 this morning for a lovely day on the peninsula. It in fact cleared up significantly, with patches of blue finally becoming patches of cloud as the bus pulled over at Inch Strand, a stretch of beach along the Dingle Peninsula. By this time the rain had receded, leaving only a strangely benevolent sun for us to abandon our shoes and socks to and play in the water. It was a cold Atlantic, but it could have been much worse, and the beach itself a wide and gentle slope. Maria did cartwheels and spins and butterfly kicks and Melnia took pictures and I marveled at the look of my toes in the surf and we ran and laughed and I found myself in the sun for the first time in days.


Melina (left) and Maria (right) enjoying the sun.

From there we wound up the coast, green and blue all the way, passing sights I in turn came to recognize having already been to Dingle with Barbara and David. So I wasn’t much surprised by the route of our tour around Sleg Head, including a trip past the Beehive Forts and the Blasket Centre, where we stopped to spend time sunbathing on the stone of their back face and making daisy chain wreaths and giving ourselves names like “Rainbow” and “Mariquita” (my favorite Spanish word- ladybug.)

It was a beautiful trip, even as we stopped at Dunbeg Fort where I finally got pictures and once again fed wildflowers to the donkey. The day was warm and comfortable and everything was so vibrant, the islands seems to glow and even the elusive Skellig Michael was visible.


The entranceway to the inner circle of Dunbeg Fort.

Our final stop took us in the Dingle Town where we finally toured their tiny but vibrant aquarium, with a multitude of tropical and native species, small sharks, sea turtles, goldfish the size of my head and even a petting tank with a ray that appeared to do spinning tricks in the water. We ran around like kids in wonder, taking pictures with the decorations and marveling at the way light moves through water.


A vibrant little seahorse.

It was the first time I’ve been on a trip with Maria and Melina and I enjoyed the leisure of it. There was no need to do much of anything except enjoy the sun. Perhaps it was the fact that I done it before, or perhaps it’s some kind of Spanish mentality, but there is a refreshing wholeness to being able to travel Ireland without having to learn something, or do something, simply to sit in the sun, in the green, and hear the sheep and remember this is where I am right now.

It’s been little over a month without travel and it was a much needed break from Cork, a reminder that the trip’s not quite over yet. I’m still here, I’m still here.

Feet

Walking to the gym this morning in the early afternoon, before the inevitable afternoon downpour and after the mid-morning chill, I felt as if I could walk forever. It is not a new feeling, but it seems more poignant now that I have faith in my own two feet.

I have always been slightly self-conscious about my feet, and on the whole I do not trust them much. I like the way they look, with their high arches, proportioned toes and pink nail polish, but they tend to flop when I walk like silly appendages, the left ankle rolling grossly as I trudge down the street. I am only truly comfortable when walking in bare feet, and that is a rare thing here.

But in the last five months I have learned to walk like I have never walked before. I have taken the walk to school as a normality, down damp paths in the morning or to the café in the afternoon. The walk back from the pub has become a mere trifle, tapping the stone in heels. I have gotten used to carrying my weekly groceries back from Tesco and the Market, familiar brass plaques lying under my Converse. But more than this, I learned that I can walk. That when all else fails, I am never stuck anywhere. Distance is relative, (and the distances I have walked have been long indeed) but I have learned to walk the kilometers without fail, to continue with no thought to how far, simply knowing that I will get there. I can walk. My mobility is never compromised.

In the states I am reliant on a car, my feet placed safely on the gas and brake, never forced to move much in order to go far, but to walk is a whole new discovery. This movement is a whole body experience, a sense of complete self, independent and integrated. No frame separates you from the world and no machine leaves you to be let down. Most mornings I feel I could walk forever, around the country and back to this wonderful city, and that I need nothing but my feet and my legs going on at my own pace; an off-centered gait that may not be economical, but it gets me there all the same.

The night outside Kerry airport I took to my feet in the same way I found my way through the streets of Dublin and Edinburgh and Rome. To walk, to walk to the bus station with a pack of all your possessions on your back, or simply to the gym with a towel, it is a state of perfect independence. You are walking on your own two feet! The world cannot stop you!

