One of those days...

Or, I should say, one of those weeks. I haven’t updated the blog lately because I haven’t been out much. Around the time I got home from Dublin I got a bad cold (actually, I think I had it when I was in Dublin, I was just staunchly in denial). This set off that uncontrollable coughing that I’ve had for years but only had identified as asthma after I started medical school; fortunately, I’d just picked up a new inhaler, which I put to good use all week. I decided to stay home and do nothing last Saturday, so thank goodness that I have satellite tv and was thus able to watch about eight straight hours (between naps) of my third favorite show Seconds from Disaster, which comes after my second favorite show When Expeditions Go Wrong, which runs a distant second to my favorite show, Law & Order. Between all those, I was successfully able to spend the entire day in bed attempting to rest and get better. I suspect that I should probably put a permanent hold on watching any shows on the National Geographic channel (such as the first two listed), since they tend to involve minute disections of plane crashes. Occasionally they throw in a nice maritime disaster for variety. I already hate flying; repeated viewings of slo-mo air crashes are probably not a wise choice for me. Although in the interim between two episodes of that I did manage to catch a show about the biggest port on the planet, which included a detailed description of - my favorite topic - dredging! Who knew that that was worthy of valuable cable tv time.

So the TV watching was quite successful, but not so much the getting better part. I woke up Sunday morning with my eyes glued shut, and though I don't remember ever having pink eye before, I knew what it was without too much question. By that evening my throat was starting to swell up uncomfortably, and with the highly precise scientific instrument known as a flashlight, I peered at the back of my throat, which was angry red but covered with splashes of white. There's an NHS clinic just across the street from school, so instead of going to class on Monday morning I hiked myself over there and got squeezed in where an appointment had been cancelled. The doctor I saw agreed that the eye thing sounded like conjunctivitis, and she only took a second-long look at my throat and said, "Um, are you allergic to penicillin?"

So, in one week: cold, asthma, conjunctivitis, strep throat. Gaaaak.

But the week got better once I got those under control. Thursday was Thanksgiving (or "American Thanksgiving," as I've heard it referred to around school, so as not to offend the Canadians whose Thanksgiving was last month). One of the British girls from my class decided to throw us North Americans a real American Thanksgiving, so about fifteen of us foreigners (including one girl from the Netherlands who was apparently invited by virtue of the fact that her accent makes her sound like she's from California) trooped over to her place Thursday night for some righteous food and enough wine to drown a couple of horses. A very good time was had by all. As well as a very good pumpkin pie. It reminds me that very soon I'll be back on American soil, if for nothing else than to squeeze in some work time on a dredge before the winter term starts in January. That's coming very soon - so much to get done before that comes around...

Beware of the Risen People

On my last morning in Dublin, I woke before most of the Saturday-morning crowd was up and moving at the hostel. I don’t absolutely mind staying in hostels, but it gets old after a while – especially after some folks came in at three in the morning and left the door open for light for over half an hour before they finally went to sleep. Also, for some reason, this particular hostel has a smell to it that I’m pretty sure is an institutional cleaning fluid, but to me it is the precise smell of one of the dredges that I’ve spent too much time on - and that’s not something I want to smell if I don’t have to.
I set my pack in luggage locker of the hostel, checked out, and left in the direction of the docks. Not because of the docks themselves, but because river promenade leading to them is where the famine memorial statues sit, facing out to sea. Six figures – I counted them again – and a ragged dog, forever looking toward the sea for salvation from the ravages of the starvation years. One million dead and one and a half million departed from the Irish shores, all implied in those seven figures. I wanted pictures of them, so that’s where I went.

From there I went back to Temple Bar to find a second breakfast, since the hour-long slow bus out to the airport would likely cut right into the time I would be getting grouchily hungry. I settled into the most authentic-looking place I could find, a hole in the wall playing Irish music on the radio and serving Irish breakfasts of eggs and beans and toast and potatoes. I opened the book I’d been carrying around and continued to read, realizing that the streets and the monuments and the place names that I’d been seeing outside were the same ones described into this fictionalized but historically rather accurate version of the events of the 1916 uprising and the following years of war.

And it struck me that through all places I’d seen of Dublin in the last three days, it was the jail that told the most about where Ireland had come from to get to where she is now. I suppose this is somewhat true in any nation – that you can track social trends and attitudes by who gets thrown behind bars – but rarely in the developed world is the history of a nation so completely and accurately told through the story of its most notorious prisons. The story of Kilmainham – the famine, the rebels, the civilian warriors locked and executed inside, the etching on the wall where Patrick Pearse warned his captors “Beware the risen people” – is the story of Ireland’s most terrible moments and most victorious moments, even just before the nation turned on itself and, lacking the British to wage war against any more, began to eat its own.

