Kick-Ass Ireland
Some days I sit still and think about how my life became a dream full-circle. There’s William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Brendan Behan. Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Land of Heart’s Desire and Yeats’s grave. Dubliners, Ulysses and Bloomsday. The mountains, lakes, Dublin, Sligo and the Shannon. Brú na Boinne, Corcaigh, Beara, Daingean Uí Chúis, Zú Bhaile Átha Cliath, craic agus ceol. Brian Ború, Michael Collins, Theobald Wolfe Tone and Daniel O’Connell. Seven hundred years of cruelty, yet still able to endure hard times. Writers, dancers, taps, tin whistles and uilleann pipes. Books, almighty libraries and small bookshops selling secrets. Friendships gained, lost and renewed. New alliances forged in foothills and strengthened on mountain tops. “You, the Irish” becoming “Us…
Changing Ireland
I’m well into my 10th year of living in Ireland, and I often wonder about what changed during those years. A long list builds itself in my mind on people, mentality, culture, politics, nature, life… Writing about everything would result into one very long blog post that will eventually bore everyone, so I will try to keep it rather short. After all, I’m here to be entertained myself. During my first weeks in Dublin I was house hunting and it’s fair to say that I saw serious differences in what was up for grabs. Apartments with bright blue carpets, surely there to blind its tenants and with hallways like a maze. Now how should I find my way out here? I can’t even find my way out of a cereal…
Health is not valued until sickness comes
Sadly my attempt to post daily has not had much success so far. Blame the old trigeminal nerve pains in my face and/or occipital pains behind my eyes. That said, I continue reading because the book I’m in love with right now is regarding psychology, good old Dr. Sigmund Freud and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It’s hard to put the book down but at times I need to be mindful of the aches and pains so they don’t get any worse. And that means that I am not blogging as much as I want to. Like Albert Schweitzer once said: “Serious illness doesn’t bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host.” I am also because life is bigger than my neurological illness, and life will always be much…
Living in Ireland: a life less ordinary
When I moved from Belgium to Ireland in 2002, I was on top of the world. I thought knew all I had to know about Ireland and sure, I’d adapt very quickly to living life a little bit slower than I was used to. Of course I had traveled to Ireland before actually moving over here, and had fallen in love with it even harder than I ever thought I would. Dublin was a small disappointment at first because the truth is, Dublin is just like any other European capital. But the people, they were and still are the ones that would have me ending up in a stitch, or leave me wondering about their sanity on more than one occasion. A wise man once said: “This is one race…