Ireland!

I'm bringing back the blog, and Dan on Five Continents, because, my travel bug unsatiated, I've traveled to Ireland for spring break, to visit a friend, travel around with a few others, and generally take advantage of an empty two week block in my schedule to see a new part of the world. (I'm learning most of one's life, one isn't given such two-week empty blocks of time, and I want to make the most of it.) I've been in Ireland four days now, in Dublin and Galway, and am having a lovely time.  We--myself, and my friends Alix and Ben, fellow Wesleyanites--left with an amazingly open itinerary, and have been planning as we go.  It seems to be working really well.

We began in Dublin, which is a lovely little city, though it had a bit of, in Ben's phrase, a 'generic European capital' feel to it.  It's sort of strange that that is really a thing, but the combination of cobblestones, cathedrals, bridges over an old shipping channel, lots of tourists and lots of designer stores somewhat conspired against the city's individuality.  We certainly enjoyed out time in the city, a lovely place.  But, particularly coming from living and studying in some cities which look really different (Ben in Katmandu, Alix in Nairobi, and myself everywhere else described in this blog) last semester, Dublin was surprising.  I was looking for the austerity and inward-focus of Dubliners, and found it only tucked between tourist bars, and bright boutiques.  It is there, though. It should be noted that the city is putting on some bright, European, extra-developed face for tourists (like, say, Cape Town).  Rather (in my somewhat uninformed conclusion), this is just what a city looks like after spending a decade or so as the capital of Europe's fastest growing economy.

Anyway, we headed out from Dublin yesterday, to Galway, a smaller city on the west coast.  The trip across was itself lovely, passing through a smattering of little villages and lots of sheep fields.  Galway is a cute town, with a packed downtown, with a few blocks of touristy stores and a ton of students, who, yesterday, were all around us in the central square hanging out, as we did rather the same.

Today we went on a tour around the countryside, through a somewhat geologically unique area (I'm told), a landsacep of cows, stonewalls, and the ruins of castles and abbeys, many of them leftover from the 17th century English attack on Ireland.  We ended at some spectacular cliffs, which looked dropped down hundres of feet from the pastures above to the Atlantic below.

Dublin

Ben and Alix, Dublin

I guess I can't really complain about a beautiful city at night

Dublin

Galway

outside Galway

Cliffs of Moher

Home

I'm home safe after quite a journey.  All of you who live in North America (especially those of you around my corner of North America), I hope to see you soon.

Homeward bound

I leave Buenos Aires tonight, and (if I get lucky and dodge seasonal northern-hemisphere weather) I'll be home on Sunday afternoon.  It's a bittersweet thing.

First, I'm really, really happy to be going home, I'm really looking forward to being with my family, and many of my friends, being in a place I don't have to figure out and get used to, not living out of a suitcase, settling in, curling up in front of the fire and watching the snow, and all sorts of things that home means, that one thinks of especially fondly when so far from home for so long.

It's sad to have this trip come to an end, though.  This has been absolutely one of the most incredible string of experiences of my life.  And, I've experienced it all with a great group of people, a group I've bonded with more than ever over the last weeks, as we've spent time, for ourselves and for the end of our classes, thinking over where we've been, the things we've seen and done, and what they mean to us, our lives, our beliefs, and our place in the world.  These are very broad categories.  I hope to keep this blog going for at least a little while once I'm home and have a little more processing time to keeping writing about these very powerful experiences and what they've taught me.

For now, I just want to say that I can't wait to be home but I will miss this program and everyone on it tremendously

Photos

Some here, more on Flickr.



These trees are in bloom all over Buenos Aires. It's lovely.



There were approximately seven verdurias (produce shops) within a two block radius of the apartment I was living in.  It made cooking more fun and more delicious.



I spent last weekend enjoying my last bit of time in the southern hemishphere summer at the beach.

Where's Dan?: Some updates

The last few weeks in Buenos Aires have been busy (like really all weeks of this trip), and successful.  Today I turned in my last two assignments of the semester (my individual comparative analysis project--if you're really curious about neoliberal urban development, give a shout, otherwise I won't bore you here), so now I'm on something of a blissful, and I imagine quick glide to the finish in a week and a half.

The pace of the program has gotten familiar, and really, we've gotten good at handling it.  It think in that I missed how significant our experiences were, or just didn't have time to share them with you, my faithful blog readers.

Last week was spent on a small-group case study of the Puerto Madero redevelopment project, which you could envisions strikingly well by just imagining your typical port redevelopment project.  The once-active port, literally two blocks from the city center, had sat underused for fifty years after progress had built a much better port a few miles upstream.  Then, the government spun off the Corporación Antigua Puerto Madero, which has built up the area into some scenic promenades, restaurants in converted warehouses, high-rise apartment towers, and corporate headquarters, and helped strengthen downtown in the process.  It was a hard project to build a strong opinion about.  On the one hand, it has been extremely successful at turning what was abandoned space into something valuable for the city, and its intention, despite its observed exclusivity, is to join and serve the social fabric of the city.  On the other hand, most porteños (Buenos Aires residents) seem to despise the area as new and ugly, see it as a hang out only for tourists, and it seemed to us, on first impression, an area devoid of the cultural livelihood found in other neighborhoods of the city.  Developments are tricky things: it's hard to make them serve thir cities, and even harder to get residents to accept a new neighborhood in an old city.

