Gurudwara Bangla Sahib

Mr. Singh came up trumps and gave me an insider’s tour of his Sikh temple. I was in a very pliable mood when he asked if I would like to go, otherwise I might have demurred. So glad that I didn’t.

The temple was beautiful with real gold everywhere, and hundreds of visitors constantly streaming through. It had a big pool full of sacred water and koi. “The sacred fish,” I said to Mr. Singh, who laughed.

Gold and glitter is all very well, but the most interesting parts for me were the temple’s  kitchen and lunch room. Here, anyone who wants can come enjoy a free lunch every day. According to a new acquaintance, “The food is so simple, but it tastes so good. You can’t figure out why it tastes so good, just chapatis and dal. They say it’s because it’s made with such devotion.” The cooks, dishwashers, cleaners, and servers are all volunteers and thousands of people are fed every day.

They make some chapatis with a machine and some by hand. These ones came out of the machine.

The handmade ones are formed at this long table.

And cooked on these huge griddles.

Dal is cooked in a huge pot and then separated into smaller buckets before being ladled onto individual serving trays.

The dishwashing room is the loudest and busiest place in the temple, with the metal trays clanging as the washers process them as quickly as possible to meet the needs of all the people who have come for lunch.

Lunch guests sit in rows on the floor. When they’re done, cleaners prepare the room for the next group, who sit waiting just outside. The precise number of meals served per day at this Gurudwara Bangla Sahib is “thousands” but Mr. Singh says that at the Golden Temple in Punjab, it’s 1 lakh, or 100,000 lunches per day.

The temple also has a food bank for people who prefer to prepare their chapatis at home.

Salt:

And flour:

All of this is non-governmental and funded by donations from the Sikh community and other visitors.

I get slightly annoyed when I visit a mosque and have to cover my head while the men get to let their locks flow. At the Sikh temple, they practise equal opportunity head covering, and lend kerchiefs to anyone who arrives without a scarf or turban. Also, you have to take off your shoes and wash your feet before entering.

One young man was wearing this t-shirt.

There were plenty of devotees and some tourists, but Mr. Singh and I were the only visitors to the kitchen and lunch room. Sometimes I just don’t know how I get so lucky.

India, Day One

I was in an expansive frame of mind one late-summer weekday morning. Tobias and I were eating breakfast together at the Greenhorn Espresso Bar in the West End of Vancouver. The very fact that I had decided to accompany him on a trip to Vancouver, just for kicks, shows that I was relaxed and in the mood to accept potentialities.

“You should come with me to India,” he said.

“Okay!” I said.

Of course it wouldn’t be possible. Having to work every day in the office, take care of the children and the house, and lack of available funds would make it infeasible. But then, one by one, all those barriers came down. My mom said “Take every opportunity! I’ll take care of the kids.” My friend Chris agreed to “cover me” at work. And we found some super cheap flights.

So here we are. We arrived just as the country was reeling from the demonetization announcement and it is impossible to get cash. So we have no cash. Which means that today, while Toby is at the office working, I am in the bizarre position of being a guest at one of the swankiest hotels in town, but unable to afford a tuktuk to go sightseeing, or to a yoga class. If I want to eat, I can have a super-pricey lunch at the hotel, and put it on the room, or I can try to walk somewhere that will take a credit card, or I can have one of the PowerBars I packed. Ha!

Another ongoing crisis is the air quality situation. Today the AQI (Air Quality Index) is 298, considered “Very Unhealthy”. But recently it has been as high as 999, so I am counting my blessings. I brought a bunch of masks from Home Depot and it’s quite possible that I won’t need them.

What we did on the first day

 

We had a buffet breakfast at the hotel. The breakfast room is beautiful, and even though it’s in the middle of the city, when you look outside it feels like you are in the countryside. There is a gorgeous terrace and pool and lots of trees and birds. Out the window of our room I saw five species: pigeons, mynas, green parakeets, white-eyed buzzards, and house crows. Sitting in the breakfast room I felt like I was in a novel by Evelyn Waugh or Lawrence Durrell or Somerset Maugham . Everywhere you look, everything is pretty. The tile the carpets, the paintings, the tapestries, the plants, the staff: all gorgeous. The guests are fancy too. I definitely didn’t bring nice enough clothes to hang out here. I’m trying to blend in by wrapping my upper half in the lavender raw silk scarf that Anna brought back from Thailand for me when Sophia was a baby. It was lucky that I ironed it one day recently in a fit of Kon-Mariing activity, and even luckier that I thought to throw it in my luggage, even though I hardly ever wear it back home.

After breakfast we gathered our courage to go out into the city. Our plan was to walk to an ATM and get cash. We were only a few metres from the exit of the hotel grounds when a tuktuk driver approached us to offer a lift. He was not in the least deterred by our plea of cashlessness. “No problem for me, you pay later,” he said. We said we wanted to walk. He told us that his grandfather was from the same village as the grandfather of Canada’s defense minister. I was charmed but still wanted to walk. The air quality seemed okay and it was not too hot. Walking seemed like a good idea. So we declined.

