At the close of another eventful year in Ireland.

I've reread all of the posts for this year and I'm struck by how well the year has passed.  Much of what I'd anticipated in my initial post of 2013 has come to pass.  After one reaches a certain age, and I'm well past that, there aren't many years in which you don't suffer a major loss.  A loved one passes, an illness or some other life changing event occurs that sets you on your heels and you have to regroup.  It is with a lot of gratitude and humility that I say 2013 was not one of those years.  I don't want to let that milestone pass without noting and celebrating that good fortune.  I know it's not the case for many of those close to us and I wish for them such a respite in the coming year.

As we planned when we made the decision to start our retirement in Ireland, we continued to travel throughout the past year and plan a similar schedule in the coming year. We will start the new year with a trip to Lisbon, scheduled for mid-January, then a week in Aruba with our friends Irene and Craig in February. We're scheduled a few days in Stockholm for my birthday in April.   In June we are planning a month in an Apartment in Amsterdam.  In July I'm going to do the set dance workshop at Willie Clancy week in Clare.  In September our friends from Virginia will return for another week in the West, this time in Ballyvaughn and there's a possibility that I will do another leg of the Camino de Santiago on the Portuguese Way earlier that month.

The one thing that has changed is work.  I was thinking that I would do a large research study for my former employer beginning early in the New Year and lasting at least through June.  This was going to involve at least three trips to the United States, including one in August to present the findings.  But, that project will not go forward.  I was surprised by that turn of events, but fortunately I didn't count on it and find that I'm not particularly disappointed.  It means that I will have more of an opportunity to volunteer here in Ireland and toward that end, I've accepted a position on the board of the American Women's Club.  I've also scheduled a meeting in January with a nonprofit organization that helps single parents, that would probably involve working on their fundraising database.  Also, maybe I'll get back to that book, a project that is easily pushed to the back burner.

Although I expect that we will spend the entire coming year in Ireland, it feels like we are coming closer to making the plan for our departure.  I really want to stay here, but Alan is concerned about not making and renewing the connections with family and friends in the USA that we will need when we are more frail. While we are both hoping that we have at least another 20 years of good health, we both have had experiences with our parents that make it clear that one needs a good network in the later years.  If you don't work on that, you don't have it.  Our situation is compounded since we don't have any children.  There's no one obligated to take care of us and help us make decisions when the time comes.  Coming off such a good year, you'd think we could just let that slide for a while, but I think we are both realists. So, something really radical would have to happen for us to plan to stay here another 5-10 years, an outcome that would suit me fine. From the beginning, I felt more settled here but Alan still feels the tug of home.    

Still, we end 2013 with a lot of gratitude and anticipation, and I hope the same for everyone that reads this.Thank you for doing so.

Time flies!  I haven't posted for over a month, but there was a good reason until now.  For most of November we didn't do very much, just pursuing our normal life after a busy fall. It was good to get back into set dancing and bridge lessons. Alan was happy to resume his Monday writers' group, although he has been very consistently writing throughout our time here. We also found a nearby pool and have started a water aerobics class on Wednesday mornings.

Things picked up by the end of November, when we took a trip to Berlin, where we spent Thanksgiving and Alan's 65th birthday the following day.  It was a good trip, but both Alan and I were struck by an unsettling feeling of being in an old, old city with an almost exclusively modern built environment.  It was creepy.  We did a lot of walking and viturally every time we saw an older building, there was a poster nearby describing its prewar function and history.  Almost all of the posters called out the bullet holes in the facade.

We stayed in a newly built Marriott hotel in the former East Berlin, pretty much right on the wall.  On the east side of the wall was a "no man's land" while in the west they built right up to the wall, so almost everything around where we stayed was built after 1990.  There continues to be a lot of building in Berlin and we could see that Germany's economy is flourishing, unlike most of the rest of Europe we've visited since coming here. The weather was cold and gray, conditions which really affect Alan but as long as it's not raining, I don't mind.

We bought a three day museum pass and spent a lot of time visiting a variety of museums.  There are lots of them in Berlin, at one I was told there are over 200.  We started with the Pergamon, one of the National Museums, housing their antiquity collection.  The Gates of Babylon were amazing and the Pergamon Altar was quite impressive.  The latter was the motivation for visiting because when we were in Turkey one of the places we visited during the morning of the Ephesus tour was the ancient city from which the altar was taken. The guide noted that the Germans did a lot of excavating in the early 20th century and there was some interest in modern Turkey in getting back some of the loot they took.  This seems unlikely since the Pergamon Museum was purpose build to hold that altar.  Anyone going to Berlin should not miss this museum.

The following day we visited the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg collection of Surrealist art and Brohan Museum, a collection of Art Nouveau and Art Deco works. I really enjoyed both of them. I was particularly taken by the way the Brohan displayed the collections and how they juxtaposed Art Nouveau and Art Deco. We saw some really beautiful things that day.

On Sunday, we went to a concert at the National Concert Hall.  I've never been to a concert in such a formal setting in the morning (11 a.m.) but I really enjoyed it.  Mozart's overture for the opera Lucio Silla and his Haffner Symphony as well as CPE Bach's Concert for Flute were performed.  We followed that by lunch in a traditional German restaurant where both of us ate too much.  A post prandial walk through several Christmas Markets and a turn on a Ferris Wheel rounded out an active day.  I was particularly delighted to get Alan on the ride. His last experience was on the London Eye with our old friends Louisa and Roger 10 years ago. I reminded him that he was OK on that because, like this one, it was an enclosed car. He grudgingly agreed to go, but it was no London Eye.

On our last full day, we went to Checkpoint Charlie, a private museum at the gate where Americans were permitted to cross into the East and the site of the serious cold war tensions in 1961. I remembered that well because my oldest brother was in the Air Force stationed in Berlin then.  My mother was beside herself with worry, and after reading about it at the museum, I see that the world was very close to war then.  The Checkpoint Charlie Museum could definitely use some curatorial help.  It seems like a collection that has just grown like Topsy.  There are really only so many Volkswagen car trunk, suitcase, air conditioning unit, tunnels, and all around derring do escapes from East Berlin that a person can absorb.  At the end, Alan and I agreed that only small people could leave East Berlin, the big ones had to stay behind.  In addition to documenting every escape, they have expanded the collection to include lots of information on non-violent peace initiatives, which I wholeheartedly support, but here again, Ghandi's flip flops were just over the top.

We returned to Dublin on Tuesday and have resumed our normal activities.  I've put in a proposal for a lot of survey work in the coming year and should hear about that in the coming days.  If the project happens it is likely that I will be in the USA several times in the winter and spring and definitely in August to present the results at the association of associations' convention in Nashville.