ultra gaelic

In the morning, Peter said he slept well but got wet due to condensation. (Imagine … moisture in the desert!) He said next time he would change the order of his layers (put the plasticky material underneath) to attract less condensation.

We started off the day with a traditional Moroccan breakfast of muesli, cheese wedges, condensed milk, bread, jam, instant coffee, and Lipton tea. (Well, breakfast was likely our least traditional meal of the day. Oh, and spaghetti with marinara sauce might not be very traditional either.) Usually there was a special addition to breakfast such as pancakes or pancake-shaped omelets.
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A little bit of extra rain and ice doesn’t stop the Irish from going forward as if nothing happened. (Warning: Some photos and videos possibly staged.)

I’ll interrupt my desert adventure story briefly by updating you on life in wintry Dublin.

The weather has been colder than usual since I arrived, much like the whole northern hemisphere. (December was the coldest month in 28 years, and the cold spell was the longest in 40.) This, of course, hastened my departure from the place I stayed in for three days. But, you see, the cold weather has brought all sorts of additional problems to Ireland, including impassable roads and water shortages. How could Ireland possibly be short of water when we’ve had lots of rain and snow? I’ll tell you.

Since a lot of people leave their homes during the holidays (to visit family or to go to the Canary Islands or something), insurance companies urged people to leave their taps trickling to keep pipes from freezing (since nothing around here is built to handle temperatures below freezing). Lots of people did so, meaning that by January the reservoirs were running dangerously low in Dublin and some other parts of the country. The government started warning people they might need to ration, so usage shot up because everyone panicked. Parts of the city found themselves without water, so the city brought in tanker trucks where people could go fill up jugs. Now water pressure is quite low nearly everywhere (especially if you live on an upper floor of a building), so the city is intentionally lowering water pressure in various parts of the city at various times of the day in order to save water. If you like somewhere with radiators (as I do), this means you also lose heating. Luckily we have an electric shower, a gas-powered fireplace, and electric radiator on loan from Brian’s sister. And just tonight I’ve secured an electric blanket to keep till May!

Of course, many pipes did freeze anyway, especially in schools that were closed for the holidays. Most schools were supposed to reopen on January 7, but at that point we were in the thick of the freeze, so the minister for eduction announced that schools wouldn’t open till January 14. Then we had an unexpected thaw on January 9-10, so he was put under pressure to reverse his decision. He eventually did, telling them to reopen on January 12 … unless they couldn’t (because of burst pipes), in which case they shouldn’t.

Sporadic flooding continues across the country, leading to occasional suspension of coach (long-distance bus) and train service and occasionally closing of roads.

Most towns nearly ran out of road salt, but I hear more shipments have arrived. But even when supplies exist, if the snow falls during the day, they won’t salt the roads (or “grit the roads”, as they say here, though “grit” actually refers to sand mixtures) in Dublin because the “gritters” (the trucks that spread salt or grit) “get caught in congested areas and people leave their offices early.” Really? So instead people pack down the snow, making it more difficult to remove later, and they get into fender-benders because the roads haven’t been treated. I believe the word for this in Ireland and the UK is “brilliant”. In fact, the roads get so treacherous that the city bus system has to suspend bus service one afternoon, stranding commuters in the center of the city. Positively brilliant.

In any case, I’ll do my part to conserve water by growing a beard again for a few days.

Now let’s see, where did we leave off? Ah, yes, I arrived at Heathrow to fly to Morocco.

We were tall told to check in three hours early (just to be safe). I eyed the other people in line at Royal Air Maroc suspiciously, wondering who all was on my trip. I noticed there were not as many Moroccans as I expected. Mostly tourists. Hmm.
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Good news: I have secured my colleague’s LL Bean “Base Camp Classic” sleeping bag (rated for 20 °F and −7 °C), which got me through cold desert nights in Morocco, until I leave Ireland or he needs it back, whichever comes first. Even if he needs it, I bet I could get it back. This, combined with my “camping and leisure roll mat” (acquired in a Dublin camping store) and my travel pillow (also acquired there) should be sufficient comfort for me to survive a few nights on the floor of my apartment when you come to visit. I only have a single bed, so only one guest at a time.