We walked a couple blocks in the direction of the market where we hoped to find an ATM. A nicely dressed middle-aged man helped us cross the crowd and struck up a conversation. He said he is a professor of Hindi and his sister is a professor at the University of Toronto. He told us where to buy the best carpets and pashminas (not that we are in the market). While we were talking to him the tuktuk driver returned and said he would take us to the place where the man was saying we should go. We told him we just wanted an ATM. “I’ll take you to a quiet one,” he said. Well, we did need to find an ATM, so we got in the tuktuk. Toby had said that he would not take one. Too dangerous, he said. I said I wanted to walk. We were resolute that we would walk, and not take a tuktuk. This resolution only lasted five minutes.

We went to four or five ATMs which were all closed. The currency crisis means that many ATMs are out of cash here. So we didn’t find any. But we did end up at the fancy art gallery/souvenir shop place that the professor of Hindi recommended. (I know this reads like the professor of Hindi was a tout working with the tuktuk driver and “softening us up” to accept his services, but I don’t think so. I have seen a few touts in my life and I’m pretty sure this guy was just a man-on-the-street. I’d take good odds on him being legit.) We looked at lots of carpets. Toby was in his happy place.

We said that we needed to get the measurements of our hallway before we committed to buying one and this made the carpet seller very sad. Of course. We said we would come back but of course he doesn’t like this because he knows that in the meantime other carpet sellers will get a hold of us. Anyway, I do think we will go back and get one of the ones he showed us, and I am toughened to sad faces from carpet sellers.

After this Toby was feeling like going for lunch so the tuktuk driver, whose name was Mr. Singh, took us to Pindi, a restaurant recommended in the guidebook. Probably the neatest part of the day was when he parked the tuktuk near the restaurant and there were monkeys in the tree above us. “Monkeys tomorrow!” Mr. Singh said, because he had already decided that he was going to take me out the next day to the gardens. I didn’t have my zoom lens with me, otherwise I would have ignored him trying to hustle me away from the monkeys and gotten some nice shots. Although Mr. Singh is charming and kind and interesting and fun, he shares the characteristic with all tourism workers in developing countries of not wanting to take you to do free things like wildlife spotting, walking around parks, etc, because they can’t make any commissions off these activities. I don’t blame them, but it is the reason why I need to make sure to escape their clutches, so I can do less shopping, more things that I’m really interested in.

We had a pretty nice lunch of butter chicken, palak paneer and naan. I was getting a little annoyed at how our day was going and Toby said “Release yourself from the illusion that you are in control.” This was galling to me, but I tried to chill out and enjoy myself. Mr Singh was waiting for us after lunch. There was a snake charmer but I pretended to not be interested in him, since any amount of interest shown in him would result in an awkward situation because we had no money. If I had some, I would give him some and take a photo or video. But I didn’t and Mr. Singh knew this, and kind of hustled us away.

I figured we were stuck with Mr. Singh for the week. Worse things could happen. I liked that he told us that he would get something if he were the one to take us back to the shop when we bought the carpet. I already assumed that this was the case because a) I think it’s the practise  here and b) I saw some eye contact between him and the door man when he saw that I had a bag leaving the shop (I had bought a gift for my mom). But I just thought it was very transparent of him to tell us about it. After lunch we seemed to reach an accord. He would drop us at the Lodhi Gardens and after we were done there we would walk back to the hotel. Immediately upon entering the gardens I saw the cutest teeny little chipmunk and stopped to look at it. Mr. Singh called from outside the gate and directed us to turn right onto the path. He did not want me stopping to look at chipmunks. It was hilarious. Even now we were not free of him. Dear old Mr. Singh. So we hustled down the path until we were out of sight, and then we could relax and roam the gardens at will. The only problem I had now was Toby’s attention span. He likes hustling around, seeing everything, then leaving. I like wandering slowly, sitting down, staring at things for a long time, and staying until we get kicked out.

Here is one of our adorable fellow garden wanderers blowing a kiss. Yes, he is wearing eyeliner.

Here is his beautiful mom. Taking photos is the thing to do at the Lodhi gardens and this lady and another couple both asked to take photos with me and Tobias. I guess photos with foreigners is a thing here.

As you can see, I am outrageously underdressed for this country. “You look Indian!” several people said to me. “But we can tell you’re not, because you look so shabby,” was what they didn’t say.

The haze made the sun appear red, but the camera didn’t capture it. Delhiites play with balloons despite the poor air quality.

White-eyed buzzards are all over the park. They are huge and fascinating, but everyone ignores them. 

