Wilds of Wicklow
I've been all over and it's too cold for this sort of thing. I don't want to do any fresh projects and I've seen the snow, ice and lead mines of the Wicklow Gap area, researched and surveyed bits of it for a project, been rebuffed by deteriorating weather and been forced to go to the anodyne Visitor Centre at Glendalough for a day.
After all that confusion and new work set to replace the abandoned practical (thereby wasting all the research done) I managed to leave all my best gear behind on the bus and had to spend half a day on the phone and another 6 hour jaunt to the freezing cold zone out to the west of Cappagh.
It must be 10 degrees colder out there and to prove it, it seems entirely populated by East Europeans, looking like they just returned from Stalingrad. The Industrial parks and the air cargo depots, the grocery warehouses and so on are peopled by immigrant workers. I came face to face with a side of Ireland I hadn't fully comprehended before. The Celtic Tiger: is it really a Russian Bear? Well, no, there were Italians, Spanish, Chinese and many other languages I couldn't even recognise, being spoken around me. The one 'Irish' voice I could here was definitely from Belfast. Now this is certainly not a rant, since I'm not Irish myself.
It was nice to see, when I finally got back to O'Connell Street, a friendly face from the college, someone who works in the canteen - a Chinese girl. She came over and we spoke about my trip to Blanchardstown. I think she lives in Dun Laoghaire.
I finally climbed gratefully onto my bus home, which was fully heated, unlike the miserable old bus they sent us out to the back of beyond in, and thought: I think we have it pretty good on the south side.
So I've done all the field trips I want to do for the present and I have to get down to the work of revising the past 7 months, most of which refuses to come back to mind without a good deal of committed effort.
After all that confusion and new work set to replace the abandoned practical (thereby wasting all the research done) I managed to leave all my best gear behind on the bus and had to spend half a day on the phone and another 6 hour jaunt to the freezing cold zone out to the west of Cappagh.
It must be 10 degrees colder out there and to prove it, it seems entirely populated by East Europeans, looking like they just returned from Stalingrad. The Industrial parks and the air cargo depots, the grocery warehouses and so on are peopled by immigrant workers. I came face to face with a side of Ireland I hadn't fully comprehended before. The Celtic Tiger: is it really a Russian Bear? Well, no, there were Italians, Spanish, Chinese and many other languages I couldn't even recognise, being spoken around me. The one 'Irish' voice I could here was definitely from Belfast. Now this is certainly not a rant, since I'm not Irish myself.
It was nice to see, when I finally got back to O'Connell Street, a friendly face from the college, someone who works in the canteen - a Chinese girl. She came over and we spoke about my trip to Blanchardstown. I think she lives in Dun Laoghaire.
I finally climbed gratefully onto my bus home, which was fully heated, unlike the miserable old bus they sent us out to the back of beyond in, and thought: I think we have it pretty good on the south side.
So I've done all the field trips I want to do for the present and I have to get down to the work of revising the past 7 months, most of which refuses to come back to mind without a good deal of committed effort.
posted by ruth @ 2:04 PM
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