That got me to thinking about the famine, and how sometimes the worst times stand at the helm of a nation and steer it to the places it is bound to go. One display at Kilmainham noted that participants at the time considered the 1916 Easter Rising that sparked the war to oust the British just another episode in an 800-year occupation of Ireland by her British neighbours. Why, after 800 years of strife, did Ireland finally rise to throw off the occupiers? In large part, that can probably be traced back fifty years earlier to the famine. Partly because many of the displaced Irish happened onto American soil as our own Civil War raged, and many of those brought their mercenary experience and combat pay home to Ireland to raise the earliest trained militias against Britain. But partly also because the famine, according to many, was not so much a natural failure of the potato crop, but an act of British genocide against the Irish. Though there are also many more scholarly versions of these events, Sinead O’Connor had this to say about it:

OK, I want to talk about Ireland

Specifically I want to talk about the famine

About the fact that there never really was one

There was no "famine"

See, Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes

All of the other food, meat fish vegetables,

Were shipped out of the country under armed guard

To England while the Irish people starved

It was with this recent memory of a million dead and another million and a half departed forever from Irish shores that Ireland finally galvanized against Britain and wrought their independence out of all but the northern-most counties, which are still the subject of much violent contention today. There’s a lesson in there somewhere – something about a threshold of mean-ness that a people can take before they rise up, and something about the way that that mean-ness comes back to haunt those who perpetrate it. And something too about the difficulties a new nation has in ruling itself fairly after years of occupation – something that might be a useful consideration for those who think that invasions and instantaneous “liberations” are an effective form of intervention against tyranny.

So as I prepare to depart from Dublin for British shores, I am no closer to the story of why my ancestors picked up and moved to America. But I am a little closer to understanding that without the famine and the Irish diaspora of the following fifty years, my French-descended grandmother would never have met a short Irishman named Eddie and given birth to my mother and aunt, who then gave birth to myself and my siblings and my cousins. To quote something that Barbara Kingsolver once said about post-colonial Africa – our legacy is a world of hurt and cross-pollination, and we take it from there.

And at least for a couple of shining generations, the dream of those who left the Irish shores a hundred fifty years ago has come true. The American descendants of the famine diaspora survived the Great Depression, went home to Europe to fight two world wars, bootstrapped themselves into the post-war boom, and gave birth to their portion of the most prosperous generation humankind has ever produced. And Ireland has come into her own too – with the rise of the so-called Celtic Tiger economy of the last ten to fifteen years, the shores of the Liffey are now lined with luxury high-rise condos that would feel right at home in San Francisco or New York or any gentrified American town. They beckon the wealth of the global economy, while the six figures at the riverside remember a time when the early tentacles of globalism left the nation of Ireland to starve while England fed her imperial armies – and warn of dangers of rising cost of wealth once again displacing the poor from Dublin’s shore.

So now I understand, when I look at those famine-struck figures on the riverbank, that when they march their eternal trudge toward the sea with faces looking forward, that what they look forward to is me, and my brother, and my sister and my cousins and the millions like us in America who descended from their struggles into something better, and the thousands like me that come back every year trying to find something they might call roots.

On the journey home, I finished reading the Doyle book, A Star Called Henry. It ends at the start of the civil war, when the Republic was still new and not yet blood-marked by the years when Irish tore at Irish for the right to determine how independence would look. The novel captured the complexity well – the way that freedom fighters often demand blood from those they purport to be liberating, the way that corruption runs the ranks of rulers and rebels alike, the way that even an oppressed people can turn their hatred on anyone less privileged than themselves. The way that history seems to like to arrange itself.

Bus to the airport. Short flight over the narrow straights that separate two island nations. Slow train back to King’s Cross. Quick walk to the west.

Back to the imperial capital. Home, for now, to London.

Monuments and museums

With today being my last full day in Ireland, and I still had seen very little of the city. I started out away from the coast, toward the east with the vague intention of finding an old ruinous jail called Kilmainham. I had heard that this was a good place to get a wide view of Irish history. The location was actually off all the maps I had, so I wandered a good way in a very cold morning wind (sometimes gusting so strong I had to stop until it slowed again). Most of an hour later I was very close to giving up, until I spotted an old-looking building on a hill. I had no idea that this was it, but it was - and as it turns out, I took probably the most circuitous route possible to get there, since the return trip took about a quarter of the time as the journey out.

I arrived about half an hour ahead of the first tour of the morning, so I perused the museum while I waited. I find this kind of stuff sickeningly fascinating, and I have deeply ambivalent feelings about finding modern entertainment in this kind of ancient misery. Some of the exhibits were blandly creepy, such as a video mock-up of some guy who, back about a century ago, had developed some complex physics equations to calculate how much weight should go on the opposite end of the hanging rope to cause the quickest death possible; of course, this information was also used in reverse to determine how best to torture prisoners before death.

