#oilean

The first class of the day was Irish music class. Surprise surprise – we all got free tin whistles! The chaos that ensued can only be heard, not explained, but just imagine a class of educated college students dissolving into the antics of fourth graders given their first recorder lesson. Even if none of us ever master the tin whistle, we all have a nice new Irish souvenir.

The second class of the day was Irish language class. Today we learned different body parts, how to count to ten (only when counting things, not people!), and a little Irish rhyme.

Bhi subh milis Ar bhascrann an dorais Ach mhuch me an corrai Ionam a d’eirigh Mar smaoinigh me ar an la A bheas an bascrann glan Agus an laimh bheag Ar iarraidh.

The rhyme is about a man coming home and finding his doorknob covered in jam. He is upset for a moment but then thinks of the day his child will no longer be around to cover the door in jam, and is sad instead. Kind of a sobering poem, since the word “iarraidh” does not mean gone away in the sense that the child went on to live his life, but instead means “lost,” as the child-like state can never be regained (i.e. the kid is now a teenager).

But the cool part is that I now know a poem in Irish. :P

After class we immediately loaded the bus for an evening trip to Tralee. The town is about an hour from Dingle, so I passed the time writing this blog post in Word. When we arrived in Tralee, we went directly into Ristorante Uno for a free three course meal. I normally only ever eat a main course, so I ordered a starter for my friends to share. We had also eaten lunch pretty late in the day (delicious potato and leek soup!), so I wasn’t hungry at all. I ordered a small main course for myself and thus I was able to save room for dessert. 

We were cutting it pretty close – by the time the desserts were being served, it was ten or so minutes before the show was supposed to start. We scarfed our deserts as quickly as possible. Thankfully, the theatre was directly across the street.

We had been warned the show was entirely in Gaelic, so we weren’t entirely sure how much we would be able to comprehend. But thanks to the descriptive program and our prior reading of The Islandman, we were able to figure out what the characters were doing. The show was called “Oilean,” and was essentially a quick overview of life on the Blasket Islands. The show was inundated with music and Irish step dancing. The singing and acting was brilliant. Though there was no translation, it was still easy to grasp the emotion of the piece. Life on the Blaskets was not easy – you were trapped by the whims of the weather, unable to travel or even at times to support yourself and your family as the waves crashed wildly against the islands. The play ended as the human history of the Blaskets ended – families packing up and evacuating the islands for good, never to live again on the absolute western edge of Ireland. Funnily enough, the people on the Blaskets would joke that the “next parish over was Boston,” explaining that there was no human life between them and America.

I thought the show was beautifully done, and I was very grateful to have the opportunity to witness Irish theatre. We left quickly afterwards and headed home. By this point we knew that our own trip to the Blasket Islands had been postponed. The plans for tomorrow: class at 9:30, and then a surfing lesson in the afternoon. Looks like I’ll be wearing absolutely everything I packed after all – my swimsuit was the only thing that had not yet been used.