I wanted to stay long enough to see the super moon but Toby wanted to leave an hour before sunset. So we had a little super moon viewing party on the terrace of the hotel, with Kingfisher beers from the extortionate in-room bar.

And we went to bed at without dinner, at 8pm, because of our jetlag.

Video summary of the kids’ year

I continue to have so many things in my drafts folder and I continue to not finish them but keep starting new ones! So clearly I still have lots to process and lots to say.

We’ve been back in Canada nearly three months. So that means, based on last year’s pattern of moving every three months, that I should be getting ready to leave again. But we’ll be staying put for the time being.

This time last year we were saying goodbye to Amsterdam and preparing for the first of our moves. I was really scared of living in Turkey. To calm my fears I went to church and dim sum. It worked a little. The combination of being so terribly sad to leave Amsterdam and terribly afraid of what came next made for some volatile times. I remember how nervous we were about the exit inspection of our apartment, and then it all turned out fine. There were so many things like that over the year. I hope that I’ll remember to worry less in the future.

Anyway, I still haven’t finished a real blog entry, but I did make a video out of photos in my archives that have both kids in them.

Note: Sophia’s family nickname is Rara and Sebastian’s is Deetman, or Deets for short. Both names were his approximations of “Sophia” and “Sebastian” when he first started speaking.

Here’s the video.

Slow Tourism: More Notes on Traveling

This was written on May 7, 2014.

The Ireland edition of the Lonely Planet is written in a very different narrative voice than the Netherlands, Turkey, and Andalucia ones I’ve been reading this year. It’s written more in the way that Irish people actuallly talk. I wonder if this was an editorial choice, or just a result of the book being written by Irish people in their mother tongue and mine.

For example, on Marsh’s Library in Dublin, the writer concludes, “In short, it’s a bloody gorgeous place and you’d be mad not to visit.” I love this. It makes the act of reading the guidebook part of the experience of being in the country.

Yesterday we were in Cashel, on a tight schedule because Toby had to be back in Gortnacooheen for a conference call at 4pm. The main purpose of our visit was to see Beechmount Farm, the home of Cashel Blue cheese. After that, we had just enough time to make a “surgical strike” style of visit to the Rock of Cashel, called one of Ireland’s most important archeological sites.

But, you know, I kind of wanted to go for a pint.

One of the great luxuries of our trip if that we haven’t had to sacrifice seeing important sights for enjoying the place in a more authentic way. What we did sacrifice in order to have both these things, though, is seeing a great many places. The list of places we said no to is ten times the length of the list of places we said yes to.

I remember my friend Anna, who used to run a fantastic travel site for women called Vagabunda, talking, while still in her very early twenties, about how she was done with “sites” and when traveling, just liked walking around and going to cafes. I found her statement instructive and illuminating. I realized that I’d always leant that way as a traveler too. When my family members ask me what I did or saw during my four months in Ireland when I was 19, I realize that all I never went to any of the “sights”, only walked around and sat in pubs.

Writing about the Cliffs of Moher, the Lonely Planet Ireland writer said “This is check-off tourism big time”. When we went there a couple weeks ago, there were loads of foreign tourists doing exactly that: checking it off their list. “Where did you all come from?” I wondered. “I never see any of you when I’m out jogging or grocery shopping or at church or the community concert or even walking down the street!”

These cliffs are crawling with foreigners.

I remember the first time I experienced this shock of seeing other tourists like myself and being amazed that they all existed but that I’d never seen them before. It was at a Lonely Planet-recommended Italian restaurant in Moshi, Tanzania. We had been in Moshi for a week and hadn’t seen any tourists. Then we went for dinner at this Italian place and there were a dozen of the ! But how did they get there, since none of them were ever in the streets?

The answer is, of course, that they were only moving quickly through Moshi before or after going on safari, and weren’t walking in the streets (which is slow and sometimes dangerous) but taking cabs and tour buses. My feeling at the time was that they were missing 90% of Tanzania that way.

But the fact is, slow tourism is much less accessible than check-off tourism, not because it necessarily has to cost more, but because it’s difficult for people to arrange their work lives to allow it. If you get three weeks off a year, and you can afford a European vacation, it’s hard to justify spending that whole time in one city, when you could take a tour that shows you a dozen countries and all the “top sights”. You have to believe very strongly that slow tourism is going to be a richer experience in order to take this risk. Another way to do it is to find a way to take a longer time away from your job. For example,, you could quit your job, do your trip, then come back and get another job. Penelope Trunk advocates this. Or you could negotiate a leave of absence with your employer. I’ve known lots of people who have done both of these things. Both take some balls.

In a letter to his friend Howard Cushman in September of 1926, E.B. White wrote of a check-off tourism experience he had in Europe: “In Europe, we followed one of the tours, out of necessity, and made a grand hurried march through the usual points of interest – a dreamlike journey, leavving tiny bright memories: the glint of sun on the Avon, late in the day; the Cornish coast in the blue of morning; the melodious voice of a concierge in Berne, phoning; the way gravel feels under you feet; drinking beer in a garden in Koln, a hayfield above the Lake of Thun; hors d’oeeuvres for eight francs. You should have been along, tramping along.”

