It's been a while since my last post.  We have been busy and I'm happy to have a breather for a few days to catch up.  Since posting on September 29th, we've hosted Alan's sister and husband, been on a walking tour in Mallorca and seen 9 plays in the Dublin Theatre Festival.  This is going to be a long post because I want to cover the trip and to record my feelings about all of the plays.

The visit with Alan's sister and her husband was a real treat.  In addition to seeing one of the plays with them, The Dubliners, we also had a chance to catch up with the family and show some sights of Dublin that we think are particularly noteworthy.  It was too bad they didn't have an opportunity to see more of Ireland since this was their first trip outside the USA in over 30 years.  It was a quick, three-day visit, but we packed a lot into it.  They went on to London for another whirlwind three-days of touring. 

First Mallorca

The Mallorca walking trip had its ups and downs.  We booked with a travel provider associated with the Irish Times newspaper, The Travel Department (TD), recommended by several Irish people that we know.  We were particularly interested in using this travel provider because they do Christmas trips in Italy, Portugal and Malta and we are considering one of them for our Christmas this year. 

As promised by the people we know that have booked with TD in the past, the other people in the group were really nice and we met several with whom we will likely keep in touch.  This was the first walking tour TD has offered in Mallorca though and there were several things to be desired about the experience.  I also learned, or maybe re-learned, a lesson about myself that I hope will be remembered next time I book an 'adventure' holiday. 

First on the positive side, in addition to the nice group of people, Mallorca is a beautiful place.  George Sand spent a winter in Mallorca with Frederick Chopin (to whom she was not married, causing quite a stir on the island) and characterized it as a place where "everything seems to pose with a kind of vanity to please your eye."  To my mind, this was a perfect description.  I really found it very beautiful. 

Surprisingly, the food was not so good, the Mallorcans we encountered weren't particularly friendly and the hotel was abysmal.  The latter was a surprise to us because our friends and those in the group that have done TD tours in the past agreed this was not the norm, usually the hotel is one of the high points of booking with this operator. 

But, for me, the insight that, like bike touring, I don't care for walks that don't go anywhere but up and then down.  I have to remember that I don't like doing it.  Touring like that attracts people that seem to be in it for the accomplishment of getting to the top and down again the fastest. I am not one of them.  I don't really care about getting to the top, I would much rather walk between towns or villages, with a stop for lunch in a nice cafe or pub and interesting shops at the end.  In 2004 I did my last biking 'touring holiday' on a trip in Ireland and this trip shared some of the characteristics of that one.  Each day there were miles to be covered, a stop for a quick lunch, and then more miles culminating in 'a view.'  At the end of that process an exhausted flop into bed is the most likely outcome for me.

On this trip there were two tour guides, the leader of the two was definitely of the quick-to-the-top mindset.  He stayed in front at all times, where he expounded on family, military service, taxes and government as if there were no views in all the world but his own.  The other guide was much different in his love of homeland and the environment and knowledge of Mallorca flora and fauna; he also understood his role in keeping the group together and paying attention to the sometimes dangerous, steep and gravelly mountain paths we traversed.  It was hot and the path to the top of the three mountains we walked was pretty boring.  So, when my attention wasn't completely focused on not slipping on gravel or pitching off a cliff, I was just hot.  If it weren't for some of the other travelers with whom I had some very nice conversations along the way, I would have hated the whole experience.  Fortunately we only hiked three of the seven days and Mallorca is just a beautiful, beautiful place. So, Mallorca 10, this sort of hiking 0.

One of the things that Alan and I discussed while there, however, helped us to clarify our onward plan once we leave Ireland.  First, I think we are going to extend our stay in Dublin until at least November 2013 and then spend the winter and spring spending a month or so in a variety of European cities, returning to Bloomington in the fall of 2014.  During our visit to Mallorca's capital city, Palma, we thought we might pick that location for one of those months.  It's a big city and there seems a lot to do.  Also, not many people speak English and we both thought that we could really brush up on our Spanish quickly if we were thrown into that situation.


 Dublin Theatre Festival

The Mallorca trip was sandwiched between seeing nine plays in the Dublin Theatre Festival.  Both Alan and I really like live theater so wanted to get to see as many of the plays as we could. Given that our trip was during the second week of the three-week festival we wound up seeing more than one play a day on two occasions.  We got to visit three new venues as well as re-visit the Gaiety Theatre, a beautiful theater with, as we discovered to our dismay, some very obstructed-view seats.

