Get a load of this fucking view, It’s the best in the west

Well, I got more pictures from Scotland, but tomorrow I leave to go back to the States. So, they’ll have to wait to get posted until after I come back.

I don’t know what to say. It’s been incredible. It seems like all I know is Catalunya right now. I was even walking around the Dublin airport speaking Spanish, because I forgot I could speak English to everyone there. Bumping into people, excusing myself by saying fucking “Perdón”.

Anyway…

Today, among other things, I’m saying goodbye to these shoes:

They’ve taken me many places. From Indianapolis to Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Cincinnati, to New York City and Chicago, to Barcelona and Dublin, to Glasgow and Edinburgh and back again. They have many holes in them, and don’t smell too great now. It’s fair to say that they’ve provided their use fully, and then some. So now, they go back from whence they came. Back into the ocean.

A lot of things here have holes in them right now:

My jacket. (Courtney, I might have a favor to ask of your ever-improving seamstress skills.)

My backpack. (This ain’t coming back with me. It was a piece of shit, anyway.)

Various bodily organs, figuratively and literally. (Not pictured, of course. But that would be pretty cool.)

Well, it’s been magical, kids. Those Edinburgh and Scottish Highlands pictures will be coming, just because that was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen. Until then. See (most of) you Stateside.

Love is hot, Truth is molten

Blarney Castle, Blarney, Cork County, Ireland.

Walking up to it, you cross over this small stream, with the bottom covered in 1, 2, and 5 cent Euro coins.  Luck o’ the Irish, eh?  Unfortunately, the Irish, as a society or culture, hasn’t really been too lucky.  But of course, they themselves would never say that.  Happiest people alive, even though they have no real reason to be happy.

The entrance fee, while fairly steep, allows you to not only see the castle, but to also tour the grounds, which are amazing.  The Rock Close is the outlaying gardens around the castle.  The way to get in them is to go through this small tunnel.  Small meaning three feet tall, not short in distance.  The place was made for leprechauns, I’m telling ya.

Speaking of leprechauns, does this not look like some place they would live?  No wonder why the Irish love tales about small, mischievous humanoid creatures and fairies living in the woods.

Those leaves are as big as my torso.

This is called the Witch’s Oven.  Or Chimney.  I forget which.  They say that back in the ancient times, witches would steal firewood from the castle and come here to stay the night.  They also say (I don’t know who ‘they’ are exactly) that occasionally they’ll still find embers glowing in there some mornings.  Sounds like hobos to me.

But back to the castle itself:

Looking up through one of the small towers around the castle.

A fireplace in the middle of the wall inside the main chamber.  It’s in the middle of the wall because the floor from that level doesn’t exist anymore.

Looking down said Murder Hole.

View from the top.  That’s the town of Blarney.

The Blarney Stone itself.  Said to give whoever kisses it the gift of eloquence in public speaking and great skill in flattery.  I remained unconvinced until I saw a sign saying Winston Churchill himself kissed the stone before he was P.M. of England.  And we all know that man could talk his way into anybody’s pants.

How you kiss it is you have to get on your back and hold those two rails with your arms stretched over your head, then bend your head back and kiss it upside down.  The man who helped me kiss it looked close to a hundred years old, and was the same man pictured in all of the postcards in the gift shop that were probably taken in the 1980s.

Looking up to where the stone is located.  I’ve actually heard that it isn’t even the actual Blarney Stone, and that to kiss the real stone, you need to hang off the edge and have someone hold your legs.  Oh, well.  The things tourists will do…  Hell, I did it.

Name me someone who’s not a parasite, And I’ll go out and say a prayer for him

Cork is a lovely city. Not that big, plenty of pubs and restaurants, college crowd, art house cinema. I was thoroughly impressed.

The Cork City Gaol (apparently an old English word for jail) was an unusually interesting tour. The jail was made in the 1820s and stopped functioning about a century later. It’s on the northwestern outskirts of the city centre, where they wanted to give the inmates a fresh breeze with a hilltop view. Isn’t that nice?

Front gate building

Entrance and outside one of the wings

It was the tape-player-and-a-headset kind of tour, and usually I ain’t too keen on those types of things. But this one was actually interesting. As you walked from cell to cell, the tape would tell you about the former occupants (some in mannequin fashion, some simply the tape’s quaint Irish accented voice), their misdeeds, their struggles on the inside, etc. I’m always one for tales of societal angst or life inside prisons, semi-medieval or not. This prison actually housed most of the political prisoners of the early part of the 1900s, including author Frank O’Connor and Michael Sullivan.

Who knew history could be so fun? With creepy mannequins to boot!

You would come upon a scene like this and the tape would say something like, “This is Mary Bowles. She was convicted of stealing from her neighbors and starving her children to near death. Mary is upset right now, because she has to do what every newcomer is required to do upon arriving here, give up her outside clothes for the standard issue prison ones.” See how much you can learn just from that small scene?!

I learned I like taking pictures of mannequins. They’re a lot easier to deal with than people.

Don’t worry. According to the tape, this ten-year-old boy was in there for stealing food from the markets and pickpocketing travelers at the local pubs. Totally justifies the daily whipping he received.

Early 20th century graffiti from the numerous IRA members and general protesters of the English and early Irish governments who were forced into the prison to keep their ideas off the streets.

———————————

Well, I’m in Edinburgh, Scotland right now, just for a couple of days. I have one more set of Ireland to post. I’ll try to get it up in the next couple of days. I’ll give you a hint to what it is: I can officially now say that I have truly indeed kissed the Blarney Stone. Eternal eloquence and persuasiveness are now mine.