What I like about the description is the frank admission that none of the important memories of the trip are of important sights. In Koln, he doesn’t mention the Dom, but drinking a beer in a garden. In Paris (I assume) he prefers the hors d’oeuvres to the Eiffel Tower. Well, duh.

But I also like that he enjoyed these special moments while participating in the more-accessible check-list tourism. It’s not all bad.

So all these ideas were swirling in my mind as we parked the car in the town of Cashel and started the short walk to the Rock. The four members of our family will perhaps only ever have one hour in our entire lifetimes in the town of Cashel. Would we do the popular thing and see Rock of Cashel (quickly, without enough time to join an informative guided tour or leisurely read the interpretive signs)? Or would we go off the beaten track and just head to the pub for a pint, which made a lot more sense after our intensely interesting 2.5 hour visit to the cheesemaker’s?

I didn’t put the question to the family, but I agonized over it internally, and made the conventional choice.

Sebastian’s favourite part of the Rock of Cashel was rolling down the hill.

 

The famous, intact round tower of Cashel.

It was okay. I don’t know if it enriched our understanding of Irish history too much, but Sebastian did make the connection between the site and the story he knows from the film The Secret of Kells, so that was positive. I wonder what we would have found at the pub. It would have been funny to walk in and realize it was full of folks that had snuck away from their tour bus group for a bit of respite and a beer. Maybe it would have been depressing, full of unemployed locals drinking in the middle of Friday. We’ll never know. I’ll have to add it to the list of things not done. The dream list, which, for us slow tourists just keeps getting longer.

My first “notes on traveling” entry is here.

Stepping into the Stream

Returning to Canada and to work has been so much more straightforward, emotionally speaking, than I thought it would be. I’m having teeny little culture shocks but no sense of disappointment, ennui or depression, which is what I expected to feel. I did have a rough last few weeks in Ireland, trying to come to terms with the fact that I had to leave my beloved stone cottage, so maybe I pre-felt all the bad feelings I thought would come with returning home. 

I still feel relatively detached here, but that doesn’t feel like a negative for me. Talking this all over with my friend Natasha yesterday she said “Maybe ‘community’ was a crutch for you before”. She might be right. So the question is, will this new, seemingly healthy, feeling of detachment persist, or will I slowly slide into old patterns of thinking, old methods of coping? I guess I’ll see. 

 

Final Week of May

This was written on June 3rd.

On Friday night at bedtime (the last Friday in May) I said to Tobias “What a week! So many things have happened already!”

He said, “I think your definition of things happening has changed.”

I’m not so sure. I think it was an exciting week by any standard. A big factor was that after we returned home from Dublin on Monday afternoon, the weather was warm and dry for the rest of the month. That in itself was exciting. We are not rain-haters by any stretch, but May was very wet, and we’d had enough.

Sunday: First of all, there was that exciting baby magpie sighting in Dublin.

Monday: Sophia and I caught a 4am cab to the airport to drop off Natalie and then returned to our beds (in our AirBNB in Dublin) for a few hours. Then the whole family caught a bus back out to the airport to get another rental car (we rent the car in 30 day increments for insurance reasons). Then we drove home to Gortnacooheen and we were all so happy to be back in the quiet country.

Tuesday: Midmorning I headed out on a longish run and Tobias and Sebastian took Sophia to work at the farm where she’s been volunteering once a week for five weeks now. When they pulled up in the driveway, the farmer dashed to the car, and said “Follow me, quick!” They did, and thirty minutes later, they were watching a calf being born. I had hoped and prayed that Sophia would be able to witness a birth while she was at the farm, but having three members of the family witness it was beyond my hopes. I was so happy for them.

 Wednesday: Toby dropped off the kids and I at the forest park in town while he did some work. But before we even left our driveway, I made an exciting discovery of the natureish variety: there are great tits nesting in the stone wall in front of our house. This was surprising because I didn’t know that the stone wall contained recesses big enough for nesting and also because the opening this great tit family is using is very low to the ground. Only about 4 inches from the ground. This discovery precipitated several other things, in that pleasing learning-snowball-effect way.

We spent a few very pleasant hours in the forest. Five minutes in, Sophia spotted two fallow deer. We had previously only caught glimpses of their cute little white tails prancing away from us, so this was exciting. An interpretive sign said that there were 200 deer in the park, and after watching those 2 for a minute Sebastian said “Only 198 more to go!”

Soon after this, Sebastian spotted a pair of red dragonflies mating. It was fascinating to watch them fly around connected to each other, and to see how much their long bodies can bend. None of us had seen that before. We also saw blue dragonflies and grey dragonflies.

