Chapter One: Starting the Revolution!

I cannot believe that I have been here for almost three weeks! Even more amazing is the fact that, in those three weeks, this is really the first time I have felt that I have enough time to actually write!

Everything has been going very very well. I love my housemates and, although our apartment in extremely tiny with barely any working electronics, we are having a ton of fun. But it is not all play, the Gaiety School of Acting has been working us very hard. I have class every day of the week and they are intense. Mondays and Fridays I only have one class which will make travelling easier. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays I have class from 9 to about 7pm, and Tuesdays we usually have a play that we go see which means we don't get back to our apartment until around 11pm. Pretty full days! On Thursdays I only have one Gaiety class but I also am auditing Writing on the Wall which is a course about the Northern Troubles tought through art mediums by the head of the IES Dublin programme. What is especially interesting about the class is that Ashley (our teacher) actually grew up in Northern Ireland during the worst part of the troubles. His family was Protestant and they actually had to flee their house because his father was involved in business with Loyalists, Republicans, and British which means that when the IRA found out his was involved with the British they had to flee as the British had intercepted a kill list with their family's name on it!
So far I have not had much time for a social life of any sort. Mostly due to an insane workload but I have managed to get out an about. The Fringe Theatre Festival is going on and my first Saturday here I went to the Fringe's opening party. It was pretty amazing. There was really fantastic Samba mixed with techno for dancing and a live drum line that played with capoeira dancers and it was just a great party!
The next weekend my housemates and the boys who live in the other IES apartment in our complex took the bus out to Galway. I am absolutely in love with Galway! It is a beautiful sea side town with a vibrant night life, which we enjoyed. We ended up randomly happening on the Beer Haus, which was pretty dead when we got there, but by the end of the night we were one of the only ones with a table and it was packed! My housemate Tara was getting hit on hard core by a local named Mihel. It was pretty hilarious. Galway is also very close to the Cliffs of Moher (where they filmed the Princess Bride Cliffs of Insanity scene) and so we decided to take a bus tour of that part of County Clare. We went to the cliffs, a fairy fort, an abbey, the famous cemetery with all the crosses, as well as just looking around the beautiful country side.
This past weekend was Culture Night in Dublin. Culture Night essentially equates into Free Art Night which was really great for me as I recently locked myself out of my accounts! So I spent the entire weekend with no cash and no way of getting any money but the 200 euro I keep for emergencies. Well- the emergency came but no store would break my 200 note so I ended up completely moneyless. It was a pretty interesting experience. Culture Night was really wonderful as we were able to go around and get free admission to museums and cathedrals and a whole host of other things. I ended up bouncing between groups before I finally ended up with Peter and Bryan. We went through Christchurch Cathedral- which was packed with tourists so lost a lot of its appeal to me. Then, on our way to find a place that was supposed to have live music, we encountered on this performance of men in Druid/monk cloaks playing drums while two lads twirled fire batons or fire poi. We ran around trying to find our way into the square where they were performing. Finally we ended up in the courtyard of Dublin Castle behind these huge gates looking into a second courtyard that no one was allowed in. The performance was just finishing up and five giant colourful performers on stilts were walking around interacting with men and women in fancy looking suits and dresses drinking champaign. A local woman who was watching behind us told her husband that she refused to look through bars as she thought the country was through that. Then she told us to climb the fence and start the revolution! We aren't sure if she was joking or not. However, Bryan decided it would be fun to pretend so we took some photos of him and Peter trying to climb the fence. Only problem is that the Guarda, who were watching us at this point, didn't look to pleased so we decided to leave. We found the live music but it wasn't nearly as interesting as we were hoping so we ended up just wandering around Temple Bar where we happened upon the crazy street performer. He was dressed in the most ludicrously short Lederhausen just alienating the audience. At one point he called up members of the audience - all children save one very enthusiastic 20 or so year old American boy (although sadly not Bryan)- and gave them bells. Well, one should really never give a 7 year old boy a bell. The performance ended up being hilarious as the kids were pretty much brats but what the performer would do was walk to who he wanted to have play the bell and hit them on the head with a squeaking-fuzzy toy type thing. He hit them really hard on the head which was bothering me. One girl flinched every time. And there was this adorable little boy, he couldn't have been more than 4, and he just couldn't figure it out and the performer was dreadful to him! I was actually getting really upset. But then a little boy in a wheelchair tried to hit the performer with his bell and I felt better. Too bad he missed! While all of this was going on a group of German College Students walked by and I was able to understand enough to roughly translate what they were saying into - "that's not a real German" which made me laugh. After it was all over he asked the audience to guess the song and then told us it was Rachmaninoff’s 5^th piano concerto which made me laugh as there is no 5^th. Personally I thought it sounded more like Bartok! But after that we decided to leave as he was still going on and we were less than impressed. We headed down to an art gallery that was supposed to have refreshments and a member of the Fringe Festival talking about his show. Only problem is that Bryan got us lost. Well, not lost, just seriously misplaced. Peter seemed to get fed up and decided to go home. Bryan then told Peter where to go home (pointing him in the opposite direction than what was actually home) and Bryan and I proceeded down a very sketchy looking street which Bryan was sure was the correct one. Turns out he was right. The Lab, as the gallery was called, was very interesting. Although, to be honest, the art was a bit over my head. It was all very interesting though. The staircase had a bunch of small art exhibits around, including an entire play script that fell from the very top of the fourth floor to the bottom of the staircase where the pages were burned. There was also an exhibit with a long piece of white butcher paper where the spectators were invited to draw. I ended up drawing and roughly transcribing a bit of the very repetitive minimalist piano playing into the background. We never found the Fringe talk and we didn’t really understand or appreciate the other exhibits. There was one room with giant pieces of Styrofoam with photos of mountains or projections of period movies with women running around after squirrels. All very strange. Needless to say we gave up on it all and went back into city centre. We weren’t sure what we wanted to do and ended up in a square outside of the GSA. They happened to be gearing up for a screening of Once and so Bryan and I ended up sitting down in this courtyard, surrounded by people, staring up at the side of a building with the film projected onto it. There was surround sound provided by rock concert speakers all around the square, and the whole thing was just indescribably amazing. The film itself wasn’t really all that great in my opinion, but I enjoyed it immensely. The music is amazing and where better to appreciate a film about a Dublin street performer than in a Dublin street right?

The rest of my days have been filled with reading and plays. We have gone to two plays with my Contemporary Irish Drama class. Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. No Man’s Land was so boring I almost fell asleep. Which is really sad as the acting was superb with the actors who play Dumbledore and Filch in the Harry Potter films, the actor who plays Lord Boleyn in the Tudors, and a very famous British comedian. However the play itself was dreadful. I am not a fan of Pinter. An Ideal Husband was enrapturing. They decided to perform the play through a Brechtian method of making sure the audience is aware that the play is a play and the characters are merely actors. They did this through having no masking, fog lights to show where the light beams were coming from, and having the actors address the audience a lot. Plus the main actress was out sick and so a member of the cast was reading her role from a script- which I believed actually aided the performance. I just loved it. This week we are going to a dance performance where they, supposedly, allow the audience to drive around in bumper cars! We’ll see. But this season is definitely going to be giving Hey Girl! a run of its money in the Weirdest Show I’ve Ever Seen category!

And that just about sums up the last three weeks!