Don’t trust the poets, They want to get paid

Ah, Dublin. Rainy Dublin. Rainy cold Dublin.

I unfortunately don’t have many photos of it because of the almost constant torrential rain, but mind you that didn’t take away any of my enjoyment of the town.

While Dublin is quite in the mold of other international European cities (i.e., constant flows of foreign tourists, gaudy stretches of overpriced boutiques), it also has an immense amount of personality. Hundreds of cozy pubs and narrow cobblestoned streets leading to rows of village-like townhouses.  But not as much personality as Cork, the place from which I am currently delivering this message.

I present to you the one thing I did have the opportunity to photograph, St. Stephen’s Green, named after Mr. Dedalus himself (not really):

Statue dedicated to the victims of the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s. Pretty brutal with the dog and the unborn baby on the right.

It was very green.  And tranquil.

It was also really awesome to stay at the World’s Most Obnoxious Hostel, complete with young Frenchies smoking (illegaly) in the hallways like chimneys and dozens of American kids running around drunk for what was the likely the first time in their lives.  Oh, well.  I lived through it.  Like Dublin’s own George Bernard Shaw said, “Youth is wasted on the young.”

I feel old.  But not in an entirely bad way.

She says I want to do right, But not right now

Here’s a picture of my twin that the kids made for the class. It’s pretty accurate since I always wear long-sleeved magenta shirts with the U.S. flag on it here. Subtlety has never been a strong suit. And apparently I sport a chain too. Who knew?

So, I’m leaving here in about a month or so. Done with the school at the end of May. I’ll be going to Ireland and Scotland for a couple of weeks after that.

Then, it’s back to the States for God-knows-what. Meanwhile, if there’s pictures, I’ll post them. Will I be up to the task? Stay tuned.

Cover me with roses for the funeral pyre, Send this dashing carcass out to sea

I’m still alive. As proof, here is a picture of me with a beard:

Taken atop Parc Güell, Barcelona, January 6th, 2008.

Drinking pots of coffee ’til every drop is gone, Painting a portrait of Ponce de León

Pictures from the Good Friday procession just below my apartment window. I live right around the corner from the Cathedral in Tarragona, and was warned/told about the Easter parades that would go through my street. (Note: I apologize for the unusual shitty quality of these pictures. Necessity of the flash, which I never like to use, and the presence of an annoying black cable running throughout the pictures are a product of the my apartment’s location and the lack of notice I had about the procession.)

I should have taken the sheer amount of people waiting in front of the Cathedral steps as a ominous sign, though.

Basically, the procession consisted of twenty or so “cars” (they called them coches in Castellano even though most of them were carried) depicting the final days of monsieur Jesus Christ. Yes, this is the Last Supper.

This was probably the most disturbing part for me. Then again, there were a lot of disturbing things about the “celebration”. Yes, the KKK took their outfits from this ancient Catholic tradition, even though the KKK hate Catholics. Originally, they were worn to signify penitents, suffering as Jesus once suffered. Nothing has changed in all the years. Most of these penitents went shoeless, while carrying those cars that probably weighed hundreds of pounds through narrow stone-cobbled streets. Worshiping can be such fun!

Oh, what flagellation!

All of the groups were followed by a group of drummers and/or trumpets and/or bagpipes, all playing very austere, droning rhythms and melodies.  One group even had a choral group singing, of all things, hymns in English.  Barely intelligible English, but English all the same.

All the balconies were crammed with people, and they were also lined up shoulder-to-shoulder along the narrow sidewalks.  Even the building across the street from mine, which I have never seen people in, had families watching the procession.  This was evidently a very big deal, even though only about half of Spain’s population is Catholic.  I’d guess the figure is even less in Tarragona.

More flagellating, you say?  Why, yes!

It was a sight to behold.

To be a zombie all the time, Requires such dedication

More photos from the Costa Daurada trek.

From the other direction.  If you can see that tall point that stands out on the right side, that’s the cathedral right next to my apartment.  We walked north along the coast for about 5 hours before taking the train back in Altafulla.

This is what the Mediterranean looks like, for those who are interested.  There’s usually a lot of boats.

It was fairly overcast that day, and the light wasn’t so great.  So, the pictures aren’t the best.

Fun fact for the day:  The Spanish call hippies (or at least the slang I’ve heard) “perraflautas“, which literally translates to flutedog.  This comes from the stereotype/fact that whenever the hippies here gather in the streets for a block party or to try to scrounge for some change from tourists, they are without a doubt accompanied by some scruffy, dirty dog(s) and seem to always be playing a flute.

I do believe if you don’t like things you leave, For some place you’ve never gone before

Yeah, well, didn’t get to go to Andalucia. But that just leaves me with more money to go elsewhere in June, the way I see it.

I did get to see some cool things during la Semana Santa, some of which were right below my apartment window (more on that later).

I took a walk up la Costa Daurada (the Mediterranean coast from southern Catalunya to just below Barcelona) a few days ago and discovered some amazing places, just a couple of hours walk north of here. One of which was this abandoned building.

View from the first floor window. As you can see, it’s incredibly situated on the coast. I don’t know if it used to be a school or a hotel, but it looked like the military (probably Franco’s) took it over at some point, since there were turrets nestled around its coastline and newer constructed buildings that resembled barracks on the grounds.

I expected something to be living in it (given this region’s propensity for hobos and gutter punks), but goats weren’t one of the things I was thinking.

More from the Costa Daurada trip later.

Lord Humungus Goes Nowhere

No Andalucia for me.  The fucking Americans and Brits here are the most unreliable pieces of shit I’ve ever met.

That is all.