I am frantically preparing for three presentations at the end of the week in Cork, plus planning an event in April and writing some conference paper proposals. However, I plan to write about my experiences in Morocco on the train to Cork (or on the way back) and provide links to lots of photos. It’s been a bit difficult for me to acquire photos since I’m not on Facebook, but luckily a few people have been willing to accommodate my backwards ways.

It looks like someone from Dublin visited Ann Arbor and was inspired by a certain Ann Arbor institution. I draw particular attention to the model, paint job, and typography on the delivery van.

I give them credit for managing to locate themselves on Reuben Street. If only Baggot Street were actually “Baguette Street”…

Since I can’t get enough of the Economist’s brilliant Christmas issue, let me share two more articles with you:

• “The others” – on being foreign, living abroad by choice, living in exile, and self-deception
• “A Ponzi scheme that works” –all the reasons why the Economist loves America in one article … in case you needed reminding

Oh, I wrote to the editor about the confusion over types of verb aspect and actually got a response. Turns out I interpreted what “it” referred to in one sentence differently from what the author intended, so I retract my complaint.

I’m way behind on work and a conference proposal (though procrastinating on it), so it’s going to take me longer to write about Morocco. In the meantime, I’ll include beautiful photos of the desert like this one:

(That’s not me on the sand dune. It’s one of our Berber cameleers.)

I managed to sort through my Morocco photos, but I need some more time to write narrative. I’m also waiting for my traveling companions to post photos they took so I can supplement my meager collection of 82 photos (not all of which will be described in the narrative, rest assured).

In the meantime, here’s a shot of me on a camel:

I’ve recently come across a few articles dealing with the ways Americans and Britons use language that have solidified some things I’ve been thinking about:

• “My American Friends” from the New York Times Sunday Book Review is spot on and even touches on that which distinguishes Americans (and often Canadians) from most Europeans: namely, chattiness with strangers in social and customer service situations. That and clothing that’s not black.
• “Hi there” from the Economist a history of the loss of formality in contemporary language and argues that this decreases our ability to express intimacy. Lots of food for thought here. Especially interesting to read the claim that Britons are more informal than Americans in their use of languageuse of first names was a British innovation, not an American one as I assumed. I have to say that while they cite as an example Gordon Brown referring to Obama as “Barack”, I think this can be entirely blamed on George W. Bush’s habit of referring to foreign leaders by their first name. He made it look normal for eight years, so why would Brown act otherwise? I also have to say that I had never realized that use of “sir” to address a stranger was an Americanism. I used to think contemporary Russian was deficient in not having a word for addressing a stranger (compared with French or American English), but now I see that Britons also suffer from this!

While I’m sharing articles, here’s another from the Economist: a fun, short introduction to linguistics (a faster read than the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, which belongs on every coffee table). The Economist confuses different types of verb aspect (perfective/imperfective versus progressive/nonprogressive), but I’ll forgive them.

My coworkers—and, it seemed, most of Dublin—disappeared as Christmas approached, so I found the bus ride to the airport on Christmas Eve, and the airport itself, to be incredibly quiet. I had some extra time, so I checked out the bookstore, where all the top sellers were about the financial crisis in Ireland—how bankers and politicians conspired to rip off the little man.
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I’m back from holiday in London and Morocco. Had a great time; blog posts to come. Despite taking the day off work to recover (laundry, shopping, emails, etc.), I didn’t find time to sort through my photos today.

In the meantime, though, I’ll see if I can generate some conversation here by sharing some “before and after” photos of my beard. Beard, you say? Well, I couldn’t shave in the desert, so once we got to Marrakech, I looked like this:

I trimmed it a bit, ending up like this (taken this morning, back in Dublin):

I was tempted to keep the beard, but I decided that trimming it was going to turn out to be a lot of work. So I’m back to normal:

I know beards are trendy these days in the US (but not at all in Morocco!), and I’m always a bit contrarian about trends. Is it time for me to give in to the facial hair phenomenon?