Then Sophia took us to a marshy area where she and Natalie had spotted a toad the week before. We looked and looked, and were about to give up when she spotted one. He was just the size to fit in the palm of your hand, so I encouraged the kids to try to catch him to get a better look. They are of the younger, more environmentally-conscious generation and were reluctant to interfere with the toad in any way. “Ah, he can take it!” I said. “Let’s grab him!”

So I caught him and each of us held him. He was adorable. We let him go after a few minutes, unharmed (I claim) or rattled (Sophia claims).

At this point we had been an hour in the park and travelled less than a kilometre. Sebastian said “It’s a good thing Daddy isn’t with us!” Tobias loves the outdoors, but gets the howling fantods when there is too much stopping during a walk or hike. This particular walk involved more stopping than going, and would not have been to his taste.

We moved to an area of the park called the Ladies Tea Garden, because it is where the ladies who lived in the nearby castle used to take their picnics. It is a charming beech grove surrounded by a tumbledown stone wall with ancient iron gates that no longer close properly. The beeches must be hundreds of years old and several are as wide as they are tall. One in particular looked appropriate for climbing and so the kids did so, for another half hour or so, while I spotted them from below and wandered around a bit. Having learned about tits nesting in stone walls an hour earlier, I now found another nest, and imagine I would have found many more in that wall if I had looked, since it was so old and holey. I watched two great tit parents bringing food to their brood inside (which I could not see, but could hear) for a while and after the kids came down from the tree, Sophia served us a picnic. It was probably while we were sitting on the ground eating that we got all the ticks.

We found the first ticks in the car on the way home, and while Toby and Sophia did the recycling at the recycling depot, I checked Sebastian’s head, neck and arms. Once home, we did a thorough inspection and removed more than thirty ticks from our bodies in total.

Previously, in our entire lives, Toby has found one tick on himself (back home, after a hike), I brushed a tick off Sebastian’s neck the day we hiked in Connemara, and I removed one (that had burrowed a bit) from Sophia’s leg two days after she and Natalie had been to the forest park the previous week. So that’s three ticks in total. Now, after one visit to the forest, we had 30 ticks. How on earth?

The next day, I found and removed two ticks from Sebastian’s head. So, you know, ticks. Whoa.

Anyway, we all agreed that the deer, the dragonflies, the toad, and the tree-climbing made the tick debacle worth it, but if we do return to that forest, we will avoid sitting on the ground.

Thursday: The morning was nothing special.

Later in the afternoon, Tobias and I were sitting in the car talking about financial things (when you’re traveling with kids for a year, you have to get a little creative about how to have conversations without them) when a teeny little tit-looking bird landed on the stone wall beside the car. It was so small. I mean, so small. Smaller than a wren. And it looked like a great tit but without the black cap and with more yellow feathers. “Omigosh I think it’s the baby from the wall nest!” I said, and got out of the car and started creeping towards it. It fluttered to the ground and stayed there, and Tobias and I got within a couple feet. Even if it wasn’t teeny tiny, this uncautious behaviour would have given it away as a baby. It was very like the baby magpie I saw a few days earlier: slightly skittish, but not skittish enough. After a couple minutes it flew away. I thought, at the time, that it was the baby from the nest in the stone wall that I had spotted the day before. But a quick look at the RSPB site indicates that this was a juvenile blue tit, not a great tit, and it’s a great tit family that is nesting in the stone wall in front.

Friday: I was waking Sophia up in the morning and I wandered out her doors to take a look at the trees and the birds. There was a blue tit hovering nearby.

I’d seen her before and wondered whether a nest I’d seen under the eaves was hers. But I’d discovered that the nest in question belonged to some house sparrows. So where was this blue tit headed? She had a green worm in her beak.

I waited, stock still, while she kept getting closer and closer to me. There were circular holes in the stone wall just outside Sophia’s bedroom door, and eventually, she dived into one of these.

 

Then I heard peeping. Her brood was happy with the green worm feast.

I went to get Sebastian. Meanwhile Sophia peeked right in the nest and saw the mother tit staring up at her. We all took a good look. Later, once she had headed out for more food, we managed to get a peek at the babies: five little yellow beaks that would open and squeak whenever we approached the nest. The sound of our voices was enough to trigger them to open their beaks for food. Aside from the bright yellow beaks, all we could see of them were some black feathers. We’ve had a lot of fun visiting the nest since then, though we try not to check it out too often, for fear of putting the parents on edge.

In the afternoon, I noticed that a t-shirt that was lying under the kitchen table was moving. A moment later the tiniest mouse in the world scurried out. Sophia was with me, and, after our success with toad-catching earlier in the week, we decided that we would try to catch it. So we got a cardboard box, and started to try. At one point it ran right under the arch of my right foot and hid there. So that just tells you how small it was.