The fist play we saw, Beyond the Brooklyn Sky, was on Wednesday, September 26, at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght, a small community at the last stop on the Luas, Dublin's light rail service. (Luas means rapid in Irish.)    The theater was a nice one, built, as most of the surrounding neighborhood of high-rise apartments and vacant retail stores, during the height of the Celtic Tiger but now fallen on hard times.  The play was well done, about a group of friends, several of whom spent their youth in Brooklyn, NY with most returning to Ireland during the boom years.  It was sort of a Return of the Secaucus Seven Irish-style.  We both enjoyed it.

Two days later, we saw the first theatrical performance of James Joyce' The Dubliners at the Gaiety Theatre with Alan's sister and her husband.  Alan and I recently re-read the book and earlier went to a lecture about the making of the play.  This book of short stories is the most accessible of Joyce' work, I think, and the play really captured the arc of the stories.  I was really surprised how well it held together.  During the lecture the playwright said that the Joyce family resisted allowing performances of this work and now that the 100-year mark has passed and it's in the public domain he thinks there will be a lot more interpretation of The Dubliners stories on the stage.  We were happy to be able to see the first of them in this city.  Our guests enjoyed it as well. 

Then on Sunday, September 30 we saw two plays.  The first by a New York company, imported for the festival with an interpretation of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.  This was at the O'Reilly Theatre in Belvedere College (James Joyce and Kevin Barry were alums).   I'm a real Hemingway fan and I also enjoyed this book but boy oh boy, three-and-a-half hours of every scene of excessive drinking in bars, bullfights, unrequited love, existentialism and the dissolute life of the rich American expat in Paris and Spain in the 1920's was too much.  I don't know how any producer didn't have the alarm bells ringing when he or she heard that the play was going to be over three hours.  It was really boring.

Fortunately, the next play we saw that evening was short and very good.  Everyone is King Lear in His Own Home at the Smock Alley Theatre on the Quays in Dublin City Center was the best depiction of madness on the stage I've ever seen.  There were only two characters, I think they were supposed to be father and daughter, and both were nuts, yet we got them. I couldn't tell you what it was about, other than insanity.

October 2, several days before we left for Mallorca, we spent a very nice evening with our old family friend at dinner and then to see The Last Summer  at The Gate theater on O'Connell Street.  This was a play with a theme similar to the first one about youthful emigration and returning home in middle age.  This is a recurring theme in Ireland because so many people leave and come "home" only for visits.  The idea of never really making "home" the place where they have gone is interesting.  Anyway, these people were more prosperous than the ones in Under the Brooklyn Bridge, but the story of making choices and youthful love simmering over many years was done very well.  In this play they did a really good job of alternating between two summers 30 years apart. 

Two days after we returned from our trip we saw three plays on the same day.  All performed by the Druid-Murphy company by the playwright Tom Murphy, at the Gaiety Theatre.  We have since learned from friends that the three plays are booked for The Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center this fall.  Conversations on a Homecoming, set in Galway in the 1970's was also about emigration and the ones who stayed behind.  A lot of dialogue but interesting.  A Whistle in the Dark was a family drama with which I could really relate. One son trying to move away from a life of mindless family in-fighting while the others try to pull him back with the bromide:  "Who do you think you are?"  That's a whistle in the dark alright.  The final play, Famine, was set in 1846.  I've learned so much about the famine in Ireland since I've been here, but there was a new wrinkle here that I hadn't thought about before, the English landowners actually wanted the Irish to emigrate and so that was one of the reasons they didn't do much to help feed the population and continued to press them to pay to rent their land. There was so much more than just crop failure going on then.  Unfortunately, Alan was tired of sitting, and we were both tired of craning our necks in our very poor obstructed seats, that we left at intermission during Famine. 

Finally on Sunday, yesterday, we saw Halcyon Days at the Smock Alley Theatre, the same venue as King Lear.  Except for The Dubliners this was by far the best play we saw.  Given that Dubliners was a rich and well financed production and Halcyon was a two-person, one set, production this was the greater achievement, I think.  Two people finding love and affection at the end of their lives in a nursing home.  It was just great. 

After these weeks of great activity, I am happy to spend a day or two at home.  I just tried to get back into my routine of going to the gym and a leisurely read of the newspaper this morning.  Tomorrow I have some work to do and then back to my set dancing class in the evening.  On Thursday friends from Washington are coming for a few weeks, during which we will go to the Cork Jazz Festival with them.  Another busy period coming up.