Ireland – Day 2: Connemara
January 6, 2010
I thought I was over jetlag, but right now it’s 8 in the morning. Clearly I was wrong. I guess jetlag gives me a normal sleep schedule.
I thought I was recovered from jetlag yesterday evening. Our professor told us there was a TV show about farming that we should watch from 8:30 to 9. I don’t understand how I timed it, but somehow I fell asleep exactly at 8:30 and woke up exactly at 9. Although I had missed the show, I felt refreshed and stayed up until about midnight, thinking I had recovered from jetlag. But the sun still isn’t up yet.
Anyway, yesterday we took a trip to Connemara, an area in western Ireland where the primary language is Irish. Our main reason for going to Connemara was to visit a beach where the sand was made of bits of hardened seaweed. It was a beautiful beach, and apparently it’s only one of a few like it in the entire world.
There were two primary themes being discussed yesterday that I kept thinking about. One was climate change. Ireland is really, really cold right now, which isn’t normal. Roads are covered in frost, because that happens so rarely and people aren’t prepared to put salt on the roads. Lakes are frozen over, and the people who live near those lakes have probably never seen that happen before in there entire lives. Is this a fluke, a statistical anomaly, or is this the start of a new trend? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, but it’s pretty strange. On the one hand, it’s amazing to see Ireland during such an abnormal time, but hopefully this season will stay abnormal and there won’t be any more like it. If this is the start of climate change in Ireland, it could have disastrous consequences.
The other thing we’ve been talking about is sustainability. Is it advantageous, or even possible, for Ireland to be completely self-sustaining? Well, it obviously was for most of its history, but now much of the food in Ireland is being imported from other countries in the EU. This is good in some ways; if it’s a bad year for farming for some reason, it’s not as much of a problem. But there is a movement in Ireland to buy local products and be self-sustaining. When we went grocery shopping, on our receipt every local product had a clover next to it, and at the bottom, underneath our total, was another total of all the money we had spent on Irish products. It ended up being about half of what we payed, so about half of the food we bought was local. In addition, a lot of the local food was shelved together in the supermarket. People are definitely aware of where the food they buy comes from, which makes sense, since Ireland is largely a farming economy.
Anyway, hopefully things will warm up soon. See you later.
