Correction

It was brought to my attention that the links I am posting do not work. I have fixed the problem, at least in the most recent entry. If older links have issues, just Google it! I'll make sure this doesn't happen again.

We're back from a day in Kinsale, I have some good photographs to post. Probably will happen tonight or tomorrow night. Keep checking in!

Living the Grind

All of the sudden, I have work every day. I've only had one full eight-hour day, but the usual six-hour stints are more than enough. We were out late last night at a very cool place called The Crane Lane (it also houses a burlesque theatre––last night's show was "Adult Panto-Mimes"), and I was again made aware of the reputation of my employer. Upon telling folks were I work during a normal conversation, the usual reaction is a hearty laugh. One fellow told me it's "[blanking] hilarious!" that I work at Guiney's, after which he told me to be careful to not get "beat up" while on the job. But he works for the Irish revenue authority, so I can at least be grateful that I'm not the dreaded tax man.

To be honest, Guiney's is not my ideal job, even as far as part-time gigs in a foreign country go. I have continued to look for work, but the market seems more desolate than ever. Over the past week the best source for job opportunities, the internet, has become completely barren. I might become much more concerned about this in a few weeks' time, as my job is still officially temporary for the Christmas season. Because of the Paris trip we have next week I have only five more work days before the holiday.

The harsh realities of the working world aside, we are still having fun. The other night Katherine and I went for a long walk through the city's north side, a journey that produced some photographs (as promised):



This picture features one of the minor threads in Éire Apparent: St. Finbarre's Cathedral. You can just see the twin spires in this photograph. The church absolutely dwarfs the rest of the city, and is easily the dominant landmark (especially at night).



Here is some of the blight that you see in certain sections, although this ancient doorway was pretty camera-friendly. My camera takes pretty grainy pictures in low-light situations, my apologies. I'm not willing to buy another one on Guiney's wages.

More blight. And how about a picture that speaks volumes! This is all that hardcore Irish Republicans can muster anymore, a bill posted on a run-down hovel. The free-state Irish population cares little for reunification these days. The issue is hardly on the minds of the younger population at all, from what I gather. But then again, maybe it is and they don't voice their opinions in the presence of mixed company. The Irish, self-admittedly, tend to be polite to a fault.

Lastly: I always keep an eye out for Maryland connections in Ireland. This is not a conscious effort, but just the basic instinct to notice the things that are familiar. I don't experience too many Maryland "hits"; probably 90 percent of the people I have met here have (a) never heard of Maryland, or (b) haven't the slightest idea where it is. The best I can do is say, "It's next to Washington, D.C."

But inexplicably, the Old Line State has made one indelible impression on the Irish culinary landscape. I'm talking about Chicken Maryland, of course. Or Maryland Fried Chicken, or whatever you want to call it. This stuff is a fixture at Cork's famous English Market:


Strange, since most Americans (most Marylanders?) have never had it, or even heard of it. Look it up. According to an old recipe I've seen, Maryland Fried Chicken should be served with a gravy topping. I presume this is so the deep-fried poultry easily slides down the esophagus, among other healthy bonuses. Alas, the Irish don't seem to have the gravy. Amateurs.

The Golfer and the Scobe

Katherine and I managed to find retail jobs catering to the opposite extremes of Cork society, which has made for interesting conversation and armchair sociology. Far more so than in the United States, playing golf in Ireland is a very class-conscious affair. Sure, there are snoody golfers on American courses, especially at the more expensive clubs. But there are also countless public links full of beer-guzzling Joes hacking divots the size of mortar impacts. Alas, I have witnessed the latter half much more so than the former.

In Ireland, if you golf it means that you're rich. Or, at the very least, you want people to think you're rich. During my visits to Katherine's workplace it isn't too hard to see what stratum of people she's dealing with: well-dressed, well-educated folks (it's easy to tell the education level by the accent, or lack thereof). And some of them are willing to shell out a few hundred euro for golf attire in the middle of a nasty recession. Katherine's customers are also all Irish...for the significance of this, read on.

My employer, Guiney's, is a different story. There we cater to the most modest of shoppers, who are desperately looking for deals. On my first day a woman asked me about winter coats, one of which she wanted to buy for her construction worker husband. Relying on my own knowledge of construction attire, I found her a good candidate for €29. Her response? "That's a bit expensive, don't you think?"