The tour started up in the museum with a guide who looked like a slightly less dashing Irish version of Che Guevara. He narrated the history of Ireland as we passed through the chapel where once a prisoner was married in silence just hours before facing the firing squad, along the old wing where debtors of the famine era had crowded into the prison for minor crimes (oft thought to have been committed sheerly to get the meager hot meals the jail provided - "If the prison does not underbid the slum in human misery, the slum will empty and the prison will fill," wrote George Bernard Shaw about the famine era), into the late Victorian wing where prisoners were thought to be best treated by total silence and isolation in which they could contemplate their crimes. Over all those old cells were names - Irish revolutionaries, names famous only to those who remember their history, names like Pearse and De Valera and Emmet. The tour ended in the exercise yard, where executions had taken place by hanging and firing squad, from the days when the British were putting down revolutionary sparks to the dark years of early independence when the Irish fought brother against brother in the civil war over how that independence should be created. Two black crosses at opposite ends are all that mark the place. The prison closed with the ed of the civil war in 1924 and was left to the elements, until the 1960s when restoration began in an effort to memorialize those who had died making Ireland a free nation.

But what struck me most was the cold. It was a bitter day to be sure, but walls there suck the heat out of you - and the windows that block the breeze now were not installed until the restoration. With no natural or piped in heat, the place was predictably riven with disease that preys on the crowded halls of starvation- and cold-weakened prisoners. I know that my people come from northern climates - the civilized world doesn't get all that much colder than northern Europe in the winter - and I wonder what makes my tolerance for cold little and limited. No one could be happy with that kind of cold for long, but still, shouldn't there be some memory of tolerance in my blood for the chilly lands I come from, or can the spoiling of mediterranean climates like California's ruin that tolerance in just a generation or two?

From the prison I went across the street under the clear blue sky and howling wind, to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, where I had lunch in a mercifully heated basement cafe. I should know by now that modern art should never make the list of things to do when traveling. It doesn't offend me, it doesn't make me shake my head at the fall of "real"art, but modern art annoys me. It always has. Especially mediocre modern art. The pieces on display in the only wing I visited were from a contemporary Latin American touring exhibit. A few were intriguing. A few were not. I don't care how artsy it's meant to be: preserved frogs stuck with spires and hung in a six-foot-radius circle of amphibians still smells like the uncleaned end of the anatomy lab. Ditto for the smaller-scale lizard version. And I probably could have died happy without seeing a giant picture of Che Guevara made of carefully arranged black bean soup, ya know. I spent a few minutes taking refuge from the cold in there, but quickly ended up moving on.

I walked back along the Liffey and up a hill toward the national museum. Once inside and up the first flight of stairs, I sat down on a wide stone window ledge. A young guy with a tag indicating that he worked at the museum walked by and glared at me. Great: another glaring dude. At least this one wasn’t shouting at me that he was staring because I was girl.

I started into the first exhibit hall, a totally random collection of individual pieces that had been pulled out of storage by various curators as their favourite pieces to put on display. Despite the lack of cohesion, it was actually rather interesting – bits and pieces from all over the world, firmly ensconced in thick glass. I was wandering through there when the Dude Who Glares walked past me and, once again, glared. At first I thought he was suspicious that I was touching the goods, then I remember that everything was behind unbreakable glass. He walked by me several more times, glaring every time, until once when I was standing in front of some tapestry, he finally decided to pounce. He walked up, and in a squeaky accented voice I could hardly follow, he spewed about four paragraphs of random information and unrelated without taking a breath and then said, “I could give you a tour if you want.” Oh no. I’d rather be suspected of stealing ancient artefacts that were rightly stolen from the homelands for the museum than have the squeaky-voiced glaring dude developing instant crush on me. I politely said no thanks and extricated myself as best I could. From there on out though, every time I turned a corner, there was the squeaky-voiced glaring dude, ready to pounce again, albeit with some of the worst pick-up lines known to mankind. “So what do you know about the Boer war? Do they have museums where you come from?” Since we had already established that I was from California, I took this last one to be the approximate equivalent of Americans who roam the world saying things like, “Oh, you have cars in Ireland?”

I’m never sure what provokes guys to act like that. I mean, when he first saw me, I was busy attempting to wrestle myself out of a couple of the approximately six concentric layers of sweaters and jackets I was wearing against the wind, which resulted in sleeves (with and without arms inside them) poking out in every direction like medusa’s braids. I know, I know what you're thinking, you don't even have to say it: what a hottie. But wait, it gets better. In the morning's bitter cold wind, I had been forced to put on a hat before my hair dried. There are bad hair days, and then there are days when I'm forced to put on a hat before my hair dries, and those are days when the hat never comes off. But it was too hot to wear it in the museum, so I was switching to a fleece headband when Glaring Dude first walked by, and he got the full view of my bangs plastered in flattened tangles all over my forehead. Let me tell you how much it pleases me to no end that men who decide to develop instantaneous crushes on me are inevitably so desperate as to find all that attractive.

Anyhow, I finally got tired of having to maneuver around this dude every time I turned a corner, so I moved onto the next attraction. I managed to get myself lost and turned around but still find what I was looking for before it closed: Dublinia, a somewhat cheesy but also very educational mock-up of Dublin during the Viking years. I was especially impressed by their life-sized models prominently displaying the enlarged, blackened lymph nodes of a person dying of the bubonic plague. But mostly what struck me is how not everything in Ireland in Irish, and in particular, the area around Dublin has long been a cross-roads of many different races come to trade and dominate and otherwise exist: Normans, Anglos, Vikings.

