chaos and noise

I'm posting snippets, mainly so things don't fall straight out of my head.

Just before leaving Dublin on Monday night, I saw Ketzal at the Fring festival. The show was... manic, bewildering. I loved it. From the opening moments (when the audience have to fight to clear plastic and foam off their seats, and are promptly clambered across by a tall man with a habit of picking up the audience and rearranging them), to the tearing down of the backdrop (which was used to fend off a group of other performers who'd been hiding behind it), to flooding the theatre so they could run about trailing droplets and ripples (in the best tradition of many Hong Kong crime flicks), the show kept going at a frantic pace.

It also went almost half an hour over time - if it appears in the Melbourne or Adelaide fringe festivals, don't schedule anything directly after it. It's a bit of dance, a bit of circus, a bit of bizarre costuming (mostly done with gaffer tape, black plastic sheets, and a few bits of coloured cloth). I don't make any claim to understand what went on, on stage or among the audience. I do know that it was the most fun I've ever had at a fringe show...

The trip to Bushmills took three buses and about six hours, heading north on the inland route. On the way, I met a Spaniard named Angel, who was riding a bike around Ireland in his two weeks of annual leave. The weather was closing in, he'd been riding for five hours already, and so he decided to catch the bus I was waiting for at Coleraine. A few hours later, we were having a few drinks at the only open pub we could find in the town...

Bushmills is a comfortably quiet little town, a few kilometres south of the causeway. If you ever visit the place, keep in mind that the hostel doesn't open until 5pm - I arrived at 2pm and wandered up and down the (short) main street to kill some time, browsing through a second-hand bookstore. After looking longingly at their hard-bound Ordnance Map Survey collection (I love maps, but I couldn't fit the things into my bag) I settled on a copy of "The Fairies of Ulster" - a handmade book, reprinting a series of articles from an Anthropological journal circa 1858.

I spent all of Wednesday on the coast, walking first to the Causeway itself - where I think I spent a few hours, climbed everything in reach, and took about a hundred photos. I love a national treasure that you can climb on :)

I then headed east past the Organ Pipes formation, until the paths were closed by landslides on the cliffs. Turning to the west, I walked to Dunluce Castle via a nice strip of beach (I had the place to myself, and walked barefoot through the waves) and Portballintrae (Ireland's Portsea or Sorrento - although I guess we copied them) - full of Mercedes and BMW's, and bereft of the cheerful greetings I'd had elsewhere on the coast.

The castle (thanks for the tip, Hugh) was well worth my £2 entry fee - despite the busloads of tourists who were taking photos from the road, once I crossed the entry bridge I had the place to myself. It's been heavily damaged by cannon fire across the ages, and the northern walls (and kitchen) fell into the sea one night - prompting the lady of the house to move the family home inland. Still, the round towers are intact, and I got to climb up a winding set of stairs to get a view all the way to Portrush, in the west.

I'd had glorious weather all day, but dark clouds blew in as I left the castle - a meteorological warning that it was time I headed back Bushmills. The warning came with impeccable timing, too, as I reached the old distillery just in time to join a tour...

Bushmills have been producing their whiskeys on site since 1608, making them the oldest licenced distillery in the world. After almost four hundred years, they've turned it into quite an art, too... I'd tried their "original" the night before, and sampled the twelve year old House Reserve after the tour. It was like drinking a roaring open fire - one sip and I could see why you'd use it to thaw out people frozen in the snow. I left the distillery with a lighter wallet and a heavier bag, having bought myself a bottle of the house reserve as a birthday present. I'll open it up for a suitably momentous occasion - looking ahead, I think there will be several coming up, over that horizon.

And that, in many more words than I'd expected to type, is the short version of what I've been up to over the last few days. The long version? Well, the best way of describing a tale is to tell the tale, in its entirety...

Q. What d'ye call a northside Dubliner in court?
A. The accused.

Q. What d'ye call a southside Dubliner in court?
A. Your Honour.

Dublin's been great so far. I've already walked off two edges of my map (note to self: get a better map). After two cities with right-angle streets, I've had some trouble adjusting to narrow, winding laneways - but the best thing about travelling on foot is that if you walked there, you can generally walk back again later on. In my many miles of rambling, I've wandered past everything from super-trendy Temple Bar restaurants, to a group of teenagers trying to demolish a parked car using 2x4's. I've since decided not to plan any shortcuts via the housing commission flats up north.

Getting here proved a little harder than expected. Apparently, airlines have about a 10% drop-out rate on seats allocated. Their solution? Simply sell 10% more tickets than they have seats. I spent a few hours in Toronto Airport, waiting to see if they could fit me onto the flight that I'd paid for. Five minutes before boarding started, I was finally given a seat...

Once in Dublin, I headed to the hostel to crash for a couple of hours - partly feeling the jetlag of a five-hour shift, but mostly just feeling the end of a week's poor sleeping habits. Globetrotters feels like the result of describing a hostel to a luxury hotel owner, and then having them try to build one based on their own experiences. It's great - security entrance out front, sparkling clean stainless steel bathrooms, comfy beds, muted lighting all through the building.

After spending about three hours walking blindly about the city, I decided the best way of finding out what I'd seen was to take a tour. Lucky I did - it turned out to be a damn good way of speed-loading about sixteen centuries of Irish history into my head, courtesy of Tommy Graham's Historical Walking Tour. As he said at the start of the tour, "You'd better pay attention - otherwise you might miss a century or two."

My "wander blindly into big events" abilities are as keen as ever, it seems. Without realising it was happening, I saw the opening bit of the Toronto International Film Festival, and now I've arrived here in time for the start of the Dublin Fringe. I've just bought a ticket for tomorrow night's performance of Ketzal - a dance/circus hybrid from Russia, which sounds like fun.