Guiney's customers are a good cross-section of the new immigration to Ireland, as are the employees. I work with Slovaks and Poles, and I have only met about 20 percent of the workers. Of the dozen or more customers who ask me for help during the day, probably three to four are Slavic, one or two are African, one is Indian, and the rest are Irish. And the Irish are sometimes the hardest to understand––this is where I run into the real Cork accent that everyone grumbles about. But it's fine because half of the time they don't understand me.

Why golf is so class-biased I'm not entirely certain. The easy answer is tempting: it's because of the English. They certainly exported a class system along with settlers. In a similar vein is hunting: here, and in Britain, hunting is a very elitist activity, dating back to when the forests and the game therein were property of the barons and the King. It's funny how utterly opposite the situation is in America. Please speak up if you disagree, but for the most part hunting is regarded as a poor rural activity.

Long story short: Katherine keeps track of seventy-euro golf jackets, and I arrange brooms that are worth €1.50 each. But we earn about the same, so I'm not complaining.

****

I'm painfully aware that I haven't been posting many photos recently. The fact that it has been raining constantly is partially to blame, as is the work schedule. We have tentative plans to journey out to Kinsale or somewhere this weekend, I'll be sure to have a full photographic record. But for now, I will add to the visual appeal of this entry with an older picture I took in Killarney––the interior of St. Mary's Cathedral, which took about seventy years to build:

Michael Guiney's

Well, the unlikely happened––I got a job. It's at a bargain retailer called Guiney's. And I mean bargain retailer. This place makes K-mart look like Nordstrom. But hey, I am finally gaining that valuable, and elusive, retail experience. The path before me is paved with gold.

Not too much rejoicing is in order. My employment is a "trial period," according to the manager, a trial period that ends with the Christmas season. Until that point I'm working around twenty hours a week. My first day's duties included reorganizing the clothing in the women's section. Picking up loose articles from the ground, putting articles back where they belong, etc. About an hour into this I had, I admit, a bit of a existential crisis. Five years of higher education and I'm arranging thermal underwear? Humiliation began to creep its way into my consciousness.

But that's all just pride, and I've put it behind me. Guiney's is not a career path for me, it's a little extra money before Christmas. And as a friend of ours said, having a Master's and working at Guiney's is better than having a Master's and not working at all. I'm getting to know some of my Polish co-workers who have very tough-to-pronounce names, and, thank goodness, they got me out of the women's section. It'll all be okay. Paris is only a week away.

Have You Ever Seen the Rain Coming Down on a Sunny Day?

As I am sure you all and the rest of the world wide web noticed, I took the weekend off to lick my wounds from another emasculating week of job searching. I also dried my socks, which takes at least forty-eight hours since Cork's atmosphere is at a constant 98 percent humidity. It reminds me of a section of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, which rings truer than I ever expected:

From October to April the walls of Limerick [or Cork!] glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried: tweed and woolen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations. In pubs, steam rose from damp bodies and garments.... (12)

Thank God Ireland now has electricity!

The weather is playing with me. I really feel this way. Every morning for the past week I wake up, throw aside the curtains and embrace a perfectly clear sky. "It's going to be a nice day!," I think to myself. I shower, eat, doddle around a little bit, and eventually leave my building to go conquer the day (which, admittedly, is usually around 11 a.m.). By this time it is usually dark, windy, and raining. All one can really do in these conditions is drink tea. Indeed, I will never make fun of the British and Irish tea habit again. The fact is the weather absolutely requires it. (I will continue to ridicule the "tea time," which is asking for it).

While I'm on the topic of perplexing phenomena, a few words on systems of measurement. The Irish have no idea which system they're on. For all intents and purposes, both English and Metric are official. One trend I have noticed, for example, is that most measurements of distance, area, or speed are expressed in metric. Speed limit signs are in km/h, apartments are advertised in square meters, and the nearest market is "oh, fifty or so meters up the hill." But most measurements of height and weight, especially when described verbally, are in English. So-and-so is six-foot-one, I went on a diet and lost forty-three pounds, etc. Most of the personal scales are in stones! (For the Americans: one stone equals fourteen pounds. I weigh twelve and one-quarter stones, how about you? Break out a calculator and have fun with it). And at open-air markets, about half of the prices you see are "per pound," the other half "per kilogram." At the very least, these circumstance can make one fluent in metric pretty quickly.