From there I went on to dinner, but not before stopping at an internet café along the Liffey – I find that I can only walk for so many hours a day, and at some point it’s helpful to actually make myself sit down for a time and do something that doesn’t require being on my feet. I had a quick dinner then found the same café as last night to have hot chocolate and to continue reading through the book I picked up yesterday, which reads like a fictionalized history of everything I’ve seen since I’ve been in Dublin. I went to sleep exhausted by ten, realizing that next time I come to Ireland I’ll have to make an effort to see a little more night life – which probably means doing a little bit less walking during the day. Next time.

Murderholes at the Goat Castle

At the first sign of daylight, I headed for the docks. I suppose in another place or time this would have said something about my character - the girl who gets into a new town and goes straight to the docks. Heh. As it was, I figured where there are docks there is waterfront, and where there is waterfront there is ocean. Or bay. Or whatever body of water that is at the end of the River Liffey. Turns out that sturdy gates block the way long before one actually reaches the mouth of the river, and it looked to be another hour's walk north to get to the nearest beaches. With the overcast sky slowly clearing, I turned back toward the city center along the wide river promenade. Alongside that muddy crick one finds the monument to the great famine - four of five gaunt statues, one carrying a lifeless child, followed by a bony dog, all headed for the port and, one might assume, the ships leaving for America.

I had wanted to get out of town and see a bit of the countryside that's been kind of lacking in my city-bound existence in London, and with the clearing skies, I decided today might be only chance. After some wandering, I found the DART station (sort of like BART, but for Dublin) and caught a train south toward the coastal town of Dalkey - a remarkably convenient journey that got me well out of the city limits for just a couple of euros. The tracks pass through some of the less posh suburbs of Dublin, then burst out of the city along the tidal flats of the Irish Sea.

I stepped off the train at Dalkey, I small town that predates Dublin's hegemony as the only local trading center of note. With a tide-scoured channel between the town and Dalkey Island, ships offloaded there rather than brave the shifting shallows of the Liffey River mouth. I was smirkingly pleased to learn what a profound impact the industry of dredging had on this particular enterprise - so rare that any reason comes up to think of dredging as anything other than a boring job that pays the rent!

On my arrival, my first order of business was to find a restroom, so I stopped into what looked like a historical site. This turned out to be Dalkey castle, so I paid five euros for entrance. The self-guided tour started out with a nice middle-aged woman who described to myself and another couple in very sweet tones that the fortifications of the castle had consisted of such lovely inventions as tightly spiraled staircases that could only accomodate the swinging swords of those coming down the stairs, as well as a little contraption called "the murderhole" - a trapdoor above the main entrance where a defending soldier could throw rocks, spears, or all manner of boiling liquids directly onto the marauders coming in the door downstairs. I have decided that if I ever get around to selling my condo and buying a house, I'll have to install a murderhole, just so I can say that I have one. I'd install one in my condo in Portland, except that the main person I want to banish is the neighbor to the right, who generally doesn't approach from beneath my door. Too bad.

Before I went into the castle, the introduction continued on to reveal that the edifice was nick-named Goat Castle after the Cheever family. I looked kind of puzzled until she started to explain that they were French. Of course - Cheever is just a mangled version of chevre, French for "goat." She also mentioned that the area surrounding Dublin to the north, south, and inland to the west was settled very early on by Anglos, Normans, and other invaders, who booted out the original Irish inhabitants. This settled area was called The Pale, and its name gives rise to the contemporary phrase "beyond the pale." I hadn't know this at all, but in essence, that phrase is a slam at the displaced Irish outside the Pale, who had the temerity and lack of civilized mores to exact revenge at regular intervals against the wealthy traders who had taken their land. It struck me then - and I learned more later to the same end - that the history of imperialism in Ireland goes back farther than I have any sense of, and is far more complicated than the English-versus-Irish story that you might get in a basic history class.

I continued on through the castle, then took a long walk toward the waterfront, which was largely blocked by luxury gated housing developments. I didn't know til I read it later in the guide book, but Dalkey has become one of the homesteads of choice for wealthy Dubliners looking to escape the city but still live close enough to commute in for the day. Fortunately, this also meant there was a small shopping district with plenty of little cafes and bars to choose from. I found one cafe on a side street and ordered a grilled sandwich from a Spanish waiter who was playing Mexican rock music in the background. Ah, globalization...makes an American feel at home no matter where we are.

After lunch I decided to go one stop further south to Killeney. There wasn't much of a town right near the DART station, so I hopped down to the beach and started walking. This adventure ended in one of those two- to three-hour forced marches that are fun if you know what you're getting into, but not always so much when it's because you're lost. Once I got tired of trudging on the cobbled beach, I quickly lost the sense for where I was going. I had seen another small town toward the south end of the bay that I was on, and figured there must be a DART station there. The bay was about the size of Half Moon Bay, and I was starting at the north end of it. I like walking, but at some point I realized that this may not end with a train station, and heading back before I got too exhausted was probably a better plan, especially with a light misting rain starting up. By the time I practically crawled back into the DART station, I was ready for a long nap, but got just a little sleep on the short ride back into downtown Dublin.