We didn’t catch it, and it ran under the oven and behind the cupboards. Then it was time for me to go jogging.

Forty minutes later, I was back from my run and the kids had caught the mouse. Only it wasn’t a mouse. According to the Googs, it was a Eurasian Pygmy Shrew! Our research also told us that our new friend could eat up to 1.5 times his weight in insects per day, and would need about 250 beetles and wood lice to sustain him. If he didn’t eat for two hours he would begin to starve. Sebastian quickly put two and two together, and realized that if he were going to keep the shrew, he would have to spend all his waking moments gathering bugs to feed the shrew. In effect, he would have to become the shrew. It was obvious that we couldn’t keep him for long, so after feeding him some woodbugs and earwigs (it was hilarious to watch the way he hunted them down and gobbled them up) we let him our of the box and he scurried under a paving stone that I hadn’t even realized had an “under”. He was very, very small.

Saturday: We went to the farmer’s market where Sophia’s farmer boss sells his produce. She was excited to buy a jar of the chutney that he always serves at lunchtime. It is sold by one of his fellow stall-holders. Some kids like One Direction, some like chutney. Everyone gets what they want.

After that we went hiking in the Burren (Irish for “rocky place”) in County Clare.

And I call that a good week.

 

Thursday morning in the country

I was standing in the kitchen just after nine in the morning on May 29th when a herd of cattle came stampeding down the driveway. They had been driven off the road by a tractor and I fully expected to find a farmer chasing them. But no. They were alone. They were nine of them, and they looked a whole lot like the herd that often grazes in the outer field of the stone cottage property. These belong to our neighbours Mary and Patrick.

Okay, so maybe they are not “stampeding” in this shot, but they were, only moments before!

I, of course, yelled for everyone in the house to rush to the kitchen to see the spectacle. Once we had enjoyed it for a couple of moments, I went out to see what there was to do about all this. Where had the cattle come from? They hadn’t been grazing in our outer fields lately, and I knew that the field where they were grazing was several blocks away. Had they walked on the road all the way over from their field? It reminded me of pet dogs and cats that find their way home. I’d never herd (ha!) of cattle doing this.

But I mean, I haven’t heard of cattle doing much of anything. I don’t know about cattle, why are you asking me?

I thought I might herd them across the road into another field owned by Mary and Patrick, which had just been cut the day before. I got them off the driveway and onto the road but then they started ignoring me. I wanted to run down to Mary’s house to fetch her or Patrick, but I didn’t want the cattle in the road while I did so. So, when they refused to go into the field across the road, and instead headed back up our driveway, I just ran for it. Meanwhile, Tobias was in the house, trying to get Mary on the phone.

Then, weirdly, I couldn’t get anyone to answer the door at Mary and Patrick’s house. I knocked and called and no one came to the door. It was very odd because their dog, Max, was there, and wasn’t barking or anything, and their car was there. I knew they were both tired from cutting silage the day before but I still found it strange that they weren’t answering the door.

So I returned home to try again to herd them into the field on my own. By this time, eight of the nine cattle had made their way under the willow arch that was the entrance to the back garden, and were roaming in the garden (backyard) making big holes in the lawn and eating everything they could see.

One small black female, however, was still in the driveway, munching on the hedge. Rather than try to get her into the field, at this point I thought it made more sense to just herd her into he back garden along with her companeros. You see at this point in the proceedings I still believed in my ability to herd.

When I moved toward her, instead of going to the right, she went to the left, was confronted by the hedge and a stone wall, leaped neatly over it, with gazelle-like agility, crossed the road, and darted into the field I’d wanted to get them all into in the first place.

This was when I realized how poor an idea it had been to want to get the cattle into this field. The gate was disassembled, making it impossible to prevent her from moving back onto the road. Plus, the field entrance was right at a blind corner on the road, making it extra likely that she would get hit by a car coming around the corner. I stood at the entrance to the field, trying to figure out what to do. I decided to yell for help. It didn’t work, so I moved across the road, keeping my eye on the cow. I was yelling for Sophia to come out and help me when the cow wandered into the road, just as a jeep Cherokee cruised around the corner. Luckily, the jeep was not going too fast and the driver stopped, waited until I had shooed her back into the field, gave a sympathetic wave, and drove on.

Sophia appeared then, thank goodness, and we chased the black cow, now christened Rebel, deeper into the field away from the road. Then I left Sophia to guard her as I ran to check on the menfolk, who were staying in the house because Tobias was convinced the cattle were potentially dangerous. Having still no plan, and with the eight backyard cattle destroying the rosebushes and knocking over lawn furniture, I dashed back up to Mary’s where I found, thank heavens, Patrick on his way out the door. I explained the situation, which he processed in that cool as a cucumber farmer way, where you’re not sure that they’ve even heard you.

“There’s  bullocks in the back garden!”

“Are there? Which ones?”

“Yours.”

