Features
Where in the world is Lucas Phillips ’16
By Lucas Phillips’16
April 10, 2015
These kinds of reflections, it seems to me, come in various forms.
There is the day-in-the-life account: Today, I wandered the Northside shooting photos. Along the way, in the midst of the city, I passed a fenced-in field of horses, a bathtub on the sidewalk, a weathervane depicting a woman with two pints, a giant metal robot by an auto body shop, an old man sweeping the street with a friend, a neon sign flashing ‘fresh fish’ and the same beautiful woman twice in Phoenix Park.
Or in the tourist checklist version of the day (just add adjectives + water!): Today I walked past the Four Courts, the former Jameson Whiskey distillery, the defunct Richmond Surgical Hospital, Phoenix Park, the Wellington Monument, Heuston Station, the Guinness buildings and St. Audoen’s Church.
The list of street names is a colorful enough account of the day alone, perhaps (with a Joyce-like, labyrinthian specificity): St. Augustine, Usher’s Quay, Church, Brunswick, Grangegorman, Kirwan, Manor, Prussia, North Circular, Chesterfield, Conyngham, Parkgate, St. John’s, Bow, Thomas, John (not in saint form this time), Oliver Bond.
There is also the reflection on the funniest/scariest/learningest/nicest trip: County Mayo, traveling alone; Matt Molloy and friends playing a session in the back room of his own pub while I dried my pants by the fire—soaked through by a storm as I climbed Crough Patrick—drinking Smithwick’s with a Guinness head.
The reflections I tend to like are the ones grown out of collected little images, in a haiku, for example:
A heron switched banks
as I passed by the walls of
the Liffey at night.
A man in a tie
grinned the length of his front stairs
at me, there out front.
On Thomas Street boxes,
heroine addicts hold hands,
waiting, usually.
There’s the this-country-is-not-like-America reflection: there are only two stores in Dublin which sell matzo and neither brand is Kosher or approved for Passover use. Evidently, the 1800 Jews in this country eat blessed cardboard instead (I’m sure no one notes any difference).
Or, the quirks we love reflection: the pigeon coop in the housing complex next door, the little man with the big white beard who parks nightly at the end of the bar in Darkey Kelly’s, the woman who hula-hoops in the courtyard, ‘like’ used as a placeholder at the end of the sentence by Irish kids, like.
Life is so easily collapsible into the order and expectations of these kinds of reflections, of blogs: revelation, self-evaluation, confusion, comedy, the language of different plugs, of church steeples, of weather. It becomes a mediator between experience and understanding. It might say something, after all, that this second part of my reflection has been much more challenging to write since it’s outside of that discourse.
While Kaitlin McCabe ’16 has told me, “I am free to be open and be myself abroad,” I find this blog language limits my sense of experience and also my sense of identity. It makes me feel as if there are only two kinds of study abroad experiences.
One can be another of the ol’ American study abroad pals, balancing unfamiliarity with familiarity. That’s the culture of unabashed safe tourism: hanging out with other Americans, drinking in Temple Bar, riding the hop on-hop off Dublin Bus Tours bus instead of the normal bus, trying to make the Facebook album title with the longest list of European city names. But it’s more complicated than that. To me, it means one kind of acceptance of mediated experience. On one hand, it is a more limited interaction with one’s surroundings, but on the other, it’s also just one way of embracing the feeling that life is lived in the terms of a blog, which again, is nearly impossible to avoid.
The other option is the illusion of immersion, of living like an Irishman. To not drink in Temple Bar becomes an act of Irishness because Dubliners hate Temple Bar. To take the city bus is to travel like a local. To not participate in the “Amsterdam-London-Lisbon-Barcelona-Rome” photo album traveling is like a statement of one’s commitment to Irish immersion. And the list of ‘authentic Irish’ choices is endless: fish & chips instead of burger & fries, scones instead of donuts, pubs instead of clubs, trad instead of pop music. I stopped wearing sunglasses because I wasn’t seeing other Dubliners wearing them. I’ve started judging pubs by their number of resident old Irish men. But if option one was an inauthentic experience, this is as much so. The search for the ‘authentic’ experience is as illusory as ever. One is still caught up in expectations about Ireland and attempts at conformity based on them. One is still caught up in blogland.
I only feel outside of this world by doing something that makes me feel like both an insider and an outsider in Dublin: I walk everywhere. It is not a big city, but here as anywhere else, people stick to their spaces and travel through the others with all possible speed. There’s a recurring joke in Ross O’Carroll-Kelly novels, arguably Ireland’s most popular series, that the Northside (North of the River Liffey) is a no-go zone. It’s satire, of course, but similarly, at an orientation run by my study abroad program, one student asked if there were any unsafe parts of Dublin. The presenter said simply that they’re all on the Northside, “and you wouldn’t really have any reason to go there.”
I’ve walked through the majority of the city, and hope to have done it all by the time I leave. Most of the time, I feel out-of-place, and I often find myself in some pretty strange neighborhoods (I wouldn’t know if they’re unsafe though, since that presenter dodged the question). I see a lot that’s unremarkable, even if one is thinking in terms of a social justice blog. And it’s when I hardly see anything at all that I feel really free of blogsville. I’m not a study abroad student; I’m not an Irishman; I’m just a weird dude walking around in a long green coat that no one’s seen around here before. I’m not seeing things in terms; I’m just there.
I’m also probably a bit lost.