Back in Dublin, I woke myself up as best possible, and headed back to the hostel just to use the restroom and wash up. Back out on the streets, I stopped the same food court I had been at last night, only this time I was there to try the fish and chips. Yummy. Greasy. So greasy, in fact, that I had to stop before they were gone. But still, yummy.

From there I walked toward the area of the city where the two folks I saw at the airport yesterday were staying. I had mercifully learned the name of the one I couldn't remember, since another person from our mutual class had emailed the small group we're working in to present some material at next week's class meeting. By process of elimination, I managed to figure out her name. Whew! I swung by quickly, and a little bit early to catch them according to the time we had said we might meet if we all happened to be around, but there were no messages. I hoped they weren't waiting for me later, but left anyway. They're very nice people, but I'm never sure about traveling around with people I don't know - I hate to drag others into the forced-march version of travel that I tend toward. Most people agree that they like walking; most don't think that means upwards of seven to ten miles a day, with breaks only for eating if that.

I killed a little bit of time in a bookstore around the block from their hostel, where I found a section of Irish literature. I always try to read something somewhat local when I travel (even at work - though if you've ever tried to find something to read that is local to east Texas and is not a manual on refinery management, you know that's sometimes more idealistic than realistic), so I picked up a book by Roddy Doyle (the same guy who wrote The Commitments) named A Star Called Henry. Too worn out to do much more walking, I took the book and myself and found (after a fair search) a coffee shop where I could sit and read. Good book, by the way - if you're looking for something to read, it's a good one to look up. From there I went back to the hostel, read for a few more minutes downstairs, then crashed in my shared room by 10 pm and didn't stir at all til morning.

Dublin

I came to Dublin because Ireland is the only country of my ancestry that I had never been to before. French, German, Russian, Irish, and whatever else slipped into the nether branches of the family tree. The Irish side of the family is the side I know the least about - I don't know why they left Ireland, though I can imagine. I don't even know where in Ireland they came from, or in what years they slipped away from the Irish shores and headed across the North Atlantic toward America. But Dublin is a good place to start, so here I have come.

And also, because Ryanair had dirt cheap flights to Ireland on the particular dates that coincided with reading week at school.

Which is probably how it ended up that, after a long train ride from King's Cross to Gatwick airport, I was walking toward the security gates when I heard a vaguely familiar voice call my name. I turned around and it was a gal from my health policy class, who is not in my track but shares a seminar session with many of us CID people. She was there with a friend from back home in Canada, and they were headed for the same place I was headed, albeit on a more circuitous route - they had missed their flight that morning and were on mine because that was the next to take off. They had some time issue getting from King's Cross to Victoria and then onto the Thameslink train to Gatwick; I almost didn't tell them but eventually gave in and mentioned that actually, there was a Thameslink train right at King's Cross - which probably would have saved them the missed flight if they had known about it.

In any case, we chatted for a while then got separated when we were just about the last to board the flight. I didn't get a window seat, which I would have liked for the view of the sea and of Ireland approaching on the horizon. Instead I napped for a good while, and woke up in time for one of those landings that reminds you that humans were probably not meant to fly - the plane touched down, torqued to one side, then correctly violently to the other, then mercifully straightened out as we slowed on the runway.

I met back up with the gal from my class and her friend, though I was starting to realize that I could not, for the life of me, remember her name. I racked my brain, but I was too embarassed to ask, because I see her all the time and have even gone out for drinks with her and some others from various tracks before. I knew she knew my name, so there was no easy way out of that mess. We started to head for the bus stop into town, but they had had some trouble getting last-minute hostel reservations and decided to stop off and the information desk to try to get some kind of reservation for Friday night, without which - they joked - they'd be sleeping on a park bench. We decided to split up, as I was anxious to get into town, though we made tentative loose plans to maybe meet up the following evening.

I caught the slow bus to the center of town, though I had little sense of direction or where I was going. I got off when I recognized the street name O'Connel, though I didn't know if I was near or far from the part of that particular street that my hostel was located at. After some wandering in several different directions, I found the side alley where the Litton Lane hostel sits, not half a block off the river Liffey that separates north from south Dublin. I checked in, and was grateful to have a reservation through my departure date, as the two guys ahead of me had failed to make reservations - though they were set for that night, they were to be thrown out Friday due to a full house. Rumor has it that some major sporting event is taking place this weekend, though I don't know what that might be, and for that reason everything in town is full despite the rainy off-season weather.