“Mine? (Looking doubtful, furrowing his substantial brows)are ye sure?”

“Well, no. But I think so.”

Patrick called for Max, his sheepdog, and we headed down the road, in no great hurry. I told him about Rebel on the way but we went to deal with the backyard crew first. Patrick admitted they were his and wondered aloud “How in the world did they get here?” I still don’t know the answer to that question.

Max had them rounded up and marching back down the driveway fairly quickly, though the garden took a beating in the process: more holes in the lawn, flower bushes half-demolished and a retaining wall on the side of the house smashed up. It wasn’t necessary to deal with Rebel because Patrick wanted to put all of them temporarily in the same field that she had fled to. Between Patrick, Max and I, we got them all herded into the field. My important job was to stand in the road as a human barrier so none of them would wander off. After that it was time to close the gate, although “assemble and close” is more accurate. Patrick lifted the heavy metal gate and asked me to fit it in the gate-holder thingy. I did it all wrong and he was correcting me but I was having trouble understanding him (his accent is much stronger than Mary’s) so it took a few moments to get it sorted and I felt like an idiot for a while. But it got done.

So that was that. Except it wasn’t. Later that afternoon, Mary came to the door to ask if the kids and I wanted to help with some more herding. Now it was time to get the herd down the road into the small field beside their house. By this time Tobias was feeling more relaxed about the safety issue after Patrick called the cattle “harmless” (I was pretty sure all the males in that herd were castrated which is why I was never worried to begin with) and let the kids go.

Eight of the cattle were moved fairly easily, though it did take all five of us and Max to make it happen. Catching Rebel again proved more difficult. First of all, we couldn’t find her. Then I spotted some black through the hedgerow and told Patrick “she’s in with the sheep!” She had broken through the fence between his field and his neighbour’s sheep field somehow and was munching on the sheep’s grass. The sheep weren’t bothered. Patrick was doubtful again.

“She’s not there.”

“Yes she is. Look!”

He stood up on his tiptoes and peeked over the hedgerow. She was only a couple metres from us but the hedgerow was so tall and thick it really was difficult to see her.

“So she is.”

It took another fifteen minutes for Patrick and Max and get Rebel out of the sheep’s field and moving down the road. But when she did start moving, she did it fast. I was in flip-flops and was running ahead of her to herd her into the side field by their house. Mary was laughing and Rebel was running very fast. It was a good thing that I’d been doing so much jogging because I really needed my stamina to stay ahead of her. I managed to get her into the yard but had to wait for more help to get her in the field with the others and with the gate shut. This second herding adventure lasted about half an hour, but it was even more fun than the morning session because the kids were involved and got to be geniunely helpful to Mary and Patrick.

When it was over we felt like we’d earned some rural cred. We could herd cattle now. How hard could the rest of the farming life be?

Stuff

We moved five times between July 1, 2013 and July 1, 2014. It got easier each time we did it, but it never got easy. What made it hard was a combination of the emotional wrench of leaving a place we’d loved and the stress of all our stuff. I’ve never felt so burdened by things as I did this year, and yet I also never managed to really pare down the amount of things we had. We travelled with about 140 kilos of stuff, plus a guitar.

I was always anxious about moving from place to place with all these things. We spent about 120 euro shipping things home after three months in Amsterdam, but the suitcases were all still full when we moved to Izmir. In mid-December in Turkey, we bought some carpets and shipped some clothes home in the boxes with the carpets. I chose clothes that I didn’t think we’d need in Spain, but then later we did need them, because Seville had some cold days in January and February. And then Ireland was cold most of the time and we really missed our warm clothes.

Leaving Izmir for our Christmas week in Istanbul was funny because I had to pack all the wrapped gifts in my luggage. Luckily that flight had a 28 kilo allowance. When we left Istanbul for Paris on December 27th, the gifts had been given and were in the luggage of their rightful owners. But we also got slightly heavier from the shopping we did in Istanbul.

One of the lowlights of the year was when we were checking in for our flight from Paris to Seville on January 4th. Tobias hadn’t read the fine print on the plane tickets – it was an airline we’d never used before and won’t likely use again – and it turned out that our checked luggage allowance was 0 kilos per person. If we had paid in advance for extra kilos we could have paid only around 100 euro but since we didn’t, it was going to be 400 euro. The guy at the check-in desk was very apologetic and even took 100 euro off the  bill, but said there was nothing more he could do. Tobias was so sad. I was already grumpy when we arrived because we had taken the metro and taking the Paris metro for two trains and then the RER to Orly with 140 kilos of luggage and 4 people is really really not fun. Actually I was much grumpier about the metro travel I’d just endured than the 300 euro luggage fee.

Then our plane was two hours late leaving Paris and we were two hours late meeting our new landlords. That was a really bad travel day.

