A little perspective please

The thing about being an Australian in Ireland is that it throws your country's heritage into rather harsh perspective - and by heritage, I should clarify that I'm talking about my personal heritage, not that of the country as a whole; I know the land was around and inhabited long before my ancestors even thought of setting foot there, but it's harder to grasp that heritage than it is for me to keep track of my own. To all intents and purposes, Australia as a country as has been around for little - very little - over a century. Ireland, on the other hand, had already been conquered and freed more times than I care to think about before the English knew the great south land existed.

A short walk from Killarney, where I'm based at the moment, are places that it's hard to believe, from my limited perspective, how old they are, buildings of so little note that often they have been left to moulder in some farmer's paddock with the government paying little of no attention to them - my theory is because there are so many. The fields are littered with ruins and must make life rather hard for the farmers. As near as I can tell, there are no laws or obligations on the farmers to keep them up. The only thing that stops some of them from being destroyed entirely is the combination expense it wuld occassion to move the pile of rubble and the superstitions that have arisen over the years that some of these piles are relics of the time when the faerie walked the irish soil.

Other times, the government has their attention called to a ruin and does it up in specatcular style. Ross Castle, for example, was bought by a consortium of americans who intended to turn it into a holiday resort. One of them had an attack of conscience, however, and somehow managed to get the irish government to pay for the repairs before he handed the ownership of the castle - and the 16,000 acres of land attached to it - back to the irish people. Now it forms one of the centrepieces of Killarney National Park. Tourists can now visit the 15th Century tower house and see what life would have been like for the chieftain and his family, as well as their servants - people who slept 15 to a room that these days would be comdemned as too poky, and turned into a study.

The information the guides can offer also makes you think. Life expectancy back in the 15th and 16th centuries for the Irish was not great. Estimates put it at 27-35. I scape into that age bracket now. Think of what those people would have lived through in that time, and again that perspective I was talking about before changes. Harsh life, wars, raids, famine, disease, child rearing...all within the time it wook me to grow up, get an education and barely get started on my life. Having seen the way they lived, however - and I'm talking about the priveleged upper classes here, as well - it makes you wonder what we're waiting for half the time. That and the knowledge that if I'd been born 500 years earlier, I'd probably be a grandmother! With the amount that they crammed into such a short time frame, the miracle is that they lived that long in the first place and didn't just drop dead of exhaustion, not to mention cold, given that they still hadnt discovered windows. Makes you kind of glad to be a twenty frist century kind of girl, really.

The times they are a changing

There's nothing like sitting all day every day in the common room of a hostelpretending to be working for finely tuning your ability to avoid something. In my personalcase, I'm trying to avoid the boredom of putting together a database for a London company.It might as well be a detailed spreadsheet of all the information on a series of projects being undertaken by the company. Apparently, my inside knowledge was indispensible for the task. I won't complain too hard though, as long as I get paid for it all. But in sitting here at my laptop, I have found that the urge to update my blog overtakes me far more often than it would otherwise do. Hence the regular posts again. It's just like when I was bored silly in a permissive office *sigh*.

But it has also given me a chance to observe the workings of the hostel a little more closely than I would otherwise. And I have to say, this one runs pretty well. There are the regulars who, like me, are pretty much living here. We recognise each other by sight if not by name, and have at least a nodding acquaintance and knowledge of each other's business. There is nowhere to hide your secret life in here, that is for sure. THen there are the blow-ins, the arrivals who turn up without a booking, but hoping for somewhere to spend the night. I'm not sure where they go when it's busy time and the place is booked out; I'm guessing to the somewhat less salubrious accommodation up the road. I don't envy them.

The bit that really gets me though is that most of these people need not turn up without a booking. The odern backpacker is a high tech being, travelling with mobile phones, mp3 players and often even laptops. Many have roaming broadband and need enver be out of touch with the world in any way, at any time. Somewhat different to the first time I went backpacking, over 7 years ago now, and didn't even have a phone card, that most modest of communication devices now. I'm as bad as the rest of them, I admit it, but I have to ask, where's the adventure gone, when you can travel solo, but really be bringing your friends along for the ride via the webcam hook up on your computer?

I'm not advocating going without all th modern accoutrements. I'd die without them on this trp, since I wouldn't be able to make any money and that 2 euros I had left to my name a couple of days ago would have been spent on a combination of packet soup, 2 minute noodles and tinned pasta - a most healthy and nutritious diet. Rather I'm wondering, where do you go to get away from the world? How do you truly escape now? Its not even a surprise to find someone with hundred - in some cases thousands - of dollars worth of equipment stashed in a humble backpack, but rather a surprise to find someone wihtout any high tech gizmos. My family and friends would be curiously worried if I dropped off the radar completely for a few days, let alone for the weeks, months, years that some people spend travelling. So, how do you do it, these days? I'm not sure, given social expectations. But I'm thinking of a trip to Bhutan or Nepal to test out the internet reception there - I figure they must be the last hold outs. The bigger question is, how naked and exposed would I feel without any means of contacting the outside world? And how the hell can I get to Nepal or Bhutan when I can't even manage to get into London and work right now?

The land of the unemployed

There are many things I've discovered since I became unofficially unemployed. One of them is that I can go out any night of the week here in Galway, and still find that I won't sleep past 9:30. OF course, that might have more to do with the fact that I'm staying in a dorm room in a hostel than anything else, but it's a point worth considering.

I have also discovered that drunken Irishmen lose the ability to speak. Or at least that I lose the ability to understand them when they get drunk. I struggle with some of the Irish accents at the best of times, although I am improving. Add alcohol to an already confusing accent, and the result is incomprehensible, but very very loud and quite amusing.

It hasn't taken until now to realise that people do stupid things while on holiday, but it has taken hours spent sitting around a hostel common room doing work of some form or other to discover just how stupid people can be. Take, for example, the american traveller who was sitting at reception yesterday being filled in by his friends on all the things that he'd gotten up to the night before. He had no memory of any of it. He couldn't recall the point where the bar was closing but he didn't want to leave; then there was the point where he was being wrestled to the ground by security, leaving a very large hole in the leg of his jeans, somehow. He struggled to remember taking off one of his shoes to hit security around the head with it in when seems to have been a fairly comical turn of events for everyone except the security guard involved. In fact, the only thing he did remember was waking up in the lock up where police had all but carried him so he could sleep off his alcohol induced coma.

In the land of the backpacker - ie, the unemployed or student - alcohol still reigns as king, it seems.

There is a side effect to this though, a slightly sinister bent to the party atmosphere of the town. Galway is beautiful, set on the banks of the fast-flowing river Corrib, with the wide sweep of Galway bay just a short walk away, and Lough Corrib a little further out. There are water and bogs ringing the town, one way or another. There are also constantly appearing missing posters on the lamp posts of the town. The first I saw was for a young woman, and the flyers disappeared before I really took anything in. Then there was a 20 year old man who vanished from somewhere in Galway city on Wednesday night. Then last week more posters appeared for another young man. You can't help but wonder, with a person a week going missing, what is happening in this town? It is a party town, with high alcohol consumption and every night of the week there are people who get paralytic and wander the streets. It seems that at least one of them will walk clean out of existence every week as well. But in the land of the unemployed and of students, it sometimes takes 3 days for people to compare notes and realise that they've gone. Like something out of a horror movie, nobody knows for sure what happens to these people. Apart from memories and grainy footage of them from CCTV, the only marks of their passing are the forlorn appeals for information left to weather on the lamp posts of Galway city.