I dropped my gear and headed back out, mostly looking for something to eat in the gathering dark. I walked all over the north edge of town, encountering an expensive but slightly seedy shopping district that didn't really offer up anything appealing. I finally stumbled on an area the guy at the hostel desk had suggested, a small food court on a side street near the Ha'penny bridge. Though there were several more local-ish looking eateries inside there, I decided to try Mexican food, because I miss it and have been craving it for weeks. Bad idea. Despite all declarations to the contrary, there was nothing authentic about it, or even remotely tasty. But it was filling enough, and I set out again, figuring that I'd find another place to sit and get something desert-y to make up for the mediocre meal.

I crossed the river into the Temple Bar area. If I am looking for my roots in Dublin, Temple Bar would certainly be the least likely place to find them. Partly because the Temple Bar area only became a noteworthy neighborhood in the last 10-15 years, and partly because whatever drove my ancestors out of Ireland, it was not ready ability to afford overpriced espresso shops. This is the kind of district that every gentrified city has - expensive eateries, trendy shops, this could be downtown Palo Alto - except that in Europe, these always seem to be located in ancient neighborhoods of narrow cobblestone ways and buildings that predate the founding of my home country. That alone gives these sorts of neighborhoods an air of authenticity that makes them tolerable even amidst the invasion of Hard Rock Cafes and Starbucks.

I walked quite a ways, but eventually found a small cafe and got hot chocolate (delicious in the near-freezing weather) and a big chocolate muffin. Note to self: no matter how good an idea it sounds like, if you haven't had sweets in months, there is no way that 800 calories of chocolate in a single sitting is going to set well. No way. It was good at the time, but I'd forgotten how much my diet has changed since I've arrived in Europe, and how much I'm not used to refined sugary stuff, and how it really doesn't taste all that good unless you're feeding a minor addiction. But the crowded cafe ambience was nice - as was the warmth - and so I sat for a while before heading back to Litton Lane. At the hostel left my things upstairs then went down to read for a while in the lounge. This hostel has a little more of a cleanliness problem than the one I stayed at in Paris, as well as the fact that the room I'm in has ten beds, stacked in bunks in all corners. In other words, there isn't much place (or reason) to hang out in the room, and anyway, the lounge downstairs is comfortable and friendly. Though I have to say, for a packed room of ten people, it was a remarkably quiet place to sleep - I always bring earplugs on excursions like this, but even that wouldn't cut through the noise of roommates who really wanted to make a racket. And sleep I did, especially after realizing that even with my arrival in the late afternoon, I had managed to squeeze a good two or three hours' walk into the evening.

Recent Outings

Fresh from my return from Paris, I decided that I really needed to get out and see more of my “home” town of London. Of course, that was largely just me being silly, because I do get out and see stuff. All the time. In fact, I’m getting somewhat tired of “seeing stuff,” because that usually involves walking miles and miles over hard concrete, which is causing a minor reactivation of the tendonitis I’ve got in both knees from years of beating myself up (snowboarding: is the pain worth really the fun?!), and in one hip from – don’t laugh, please – belly dancing. Yes, a career-ending belly dancing injury. Tragically more common than you might think.

But anyway, in a typically obsessively compulsive way, I’ve started setting some goals about what I want to see in London while I’m here. I thought about taking a map with quadrants and marking off each one as I see it, but that seemed a little too OCD even for me. But I have started keeping an eye out in guidebooks and tourist-y websites for stuff I want to see. Since everything I do has to be free or minimally costly, that pretty much leaves me with museums and parks. So Saturday of last week, I hiked myself down to a not-so-lovely part of town to see the Imperial War Museum.

Now, I kind of assumed that this would have at least some camp value – the name itself implies some laughably pompous intentions. As it turns out, the name is kind of unfortunate. The museum is one of the most well put together exhibits I’ve ever seen, some of it spectacularly so. And, I found out later, the building is the original site of the Bedlam hospital, where the mentally ill were chained to the wall and visitors were allowed to come and gawk. I know that lots of people have legitimate beefs with modern medicine, but geez, at least we’ve quit doing things like that.

The entry is into a warehouse-looking room filled with tanks and planes and other articles of war, covered with crawling children who are encouraged to explore them. There’s something disturbing about kids dancing around on the hoods of tanks, but at least there’s no firepower in them anymore. To the side of the main exhibit was a sign saying “The Children’s War”, and having no idea what that might be about, I decided to check it out. As it turns out, no matter how many World War II documentaries I’ve watched on PBS on the rare occasion when there are no episodes of Law & Order on network TV, I had no idea that a very large number of children were evacuated out of London and into the British countryside for the duration of the blitz. Some were away so long that they really didn’t know their families when they came back at the close of the war – especially those returning to meet their shell-shocked soldier fathers for the first time. There was also a mass evacuation of Jewish children out of mainland Europe near the start of the war, and these are perhaps the most devastating stories – no one could have known at the time that this act of sacrifice on the part of the parents would save a generation of lost kids that otherwise would have been exterminated. I was also interested to learn that while Germany was interning Jews into concentration camps, and the US was herding Japanese citizens and immigrants into internment camps, Britain was attempting a wholesale removal of Austrian and German residents onto the Isle of Man, where they were largely left to their own devices as Britain struggled to keep its own people fed throughout the war.