And I have come to love it. The days I do not walk are marked by restlessness, a supreme feeling of waste and dissatisfaction. I have even come to love my trod; slow, but more observant. There is more time to take in the birds on the Lee or the purple flowers that cling to stone fences along College Avenue. I see the world when I walk, I see it in its own time, coming and going as it does, as I do. To walk is a feeling of freedom nothing can match. I can walk the world if I wish.

Early Examination

It is May already. I wonder when that happened. The days here are rather nice right now, a bit chill, with always the threat of a shower, but of late I’ve found it easy to walk myself to the gym at 10 each morning without becoming hypothermic.

Along the Lee small, white flowers bloom and the leaves give a beautiful green canopy and at low tide I can smell the ocean in the dredges of the riverbed. Two white swans have taken up residence in a length of the river between my apartment and the Mardyke Bridge, their white plumage standing out against the swampy brown of the water.

There are no classes anymore, just exams. A month of stressed students and packed study areas. I have never seen such a collective body of silence as I find crammed into the Q+3 of the library on the rare days when I can grab myself a window seat there. The exams are fairly straightforward; only two essays, 90-minuets, and with a choice of topics so varied I cannot imagine what it would take to fail. My own exams are spaced rather nicely; one tomorrow, one the 20th and one the 27th. After that, well, I don’t like to think about after that. After that I will be leaving this place, but I’m not ready to think about that yet.

Most afternoons are spent in the O’Rahlly Building café with a crowd of now all-too-familiar faces; Maria and Melina, (the Spanish girls), Shane, Niall and Martin (the English lit boys), Debbie and Anne, Heather, Alba, Frank, Ian, and many people who I greet, but with names I can’t remember. Pub crawls still happen at regular intervals, and sometimes just old-fashioned house parties. My free evenings are mostly occupied with reading literary criticisms and tapping away at my keyboard.

For now my only worry is enjoying this last month on the emerald isle without prematurely mourning it. There is time to sit in the warming sun still and hear Shane quip some latin quote, or listen to Melina and Maria chatting away in quick Spanish. To hear more and more about old Irish men in local pubs, jokes about potatoes, or ridicule Joyce.

Or to just listen to the rain.

Updates

There are three (possibly four) massive updates on the way, covering the last three weeks of travel and overall excitement and exertion. Not to fear, I am intact and in Ireland, and working to bring you the very best quality of writing and photos spanning three countries.

I sound like a money back-guarantee. Good thing you don't pay me anything to read this.

Senatus Populousque Romanus

The plane left me off at Ciampino Airport, where it first hit me that I was (relatively) alone in a city where not only did I not know the language, I knew nothing about knowing the language. No small words of “please” or “thank you” even, and Deutsch was still constantly dogging my vocabulary to the point that whole sentences would be thought in German before I realized that I was not cognicient in my native language.

So from the small little airport I found the bus to Termini Station where Erica, Erik and Karissa were to meet me. Termini, however, is more than a little station and after an hour and a half of waiting, walking, trying to call on my dying cell phone, and loosing euro after euro to the pay phones, I decided my best course of action at midnight in Rome was to line up for a cab and show them the hostel address. From there I could call Erica and tell them I was safe and sound.

Apparently I greatly underestimated the tiny backstreets and confusion of buildings that is Rome, as well as its unlabeled avenues and lack of reliable road names, house numbers, or any grid-like street pattern. After being left at the top of a soaping dark street and pointed in the right direction, I was forced to seek aid at a nearby restaurant. The doorman showed me to a large wooden entranceway in a wall up the street, rang a buzzer, and pointed me inside. With thanks I entered a large, dark hallway of yellow stucco walls that led to an open courtyard of uneven mosaic tile and the entrance to an unmarked five story building. The stone stairs inside wound up into darkness and no where could I find any link to my hostel.

Without any options, but at least off the street, I decided to stay put in the hallway and wait for Erica and Erik to return, supposing I must be somewhere near the right spot. A few minuets of waiting and the large wooden doors creaked open again and a group of about seven men, speaking in German, entered. My mind still thinking in Deutsch, I decided to ask for help, and while none of them were familiar with the hostel, one lent me his cell phone so I could finally contact Erica who told me to stay put, that I was in the right spot, and they would come back to meet me.