But every culture has some peculiarities. Walking around the city last night––Sunday night––I saw something that I think I admire: most of the pubs were not only open, there were full.

Oh, Tannenbaum; or, Maryland, My Maryland

I now have to adjust to Katherine going off to work every day. It's only for four or five hours at a time, but it's four or five hours when I have nothing to do and no one to talk to. As I write it is raining outside, so walking around and desperately looking for new "help wanted" signs is not too attractive.

The internet is, of course, the main way to apply for jobs these days, even in Ireland. Despite work being as rare as hen's teeth, folks try to give helpful advice. My personal favorite (and this has happened at least five times) is when an Irish person says, "You know, you should really have a look at IrishJobs.ie, they have a lot of work postings." This is like saying to anyone with a computer, "You're trying to search for something on the internet? You should try Google.com, they have a decent search engine." But it's the thought that counts.

My drill is to scan the new postings every day, with the hope that I'll find something that doesn't require fluency in Dutch or Swedish or extensive experience in the lady's fashion industry. Speaking of the lady's fashion industry, in our wanderings a few nights ago we came across a storefront with a help-wanted sign for part-time seasonal retail work. I figured "What the hell?, I'll go in tomorrow to see if they'll hire me." I entered the store the next day only to realize that they sell only women's knitwear, and that I was the only male out of about fifteen people in the room. I turned around and left. This pretty much sums up the reality of retail work in Cork. And it also might help explain why, in the middle of the workday, the pubs are busy serving an all-male crowd of patrons.

The job descriptions should include caveats such as "extensive retail [or serving, or bartending] experience required. Unless you're a cute little thing, in which case all training will be provided."

Good Brews

To celebrate Katherine's new job we went out and spent all of the money she earned on her first day. The first stop was the Bierhaus, which has the largest beer selection in the city. I had a bottle of "Chimay Blue," a dark Belgian porter that really packs a punch. Nine percent alcohol content...goes straight to your head and is very tasty. We then stumbled to the Franciscan Well, Cork's justly famous microbrewery.

Finally, we have decorated our Christmas tree. As you all know, the tree itself was criminally cheap. It definitely doesn't meet the State of California's flame retardant standards. And Katherine came up with another brilliant idea to keep costs down: decorate the trees with colorful paper gift tags, which come in packs of twenty for €1. Throw on a fifteen-meter string of lights (€6), and we're in business:

As you can see, the tree is accented by the exquisitely ugly rose picture. We are lucky enough to have a copy of that photography in every one of our rooms. And each copy is listed as inventory in our lease, so we can't even do future tenants a favor and destroy them.

Anyway, other than Éire Apparent being an obvious cure for my downtime, I have ideas for how to stay busy. I might do some volunteer work for the History Department at University College Cork. I might do what I do best and find some archives and see if there's anything interesting to write about. And, to be sure, I'll stay optimistic that something paid will turn up.

A Breakthrough

As you can surmise from my previous entries, Katherine and I have been a little pessimistic about finding work. But rather than being down about it, we think we should take advantage of all of the time on our hands and do some traveling. So two nights ago we booked five nights in Paris for December 16–21. Capitalizing on an idea I gained from the Frugal Traveler, we looked into vacant apartments on Craigslist.org. Worked like a charm: we will be staying in a fully furnished studio within a few minutes' walk from the Louvre for €50 a night––cheaper than most of the hostels.

What happens right after we finalize this journey? Katherine lands a retail job with a golf store. Very luckily, her new boss is willing to work around the trip. This position might be our saving grace, at least for our goal of staying in Europe for a year.

In other news, I bought the last €15 fake Christmas tree in Cork City today. Dunne's had them, six-foot, fairly realistic trees for only fifteen quid. I bought the floor model. I don't know how it was only €15, it's probably extremely flammable or gives off toxic fumes. Luckily our windows are as drafty as screen doors, shouldn't be too dangerous.

Last but not least, we found the best pan-handler in all of Ireland:


This guy––unlike the other street performers in the city––has real talent. I mean, look at those dancing figurines! Elvis actually hit the cymbal! The other accordion players of the city are endlessly annoying. In particular, the man who plays "Jingle Bells" in a constant loop for sixteen hours a day (I wish I was exaggerating). But not this fellow, with his band members Marilyn and Elvis. We walked past him a half-hour later, and he was rosining up a bow to play a fiddle. That's impressive!