One of the other most striking exhibits was a walk-in reproduction of a trench during warfare. Closed spaces do not sit well with me; I cannot imagine having lived and fought there ninety years ago (a similar mock-up of a bomb shelter during the blitz came with the warning that visitors should not enter who have weak hearts or object to confined spaces; I took the latter as a personal warning and stayed out). Nearby the exit from the mock trench was small corner of the exhibit dedicated to an incident I’d only heard rumor of from pop culture reference, and never known if it was true or myth. If you listen to country music, you’ve probably run across the song Belleau Woods, from Garth Brooks’ earlier years; on the far opposite end of the music spectrum, if you listened to modern rock in the 1990s, you might remember The Farm and their song Altogether Now, which tells the same story set to a synthesized version of the harmony line from the Pachelbel’s Cannon.

Turns out, the incident really happened: on Christmas Eve of 1914, along the line marking the Western Front, the soldiers in the German trenches near Flanders stopped firing and starting singing carols. The opposing side slowly realized that this was not a ploy, and a spontaneous truce erupted on the battlefields of Belgium. In some areas the truce lasted days, some claim weeks, until generals on both sides forced their foot soldiers back into battle. In the remaining three years of the war, officers specifically forbade their soldiers from pulling a similar stunt on Christmas Eve, and it never happened again. It’s one of those moments of history when human nature surprises you, and the people in the trenches turn around and tell the war-makers exactly what they think of this business of killing. It kind of takes the breath out you.

Anyhow, continuing in my circuit around the museums of London, the next day I went to the museum complex that houses the Victoria & Albert museum on one side of the street and the Museum of Natural History on the other side. The line for the latter was out the door and around the block, so even though that’s what I really went for, I decided to cross the street to the other one. This had some interesting exhibits – especially a whole hall devoted to fashion, where ancient garments are displayed next to last year’s Prada, as well as a massive hall of castings of famous statues and monuments.

In this week also I had my first out-of-town visitor – Alicia, who is employed along with me in the glorious ranks of the dredge girls. Actually, she’s now a tugboat girl (way better pay, way worse living conditions). She and her family were visiting her sister, who is a grad student at one of the many institutions in the same neighbourhood as mine. Her sister happens to be a student in history education with an emphasis on museums and multi-media learning, which meant that she had the scoop on all the best museums to see. The two of them came and visited me on the evening when Alicia arrived, before they left for a few days’ canal trip out of the city. But they were coming back into town in time for – what’s it called? – bonfire night or something like that. Since I hadn’t heard anyone else mention it, I took it in faith that this wasn’t some Leftwich family tradition of staking and burning Alicia’s gullible friends. No, apparently, this is the night when the city of London and its inhabitants burn things and set off fireworks to commemorate some plot to blow up Parliament four hundred years ago, which ended in the drawing and quartering of the villain or scapegoat (depending on whose version you listen to) Guy Fawkes. Ah, Britain: still celebrating while most of the rest of the world is trying to politely forget that we ever did things like drawings and quarterings. You can even visit websites like http://www.bonefire.org/guy/, where you can virtually burn Guy Fawkes face all over again.

Anyhow, I met up with Alicia and family again Friday when they rolled back into town and went out to a lovely dinner with them in Chinatown. Saturday being the night of burning things, I met up with them again and we went out to dinner at a gorgeous and yummy Middle Eastern restaurant along the Thames, where the waiters told us we could eat there as long as we promised to be out by 7:30. Since it was only 5:30, we shrugged our shoulders and agree that sounded fine. By the time we left there around 6:45, a crowd was gathering along the waterfront accompanied by several small phalanxes of police officers in neon green vests. Alicia stopped and asked, and it turned out by pure happenstance that we were very close to the launch site for the city’s fireworks display. So we climbed out onto the Southwark bridge and got probably the best view in the city of the explosions over the river. Well worth the wait!

The remainder of the weekend I tried to catch up on some things I’d been neglecting, especially since this marks the beginning of reading week, when we are expected to do much, uh, reading, though most of us have plans to escape town in one way or another – I for one will be going up to Dublin for four days toward the end of the week. Much to do before then...

Oh yeah, that school thing...

People keep asking me, "So what about school, how are your classes?" Since I'm already half-way through the first term, here's the scoop...

During the ten-week fall term, my track (Control of Infectious Disease) takes both general courses on public health stuff and a core series on contagious agents and their control. Monday morning is basic statistics; Tuesday morning is basic epidemiology. For Monday through Wednesday afternoons, we got to choose two of three offered classes - health economics, and two different versions of health policy. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we have lectures on different diseases and their control.

Obviously, the latter half of all that is what most of us came to this program for! The other classes are variously interesting and/or necessary, but we have to sit through them all. Fortunately, most of this is stuff that I've at least vaguely heard before, so it's alot less challenging for me than for the good portion of my classmates who have not only never had this material before, but are also studying it in their second (sometimes third) language. I had a class in stats, though almost ten years go. Epidemiology was covered in a breakneck few sessions during the first couple years of med school, economics I had a couple courses in way back when (as in, back in my brief stay at UC Santa Cruz), and health policy is just sort of something I've had to live and breath for the last couple of years, so that's nothing particularly new (especially since the Oregon Health Plan - the state's unique version of Medicaid - is given as an example of one thing or another in at least every other class).