In the end I found the hostel a fine accommodation, our room being on the top floor of the five-story building and the offices being to the right and up the stairs of the initial hallway. We had a kitchen to cook in and that first night spent tired and sweaty I was gracious for the lack of screen or glass in the window. Only parted wooden shutters and the warm, Roman air.

Through the window shutters.

All things were in walking distance for us, especially the Colosseum in the blue sky and sun, high, fluffy clouds- weather I forgot could be real. While I found the ruins of the Forum intriguing, and the flora and stone of the Palatine Hill beautiful, the Colosseum was something less than it had been in my mind. Obviously crumbled, its majesty lessened by my own familiarity with contemporary stadiums, it was still the base of all things I had seen. In fact, the entire city was to me a large archeo-historical marvel, where sites of excavation ran through city squares and arches over streets were simply treated like any other structure, while in fact they were older than my very country.

The Arch of Constantine sits next to the Colosseum and as we ate lunch by it- a cheap Italian pizza, not more than cheese and tomato paste in a pita- the thought that I was in Rome began to come through my shocked mind. From there we wandered to the Circus Maximus, a long depressed field beside the Palatine Hill where broken bottles are prevalent and the city moves around above you.

The Roman Pantheon was an intriguing building which, like most churches of Rome, looks more than dilapidated from the outside. Nothing but a drab brick, brown rotunda, but coming through the columns of the entrance you find the most spectacular display of colored stone and marble floorwork. A beautiful circle, where on one side Raphael lay and on the other Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of Unified Rome, whose monument we encountered at least once a day on our way to the sights of the city.

The ceiling of the Pantheon is done is the receding square pattern of most domes, just as it is painted on St.Paul’s in London, but here all things were real. So was the stone, magnificent and looming overhead, meeting in a wide open circle to the sky that is supposedly spectacular in the rain, the water pouring a cylindrical column to the cool floor.

The Dome of the Pantheon.

But still the Pantheon could not compare to St.Peter’s Basilica, which is a church obviously meant for something greater. Our day at the Vatican was another superb sunny morning, with clouds that did not appear real, floating lithely over the plaza. I was surprised at how quickly we walked into it, almost on accident suddenly we were emerging from a group of pillars to the crowds of St. Peter’s Square, the Basilica before us and the sun overhead.

Inside, however, it took my breath away. The size of all things was greater, the statues and the ceiling, the thickness of the columns and the sturdiness of the floor, things built by man, but not for them. My only thought, standing gaping in the center isle as people moved and parted about me, was that no other church, chapel, cathedral or dome would ever compare to the grandeur of the color and size before me now. The center isle culminated at the nave with the baldacchino by Bernini, a structure of four dark woods posts inlayed with gold and crowned with the figures of angels, under which lay the remains of St. Peter. The closest I have ever been to something so religiously important.

Behind this the grandeur of the actual alter lurked in gold, blazing like a sun ray, another work by Bernini, and appropriate, but striking me as something strange and altogether too gaudy, seemingly too contemporary for the center of the Catholic Church resting here before me. Still all the niches and chapels and the height of the walls, the way the light filtered in was more than enough to convey the feeling of being a visitor to something not designed for me. Not deigned for any of us.

Statue inside St.Peter's.

The rest of our day was spent touring the labyrinth of the Vatican Museums, a long series of hallways stretching on forever, containing what might very well be the basis of all Western Civilization, art, culture, things whose pale reflections we see in the sight of our own capital. In Rome they appear authentic, new, never before though of, designed, built, fresh for the human eyes. Past walls of maps and murals and finally coming to a crossroads, we followed the arrows through a small door and into the crowd of the Sistine Chapel.

It was smaller than I imagined, and while pictures of it always seem too busy for the eyes, it wasn’t so in person. We moved through the bodies of people, all standing steady, necks craned up to take in the full view of intricacy and color. I wanted to stand there for hours, I could have really, while around bubbled up the well of conversation only to be “shussshed” and moments later, well up again.

We exited in a final push towards the rear door and found yet more museum hallways taking us back out of the museums, and eventually into Rome again, to the market stands which grabbed Vatican tourists on their way to the metro- all too like the vendors in the temple- but still intriguing to browse.

