Sheep!

The Airporter is a bus that runs from the Belfast Airport to L'Derry. It's very convenient, if a little dear. As I make my way from baggage claim to the Airporter, my first contact with an Irish person is about to begin.

"Yoogamabloogabloo."

"Excuse me?"

The bus driver slows down, making an extra effort to enunciate.

"Yoogonntoohoppallkeeside?"

"What?"

"You goin' to the hospital or Quayside*?"

"Umm..." My insides are wailing with despair. All five of the L'Derry locals are staring at me with an amused look in their eyes.

So I call Denise, who will heretofore be known as my Savior, and whine, "Denise, am I going to the Hospital or to Quayside?"

(My mom gets the same phone calls, except substitute Highway 85 and Highway 280 for "Hospital" and "Quayside.")

After sorting out where I need to go, we all get on the bus. I'm playing around with my new camera (thanks Aunt Debi and Aunt Sara!), and pretty soon I realize I'm missing my first hour in N. Ireland. That's one of the tough parts of having a camera. I was never really a camera person, figuring that I would remember anything worth remembering. Unfortunately, that logic works about as poorly as when I use it as my excuse for not writing a journal. Still, I learned early on that it's hard to balance taking pictures of your trip with actually enjoying your trip. Does anyone else have that problem? What do you do about it? (Points eyes meaningfully toward the comments section).

Now...on to the scenery. How much cliche could a cliche chuck chuck if a cliche chuck could chuck cliches? Imagine the most beautiful pasture you can think of, riddled with sheep and a few cows. Now, turn the green dial up several notches, make the sky blue with only a few clouds in it. Looking outside the window, I had to laugh. The place is so picturesque and beautiful, it's hard not to feel like they're playing a joke on us jaded Americans. The rolling hills of farmland look like something you would see in an exaggerated movie. The cliche is there for a reason...because it actually exists. I've just never seen it before, so I thought it was a thing of the past.


Okay, this was my first day with the camera, so my pictures don't really do it justice. I hope you all spent some quality time imagining.

The interesting thing to me about the countryside was the landscape. Each plot of land is quite small, and divided from the other squares of land by a border of trees and bushes. I took a very interesting class in the spring semester on European economic history from 1500-1800. Something I focused on was the agricultural element of the economy. Looking out the window of the bus, it seemed to me that a large part of N. Ireland appears the same as it did before the Industrial Revolution.

Something that puzzled me was the size of the plots of land. The trees formed a very clear border for each plot, but each plot was so small that I could not imagine anyone growing a surplus. Perhaps each family just has a subsistence farm? I wondered about that every time I drove through the countryside for almost a month, until someone told me that each family owned numerous plots, but that they were all dotted around the area. It has something to do with the way they divided up the land way back when. Anyway, this just added to the list of reasons why I'm glad I took that class. It's not very often that I see something in real life that I can directly apply back to the classroom. Oh sure, when I really think about it there are lots of things about the world around me that I can apply to my sociology classes, but this was just so readily apparent that it made me excited. If there's one thing that competes with Peace and Conflict Studies for me, it's got to be economic history.

Anyway, after an hour and a half of cows, sheep, green grass, blue sky, and rolling hills, the bus driver drops me off at Derry Quayside,

*for the uninitiated, Quayside is pronounced KEYside. I know. Who do they think they are?

which is a shopping center in the middle of town. Denise is there with her eldest daughter to meet me. Denise (a.k.a. Person who Saves) is the coordinator for Swarthmore's semester abroad in Northern Ireland. Since I'm coming to N. Ireland independently of the semester abroad program, I was surprised when she told me that she was coming to pick me up and take me to my dorm. Going over and above her job, she has helped me set up contacts with the people I need to interview, met with me weekly to go over my research, and just generally been a friend and a good person. It's inspiring to meet someone who so willingly gives of their free time and energy to help people out. I once asked her why she does all this, and she said, "Oh, it all comes around in the end." One can only hope.