I spent most of this weekend working on my final project (the rainy weather helped encourage me), but I also had my first night in Buenos Aires where I was out until morning.  It's an odd sight coming out of a club and finding it light outside, and odder still to see everyone still sitting at cafe tables outside bars, still traipsing between clubs in very club attire, etc., when it's light out, and to see people headed to work and people headed home for the night riding the same buses.

A friend asked me if I'm still loving Buenos Aires as much as I was.  I'd pretty much say yes, with the caveat that I've learned how difficult is to really fit in here.  In my first days, I was thrilled to be in a city where I could walk around by myself and feel like I was blending in with all the other people walking on the sidewalk.  Spending more time here, it's become obvious that I give my self away as both an American and someone not very capable in castillano porteño (Buenos Aires Spanish) as soon as I open my mouth, which has made really getting to know people difficult.  I think it has something to do with the way porteños interact with foreigners, and probably each other.  Friends of mine who have been here studying for much longer still say they have few, if any, close porteño friends.

Those are my updates for now.  I'll try to get some new pictures up, too, but I can't promise they'll make it before I get home.

Noche de los Museos

Last Satrurday night was the annual "Noche de los Museos" (Night of the Museums) in Buenos Aires, a night when all the museums in the city--some 150--stay open until two in the morning.  At around midnight I met some friends at the MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericana Buenos Aires/Latin American Art Museum, Buenos Aires), and was stunned to find a line outside waiting to get in, and more stunned when I started following the line toward the end, and followed it to the end of the block, turned the corne, all the way down the next block, and around the corner again. We waited half an hour to get in, to see a great collection of Latin American modern art and a special Andy Warhol exhibit, and for the experience of being in an art museum with a crowd of people at two in the morning.  It was a great representation of porteños (as residents of Buenos Aires, a port city, are called). 

The city is wonderfully literate and cultural.  On my first day here I saw leather-bound copies of Dickens, in translation, being sold from a news stand.  Walking down Aveninida Corrientes, (Buenos Aires´ Broadway; off-beat plays here are refered to as off-Corrientes) and being papered with flyers for theater openings, one friend of mine commented on how nice it is not having to go and find these sort of things, as he´s struggled to do in other cities.

And, the city really likes to stay up late.  Dinner is never before 8:30, everyone´s advice has been not to go out to clubs before 3am, and one of our program coordinators, a porteña, said it doesn´t even qualify as a late night unless you stop for breakfast on your way home to bed.

African Safari -and- my new favorite city

We had a week of vacation last week, which was badly needed after a few furiously busy weeks of program (including, as a group, designing, conducting, compiling, analyzing and presenting a social research project on residents’ perceptions of gentrification in their neighborhoods, all in two-and-a-half days, followed by three papers due the next week).  Somewhat as a result of my busyness, however, I hadn’t really made plans for the break.  I had a fantastic time winging it, though.  I spent the first part of the week staying with IHP friends in an incredible vacation house they rented just beyond the dunes on Cape Point, staring out across the Atlantic Ocean and at the back of Table Mountain. 



I headed back into town midweek, and, still somewhat at a loss, wandered in to a travel agency.  I took the advice the guy gave me: “You’re in Africa.  You should see animals.”  So the next day, early in the morning, I got on a bus for a twelve hour ride to Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, and spent the whole next day on a safari—first a trip around Addo Elephant National Park, then a ride around in a Land Rover on a private game reserve abutting the park.  It was an incredible day.  I saw elephants hanging out around a watering hole, zebras, buffalo, antelope, and giraffes grazing, a couple of rhinos that came within a few inches of our jeep, and a family of lions battle a warthog hiding in its hole.  Yes, the safari is sort of hokey, and ye, a game reserve in Eastern Cape is not the same as the wilds of east Africa, but it was still an incredible sight to see so many wild animals usually only seen in zoos and National Geographics.

Then it was time to leave South Africa, which wasn’t really so bad because it means coming to pretty much my new favorite city in the world (a decision I made after about three house here): Buenos Aires.  Compared to everywhere else I’ve been on this trip, Buenos Aires really feels like what I expect a (really great) city to feel like.  The central city is apartment buildings along tree-lined avenues, there’s a lovely downtown which strikes a nice balance between the commercial-ness of midtown Manhattan and the architectural and social character of Paris or Madrid.



 And the city is so active.  We moved into our homestay this evening (I’m living with a really awesome guy, an older advertising consultant and tango instructor), and got a tour around the neighborhood, which was full of activity at 10pm on a Monday night.  It’s a nice contrast to Cape Town, where the locals were sequestered in their homes by sundown.  The past few days have had me almost doubting not coming to Buenos Aires for the whole semester, and trying to think of ways to live here in the future.  Don’t worry, when I do, you’re all invited to visit.