Anyhow, stats and epidemiology are dry but duly necessary. Health econ is largely review for me (drawing supply and demand curves - not exactly rocket science, though it would be alot to learn for the first time on top of all the other classes right now), but the lecturers are generally quite good enough to keep it interesting. The health policy course that I chose out of the two is interesting in that it is actually taught down at the London School of Economics. Apparently, some students choose it so that they can brag that they took a class at LSE (apparently that has some sort of reputation that is lost on me); I took it for the simple reason that all courses are required to describe ahead of time how much group work is assigned (a practice that I think should be made mandatory in the US on pain of forcible, unanesthetized toenail removal), and this one listed less group work than the others. And I was correct: any class that advertises Group Work inevitably ends in the dreaded Group Project - a little exercise that, in my unhappily large experience with such things, usually ends in annoyance, unequal distribution of work, and the hasty end of friendships. In any case, the LSE class is interesting, as well as having a minimal amount of group work: many of the lectures are presented by Julian Le Grand, who is apparently famous in some circles, having recently worked as the advisor to Tony Blair on matters of national health.

The weak spot in all these classes is, unfortunately, the seminar sessions that accompany the lectures. I think the problem is largely driven by the fact that big universities have loads of PhD students who are qualified to TA masters level classes. But LSHTM has a low PhD student to Msc student ratio, meaning that they appear to scrounge up anyone with a pulse to teach the seminar sessions. My stats TA is good, but tends to go around the room explaining the same thing to each person individually rather than to the whole group, making the session go til the very last minute when the exercises only take about half that. Epidemiology seminar is one of those unfortunate experiences where I understand it all when I walk in, and walk out totally confused; it also moves so slow that there is never enough time to finish even the most straight-forward exercises. Health econ seminar is taught by a young-ish woman who really just needs to put some spine behind her teaching; she is very sweet, but so unsure of herself it's almost painful to watch. This is not helped by the fact that there is one member of my class group who likes to talk, pretty much to himself, for 10-15 minutes at time, while everyone is forced to listen; she doesn't quite have the gumption to redirect him back on topic, much less tell him to can it as the rest of us are about to do. This guy has also been known to ask around class if there are any members of particular ethnic groups present, and when there are none, he proceeds to make bigoted comments in front of all regarding the health practices of various minority groups. Which is made even more odd by the fact that he's Asian; I'm tempted to make a few outrageous comments about Asians just to see if he even notices what a dumb**s he sounds like when he talks like that.

In any case, that's the early part of the week. The rest of the week is the infectious disease/ID stuff, and so far I've been very impressed with the quality of the lecturers. We certainly had a higher proportion by far of atrocious lecturers at OHSU than I've encountered here. There have been a couple of rather sleepy lectures (including, apparently, one that I missed when I left for Paris - glad I didn't miss the TB conference for that!), but most have been very good. Also, this is the side of ID that always interested me - weird contagious things that spring out of the rainforest (or out of the desert, or the beef industry, or other sundry sources). I decided against being in ID doctor when I realized that most of what they do is a) manage hospital infections and b) rule out infectious disease when no one can figure out what a patient has. If I could chase ebola around Africa or track leishmaniasis in the Middle East, I'd suffer through an internal medicine residency and an ID fellowship in a heartbeat. As it is, I think I'll get more front-lines ID experience as a family medicine doc, since infectious problems tend to concentrate in poorer populations, and usually family practitioners are about the only doctors that poor people get to see. That's one reason why I'm happy with this program - it puts me back in touch with the ID world, but without having to redirect my entire career for it.

Overall, I'm quite happy with the program. As I had hoped, it's very interesting but not too terribly challenging. Which means that I think I finally officially qualify as overeducated. I'm having a great time and wouldn't trade this year (or the debt that comes with it) for anything, but at the same time, I do have to acknowledge that this is more fun than serious work. It's definitely more of a process of filling in gaps than racing over new territory. Which is good, because while I have really like medical school all along, I really don't feel the need to repeat that kind of stress and that kind of mind-bending information cram that characterized the first two years.

Which also brings up another aspect of this program, one that makes it a little more challenging: in med school, we had no cumulative tests - every two to three weeks we'd take an exam, and that was the end of that material. In this program, we have no exams or graded material at all until the spring; all of the fall courses are graded by written exams taken in June. June? You mean, I have to remember all this stuff eight months from now?! Apparently so. That is something I'm not particularly looking forward to, as well as the fact that those exams consist of three-hour essay-writing sessions two days in a row - something that I'm not sure I will do so well at with the way my wrists get stiff and sore and a little numb when I use them too much.

So that's the long description of my classes - more than anyone who asked actually wanted to know, I'm sure!