On our third day in the city we decided on a day trip to Hadiran’s Villa, a monumental site of excavation, a 45-minuet bus ride outside of the city in the tiny town of Tivoli. Here we leapt off the bus in a flurry, hoping for the right stop, and backtracked our way through back alleys until we found the road to the Villa, encountering along the way the most typical of Italian sights; the cypress-lined gravel road.

The Villa itself was a massive complex of crumbled stone where once the Emperor Hadrian spent his leisure. It rests at the base of a complex of small hills and mountains, into which stretched the buildings of Tivoli. It was sunny and warm again as we walked through open ruins, climbed on some, posed with others. Baths and pools, some full, some drained, were evident. Rotundas whose ceilings were simply now patchwork with sky and half-fallen columns. It was the perfect day trip as we sat in a grove of trees and ate our lunch, protected from the slight drizzle that had snuck up on us. Everywhere, in between stone walls and complexes, grew a vast array of wildflowers which inexorably ended up in my hair as the day progressed. Small lilies and bright poppies, buttercups, daises, some I could not name at all, giving color to everything around them.

A bouquet of Italian wildflowers.

I was glad to get a day out of the city, whose maze of streets were becoming strangely familiar at this point, and see more of the country. All my life the idea of Rome has never been associated with any nationality. Rome in my mind simply was only the city, without ties, and to remember that I was in Italy was hard, even while encountering the language almost constantly.

On our fourth day the weather took a turn for the worst and came in a plunking downpour, thankfully still warmer than the Irish version, but unpleasant nonetheless. We set off through the neighborhood of the Villa Borghese, upscale and lush with greenery, in search of the Galleria Borghese, only to read in our tourbook as we huddled around a heater on the veranda of a nearby restaurant, that it was closed without a reservation. Disheartened, we turned to head back into the city, tramping wet streets in our drenched clothes- none of us prepared for the rain- to the Santa Maria della Vittoria, where housed is the famous sculpture the Ecstasy of St. Theresa. Unfortunately this was closed for lunch. Tired, we decided to dry out in the hostel, get some food, and come back in the afternoon. Tracing the same route we took that morning, we stopped for dinner at a small pizza place we had had breakfast, where the cook recognized us four wet Americans with a grin a euro slice of pizza.

Farther down the Quattro Fontane we found ourselves in the spot we had stood that morning, now in the warm evening sun. In fact we were standing at the top of the Spanish Steps, a sight we had missed in the rain of the Piazza Trinità dei Monti. Beautiful and in bloom, with flower pots in patterns on the stone, it was gorgeous crowded (as everything is) between buildings of deep dry yellow and red.

Nights in Rome, after we cooked our pasta dinners, we treated ourselves to the wonders of Italian gelato, frequenting the same stand each night. From there we would tour the Colosseum or the Trevi Fountain while it was lit at night, Erica and I vying for the “artsy-ist photo” we could take. To culminate our trips we even splurged our college-age budgets for a nice dinner out, complete with wine and dessert, at a small bistro with street-side seating and fairy lights for the long-falling dark.

My "artsy" photo attempt.

Our final day was spent trekking the city one last time, from the Pyramid of Cestius back to the National Museum of Rome (which we discovered was closed on Mondays) to a final attempt to catch an Italian movie, and finally ending up at the Piazza del Popolo, after passing the Roman LUSH Store (a discovery I found most exciting)! Be also finally stepped inside the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, another drab, brick construction we passed each day in the Piazza della Reppublica on our way to or from Termini station. Inside we found a large open space, the church being more like a squat cross than having an extended isle, where works of art and pendulum demonstrations ticked in the corners. In ayed into the floor, however, was one of the most intriguing gold lines, cutting diagonal from the corner of the right wing, up past the alter, and surrounded with stone cuts of astrological animals and marks for seasons. Called the Meridiana, on sunny days a pin-prick hole in the ceiling lets in a dot of light that, depending on the season, lines up with certain spots on the golden line, telling dates and times on the floor of the church.

All the more because I come from such a young place, culturally speaking, Rome blew a gasket in my head. Something so old, existing, in front of my eyes, touching this stone that was carved and placed here before any man West of the Atlantic had even stepped foot in a boat for the Americas. Before anything I have ever know. But more than that, you get the feeling that any reference to classical culture you have ever encountered was only a shadow, and here is the real, monumental thing.



A girl offering flowers to Mary at the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri.