The Irish Rover

It's St. Patrick's Day today, one of my favorite holidays, if not one that I've had much success celebrating in recent years. For the second year in a row I've missed my college friends' reunion over pints of Guinness and probably just a little bit of mayhem - as alumni of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, it's a holiday we take seriously.

Last year was a wee bit harder than this one, of course. I was in India and besides the obvious technical difficulties and the paucity of corned beef and cabbage, there was one more problem with my attempts to share the holiday with my friends.

I walked into the office with a bright green shirt on and a big smile on my face, only to run smack into one of my coworkers. He looked tired, drawn, and he had a streak of white on his forehead. He explained, he was celebrating a holiday too - the days of Vasant Navratri leading up to Ram Navami - and he was fasting.

So, no green beer, in other words.

That was probably the quietest St. Patrick's Day I'd ever had. No matter where I'd spent it, though, it would probably be hard to top the time I actually lived in Ireland, the holiday's spiritual home. My sister was in town, and besides the usual tomfoolery we stumbled across a céilidh and danced like idiots with half of Dublin. The rest of the night, we [scene missing].

More than anything, today's celebration of its patron saint makes me reminisce about the good times I had there both as a student and more recently for a rather long run. Maybe it's time for an impulse trip back to the Emerald Isle . . . You never know . . .

Trinity College and Dawson St

O'Connell St looking towards the Dublin Spire

Cadbury Without Borders

An Iranian friend and I were chatting yesterday about where to go on one of our weekly lunch dates. As often happens, the conversation veered from a description of a traditional English Sunday Roast to one of our own respective traditions. As it turns out, the Persian New Year, or Norouz, begins next week.

My friend tried to describe the festive table setting Iranians have to celebrate the new year. It's called haft sin, where sin is a letter of the Persian alphabet (س). Seven foods are placed on the table, each starting with the letter sin, and each carrying its own symbolic meaning.

We were sitting in the school's computer lab, so we clicked over to Wikipedia for a full list. (It's not very easy to describe your own traditions without visuals. Last season this same friend asked me why we decorate Christmas trees and I could only quote Jim Gaffigan.) Sure enough, there was a list of seven foods - sabzeh (wheat or barley), sib (apples), senjed (oleaster), somaq (sumac), sir (garlic), samanu (a sweet pudding), and serkeh (vinegar).

"That's so funny," I said. "That sounds a lot like something we do in Italy, where we eat seven fishes for Christmas."

"Sometimes you have other things," she added. "Not just those seven." She pulled up one of the many photos of various haft sin spreads.

Haft sin spread, by Mandana Asani

"That's lovely!" I said.

"But . . . Wait a minute."

Peering closer.

"Is that . . .?"

"Um, those look like Easter eggs," I told her.

They are clearly not Easter eggs, of course. But, at the same time, they are. Hard-boiled eggs, decorated and painted, although in Iran you place them on the table where in America we hide them and make small children go hunt for them.

So we reminisced together for a while about decorating eggs. It was all well and good, of course, until she asked me about Easter.

"Um . . ." I said. Where to begin - the high religious significance, or . . . "We celebrate with . . . the Easter . . . bunny? Who lays . . . chocolate?

"Shoot, we're going to need a visual."

And then I just *chundered* *everywhere*

Is it awful that I watched this and thought, "Hey I've totally done that!"

Except I've never taken a gap year, and certainly not a 'gap yaah'. Americans don't have gap years! We don't believe in taking a year off just to be young and travel. You graduate . . . You work! You work while you travel! And when Americans "chunder everywhere" (which, yes, I've done that too), it's probably e.coli, not "being on the lash".

It's funny you should say that, tho. That totally reminds me of this time, on my year-of-working-in-random-far-off-locations . . .

Lording over you

Some whispers went around last week that someone in your correspondent's circle is the son of a Lord.

I needed this explained to me. What, exactly, makes you a Lord? Does this make my acquaintance a Lord? Is it anything like being a Knight? Do you have a say in Parliament? And, for goodness' sake, since when have there still been things like Lords in the twenty-first century?

One friend (who is a subject of Her Majesty, though not English) tried to explain: "It's kind of like the Kennedy family in America."

I thought back. Sure, they're the most famous political family we have. But, no disrespect to the Kennedy family, but they're also famous for various assassinations and the occasional scandal on Martha's Vineyard. Plus, when John F. Kennedy was elected president, it was under much suspicion - he was the first Catholic in office, and many thought he would be answering to the Pope.

"No," I disagreed. "I don't think we would consider the Kennedys anything close to a Lord."

For lack of a better analogy, we let the subject drop, and to this day I'm still not entirely sure what a Lord is.

As I found out, however, they are definitely still alive and well in the United Kingdom. I booked myself a flight to Morocco last week, and as I was entering in my passenger information, a drop-down menu offered me a choice of honorifics - Doctor, Mister, Miss, Ms, Mrs . . . Lord . . . Lady?

As tempted as I was to fly as Lady Your Correspondent, something tells me this sort of joke would be strongly frowned upon, and I'm not crazy enough to try. After all, as the expression goes, I'm no Jack Kennedy.

Thought of the Day

I found this quote in an Economist article, and felt I had to share:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. -- Mark Twain

At the very least, Mr. Twain has just justified the flights I've booked for Casablanca and Barcelona in April. One woman's lying on the beach is another woman's horizon-expanding fight to eliminate prejudice. You wouldn't want me to become narrow-minded, would you?

You Say Potato, I Say French Fry

Since moving to England, I've really missed the opportunity to do some good outside of class. Last week I was happy to stumble across the website of a local homeless shelter which seemed to match my old volunteer work: low-key, non-denominational, and non-judgmental. I went today for my first tryout and, as usual, found a few surprises.

Oxford is such a small town, so small that it literally takes me five minutes to run myself out of town. Sure, there's a bit of scruffy neighborhood down Cowley Road, but the group I joined was just open for a few hours every evening between the day shelters and the night shelters.

In those two hours, over one hundred people showed up.

Obviously, they need the help, so I will most definitely make it a regular occurrence. Next time should go better now that I've learned where they keep the plates and cutlery. Getting the terminology down is key, too.

"Do we need more cheese and crackers?" I asked the other kitchen volunteers. No answer. Blank looks.

Someone popped in from serving tea up front. "Do we have any more cheese and biscuits?"

Oh.

"Can you pass me the aubergine?" someone requested.

I stared at the pile of vegetables next to me.

". . . You might call it eggplant."

Oh.

The kicker came when one of the volunteers popped into the kitchen and asked me, "Quick! Can you make one of the ladies a Marmite sandwich?"

Ugh. Marmite. Marmite is one of those strictly English foods. I've never seen anyone eat it who wasn't a Brit. It's meant to be really good for you, but no matter how many times I try to give it a chance, it's still disgusting.

You're not doing it right, my friends tell me. You're supposed to put only a teeny little bit on toast. And lots and lots of butter.

"Are you sure I should be doing this?" I asked, when someone handed me the jar and a knife. "I'm an American! An American!"

But, I was there to pull my weight, and I dutifully followed the instructions I had been given hundreds of times. I handed my finished open-faced sandwich to the volunteer and waited for her reaction.

"No, we need more Marmite on that," she said, handing it back. "There's barely any there."

"I'm an American!" I explained again, and, shrugging, added more Marmite.

"Ew!" said another woman. "That's way too much Marmite!"

Lesson learned. I handed in my knife, and decided to wash dishes instead. Eating it or preparing it, I just can't win with English food!

Sacre Bleu!

The other night, I was standing in my local grocery store looking for a good beer to pair with dinner. Surrounded by Fuller's and Old Speckled Hen, nothing caught my fancy, nothing seemed to do. The English are so proud of their "real ales", but was that what I wanted?

Then, I spotted a four-pack of Guinness in the corner, straight from Ireland. I bought it without a moment's hesitation.

A few days later, I was lost for inspiration and turned my internet radio on to the first channel I came across. That night, I happily finished an entire paper nodding my head to nothing but rap music. Even though I wasn't a big fan before, for some reason out here I can't get enough Outkast and Eminem.

This morning, I realized I've spent the past week swapping between two other internet radio stations: what I call "yeehaw" country, and pop music from . . . France.

My goodness. It seems as though six months in England has turned me into the walking cultural opposite of English-ness. I suspect my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

The Inspiring City in Spires