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Note: During my time in Ireland, I sent my friends lengthy journal excerpts. This is one of those exerpts. Note that I followed Irish spelling conventions while in that country. The Ireland Chronicles, Part IIDear Friends and Family, A guaranteed cure for egotism is to shop in a foreign grocery store. Especially a grocery store that uses a) fake money such as "punts" and "pence" and b) fake measurements such as "grams" and "mililitres." Oddly enough, they sell Coca~Cola by the quart. Just kidding. Of course, if you've read the news, you know that the fake money in Ireland and a lot of other cute little countries will soon be replaced by /another/ kind of fake money, the euro. (The European Union is also replacing their antiquated measurement system with a new system that everyone understands: "smidgen," "handful," and "boatload.") There are signs up in all the banks and grocery stores reminding people that the Euro is coming, and that, soon, all of the Irish money will expire and be worthless. The subliminal message seems to be "Those punts are just confetti come January first, so you might as well spend 'em now buying a boatload of cheap knickknacks!" Artie read an article in the newspaper two days ago that "E-day" is coming on September 1st. E-day is Euro day, the day when the six major printing facilities throughout Europe will ship five-hundred billion dollars worth of Euros to retailers and banks throughout Europe. (Isn't it funny that they describe the value of the Euros in dollars?) September 1st will be a very big day for the armoured car business. Some countries are planning to use the army to transport the money, as they are very afraid of sophisticated armed robbers who will try to hijack these trucks. Artie's question is, if these hijackers are so sophisticated, why don't they just hit those six warehouses? Warehouses don't move around so much, you know? The U.S. has missile defense, the European Union has E-day. Proof that rich countries, like rich people, often do incredibly silly things with their money. Speaking of money, Ireland's economic "Celtic Tiger" is now more like the "Celtic Puma." It's still a good economy, but there are big layoff announcements every day. The Irish term is "job redundancies." Nobody gets sacked/fired/canned anymore. The major industries are high-tech manufacturing, software, tourism, wool, U2, potatoes, banking, liquor, and fancy crystal glasses you're not supposed to touch. (Toddlers aren't allowed anywhere /near/ the city of Waterford, or they will be grounded for a week.) (Northern Ireland, of course, makes a lot of very high-quality plastic explosive, but the Irish, in their generosity, prefer to give it away, free of charge.) All of these industries combined don't begin to approach the GDP spent on lottery tickets. The Irish government really gives its citizens the hard sell on lotto tickets. They sell them at pretty much all government buildings. As a resident alien, Artie spends a lot of time in queue in government buildings, and they are always selling lottery tickets. The newspapers, which have a pretty cozy relationship with the government, always feature half-page stories on the lucky chap who hit the lotto this week. They never run stories on the people who don't win the lottery; maybe the Irish really are as lucky as they claim. (There are only 3 million people in Ireland; tickets cost £1, and the weekly prize is usually about £1 million. Think about it.) Sales tax on most goods is included in the price, so you don't have to think about it. Artie's guess is that the Irish /don't/ think about it. The sales tax here is a wallet-busting 17%. If people thought about it, they'd riot. The weather here is way beyond anything New England ever threw at him. Cold and wet, even in August. Newspapers here are very empathetic, and the Irish don't really go in for all this newfangled proofreading stuff. If a couple words are misspelled, no bother; people will get the general idea. Let's suppose a plane crashes and kills 5 people. The New York Times would say "Five Die in Plane Crash." The London Times would say "Five People Die in Terrible Plane Crash." The Irish Times would say "Five People are Killed in Tragic Plane Crash, and We Feel Terrible. You Should Feel Terrible, Too." Artie's making this up, but do you get the idea about the sentimentality here? Half of the population of Ireland is under the age of 30. Weird. British people here still act as if they own the place. This outlook does not go over well with the natives. Yan, the little boy in Artie's house, does not have any toddler friends because he hits and bites other children. He has quite a violent streak in him, which is strange because his parents are very gentle. Irish people, particularly men between 16 and 30, seem to be a good deal more rough-and-tumble than their American counterparts. Quite a few people on the bus Monday morning have cut and bruised faces, and Artie doesn't think that it's all from playing rugby on the weekend. Yesterday, there was a long queue to use the ATM machine, and two men got into a fist-fight. A thin man with glasses landed two pretty good jabs on the cheek of a shorter, more muscular guy. Some other people separated them, but then the peacemakers started arguing, too. Artie moved on. Irish people think the American economy is getting worse and they are very worried about it. Irish people think Hollywood movies are getting worse and they are even more worried about this. Artie's French friends think that /American Beauty/ was the only decent movie to come out of the US in five years. The city government is known as Dublin Corporation. Dublin Corporation are a plural entity. Dublin Corporation need to do more to differentiate public trash cans and public mail boxes. They look a little too similar. Irish people have no compunction whatsoever about smoking cigarettes on buses, in movie theatres, in restaurants, whatever. Often, indoors is just as foggy as outdoors. Artie had two job interviews this week. On Wednesday, he interviewed for a position promoting an upstart poetry and short story magazine. He didn't know what to expect, but the receptionist gave him an application and asked for his Curriculum Vitae (nobody calls it a resume here). He heard the familiar start-up chime of a Power Macintosh, which was reassuring. After a while, a man in his thirties, named Mark Ward, called Artie into the back office. Mark Ward is a poet, as it happens, and the new magazine is self-published and contains mostly his own work. He financed this little operation by selling a single sheet of laminated paper&endash;poetry on one side, a photograph on the other&endash;door-to-door in a Dublin neighbourhood. He asked £3 (about $3.50) for this page, which also would go towards a subscription to the magazine once it actually came out. He claims he sold 10,000 of these pages, and that the first real edition of the /Little Picture/ will go to press in two weeks. He wants people to sell it door-to-door, and also to go to local businesses and sell advertising space. He wants each edition to focus on a different neighbourhood in Dublin, printing local poets and advertising local shops. He asked Artie if he thought Blanchardstown (Artie's new home) could sustain its own issue. Mark was very interested in Artie's computer skills, as Mark is doing most of the layout himself, with X-acto knives and rubber cement. Now, to be honest, if this job interview had happened in the U.S., Artie would have run out of the building and never looked back. It just seemed too silly. Sure, Artie loves literature, and he's hardly one to talk about the silliness of following a dream (he moved to Ireland to learn about poetry), but this whole scheme just seemed too crazy. Writers, particularly Irish writers, particularly poets, are not famous for their business sense. (Seamus Heaney, after winning the Nobel Prize in 1995, blew most of his winnings on lotto.) Some guy with a receptionist in his living room wanted to print poetry magazines out of his bedroom? And he wanted Artie's help with layout and with door-to-door sales? Yeah, right. Artie really hopes he gets this job. He'd never do it in America, but here, it seems just crazy enough to work. He'll find out on Monday. On a more realistic note, he also (at last!) interviewed with Theresa Black of Osborne Recruitment. Melissa said she was great and Melissa was right. Theresa is pretty sure she can find regular office work for Artie, although he might have to give up his job tutoring English on Thursday and Friday afternoons. Whew! That's Ireland. More to come! -Artie Moffa Artie_Moffa@excite.com 16 West Way View Blanchardstown, Dublin 15 Republic of Ireland. |