(Around midnight we all left our apartment in Seville in search of food – we hadn’t eaten properly since leaving our flat in Montmartre that morning – and we found the Alameda – an awesome plaza near our house that had a Christmas festival – and a pizza place and we realized that we’d arrived in a completely enchanting and cool city and all was well. So it always works out in the end with our voluminous and heavy belongings but it can be so nervewracking along the way.)

We left Ireland on June 22 and flew to Iceland, where we stayed six nights. Then we flew to Seattle on June 28th. Both our Dublin -> Reykjavik and our Reykjavik -> Seattle flights had smaller luggage allowances than the other flights we’ve taken this year: 23 kilos instead of 25. So the final week in Ireland was made more stressful by our efforts to reduce our load down to 23 kilos per checked piece. Tobias was very reluctant to ship using the post office because of our austerity measures. We could have shipped 15 kilos for 76 euros. I would have just gone for it to reduce stress but he was looking to scrimp any place we could because we were anticipating that Iceland was going to be very expensive, which it was.

In the end, we didn’t get down to 23. The kids were at about 21 and Tobias and I were at about 25 so theoretically we should have been able to repack and move things around in order to get the right weights. We’d had to do this when flying from Madrid to Dublin so we had some experience with it. I also picked out a few things that I felt I could part with, if absolutely necessary. So if it came down to it, I could just start tossing things in the bin.

Then, in the end, it didn’t matter at all. Tobias and I were both between 25 and 26 and the kids were between 21 and 22 and the airline didn’t care. So it was a lot of stress for nothing.

When we got out of the taxi at our friends’ house in Seattle, they were surprised by how little we had. “What?” I said, incredulous. “We have SO MUCH STUFF.”

“I can’t believe you got by on so little for a YEAR,” our friend said. I realized then that these friends were the first people in a year who had looked at all our stuff with the understanding that we were on a year-long trip. Anybody else who would have seen the four of us trudging down the street, laden with backpacks and laptop bags, stuffed animals and a guitar and pushing gigantic broken pieces of luggage would have assumed we were normal tourists on a normal vacation and that was just lacked savvy in bringing so much junk. Having our friends be actually impressed by how lightweight we were was almost surreal, because I guess I just hadn’t seen things that way the entire time. I’d always felt oppressed by our stuff and like we were somehow dysfunctional because we could solve this problem and be like my friend Brian who ended up with just 11 kilos on his Europe-Asia-Australia year-long trip. I wished then that I’d given myself permission to be okay with our stuff a lot earlier.

With that said, I’ve been on a culling rampage since we moved back into our house on July 1st. Our 140 kilos from the past year is, obviously, just a drop in the bucket of the huge number of things we actually own in the world. And I really want to reduce the load. When we packed, in the second half of June 2013, I was in a pretty fragile emotional state. I didn’t want to go on the trip at all and I hated moving and was very attached to nearly every single broken toy and scrap of paper we owned. So I threw out very little. I even labelled boxes “Random Junk” and just taped them up rather than actually dealing with it.

But now, I felt pretty detached from most of our things. I have gotten rid of books, toys, clothes and many kitchen things in the last week, and there’s more to come. My neighbour down the street retired in January and his big project the first year of his retirement is to clean out his garage. I don’t want to wait until I retire to recognize that we live with too many things.

We are home

….but I am not stopping working on this blog. I have about a dozen “sum-up” entries in my drafts folders and a lot of processing still to do. So I will keep on writing until it’s all out. Maybe a year 🙂

Luck of the Irish

One of the first things I noticed when we arrived in Ireland was that every little town had its own betting shop. It’s the horses and the football, mostly. During the World Cup, the punters are very busy indeed.

So fine, sports betting is not a very interesting cultural phenomenon.

I was surprised, however, to hear that the writing group that I joined had taken bets on which poets would win the prizes at a poetry festival they had gone to. Poetry betting! Now that was something new to me.

Last week Tobias and I went to our first ever Table Quiz at the local pub. We entered expecting that we were pretty clever and would win the thing or else place fairly high. In the event, we were only mediocre, tied for 8th or 9th place or something out of 19 tables. And that showing was only because our neighbour, Padraig, turned out to be a trivia genius. You wouldn’t think a man who spends his days with cows could know all the things he knows, but he does.

So we weren’t terribly lucky in the quiz, but in the raffle afterwards, Padraig won two separate prizes! There were fifteen prizes, 100 people buying tickets, and no one else won two prizes. I went up to fetch the prizes for him so everyone assumed I was the lucky one, but no.

Then, just now, as I was typing up my last day lament, Padraig’s wife Mary, our best friend of the year, dropped by with something for Sophia: 50 euros from a 10 euro raffle that Sophia had entered in aid of the local nursing home. Sophia spent her last farthing on a set of water colour paints about a month ago, so this was a very pleasant surprise indeed. It is the largest amount that the nursing home raffle gives out.

Now what do you say to that?