The Road Less Traveled

How many of us spend our lives in a city we barely see?

It’s the same old story. Jaded by life, we go through our days with blinders on. Without the energy or the interest to see or do things. To explore.

There’s so much in Ottawa and around that I have never seen, and I lived there for 22 years. There was tons in Galway that I never saw in my four months there. I remember walking to work one morning in Galway, following the river back behind the Roisin Dubh, watching the swans and the garbage float side by side. And suddenly I was struck by the fact that, even though I was on my way to crappy job too early in the morning and even though it smelt like vomit and stale beer, I was in Ireland. It was so easy to forget. To concentrate on hating my job or on what club we were going to go to that night.

This time, I made a decision to change that.

I made a list. It’s a whole page of places to go around Newcastle. Most of them are either in the city or on the Tyne and Wear Metro system.

My best memory from Ireland was when we crawled underneath the Blarney Castle with only the little flashlight from my keychain. Because we were terrified and had no idea where we were going or whether we might get thrown out before we got to kiss the Blarney Stone, but we were there. In this little passageway underneath a castle. People had been there before - the bottles and garbage everywhere proved that. But in a place so chalk full of tourists, for that moment it was ours.

This weekend I became an adventurer. Living in alone in a new city is terrifying and lonely at times, but I made this decision for myself and I know that I can love this. So I went exploring, to distract myself from the small ache of loneliness that followed me to London and back again.

This weekend was Heritage Open Days in Tyne and Wear. Tyne and Wear is the area of between the two named rivers, including Newcastle, Gateshead and Sunderland. They were offering special tours of many places that weren’t normally open to the public, and even the places that were normally open were free. I admit that I forgot about it entirely on Friday, and slept in quite late on Saturday. But I still managed to make it to three places on Saturday and one today.

One of the buildings I saw, Alderman Fenwick’s House wasn’t normally open at all. And the highlight of my day on Saturday was the Bell Tower at St. Nicholas Cathedral. I had gone to St. Nicholas the first Sunday I arrived in Newcastle. It’s a gorgeous old church, and I walked around inside the seemingly deserted building for a while on my way back to my flat. I returned on Sunday for two reasons. The first was that it was close to the Holy Jesus Hospital, which I visited before it, and the second was that the Heritage Open Days booklet promised a display of the oldest books in the Cathedral’s collection.

I arrived just in time for the magic words.

“So I guess you all want to go up to the tower then?” The guide said to the gathering crowd. I immediately tried to blend into the group. I definitely wanted to go up to the tower.

The staircase up the Bell Tower is impossibly narrow, steep and dark. The first place we got to was the Bell Room. From here, the Bell Ringers (who have trained for years to be able to do this) use the cords to ring the eight bells in elaborate sequences which produce the tunes you can hear for miles from the Cathedral.

We had to leave our bags here, because the staircase got narrower from then on. Right before we left, our guide rang one of the bigger bells. As we climbed the staircase, the sound buzzed through the tower. The walls trembled with the vibrations. We stopped briefly at the Bellfry to watch the huge bell swing back and forth.

We continued on to the very top of the Bell Tower. Heritage Open Days is the only time they let the public up this tower. And so we stood, where not so many had stoof before, looking out at the city of Newcastle from perhaps the highest point in the city.

You should know, I’m terrified of heights. But as I looked up, my back pressed firmly against the stone wall of the Tower, I knew it was worth it. The climb. The shaky feeling in my knees as I glanced at how far away the ground was. I was looking up at the spires of the Bell Tower, from right below. From the centre. From a spot that so few people had before.

I’ll continue the next part of my weekend adventures tomorrow, with my first trip to the North Sea.

Who am I? Somebody just tell me that much…

I just was reading my journal from this summer. Because I have two essays and a huge journalism article due this week. So, obviously, I’m procrastinating. I got to cross two things off of my list of 100 things to do before I die. #68: Feel infinite. #60: Get a tattoo.

So I found the entries I had written about Ireland. And I really liked them, looking back. So I decided I would start posting them here. Enjoy.

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Dublin was a city you couldn’t help but get lost in. It seemed that even when we were going in the right direction, we ended up in the wrong place.
Dublin was a city of too many people - very few of whom were actually Irish. There were almost no crosswalks and the ones there were were never obeyed by cars or pedestrians.
The did, however, have very useful signs painted on the roads saying LOOK RIGHT or LOOK LEFT, to give all the tourists an idea of where the cars might be coming from.
Once you’ve figured out where most things are in Dublin, it becomes liveable. It was expensive as all hell, but it was good craic.
Staying in a hostel on a street called Aungier (actually pronounced ayn-ger, not, I was told repeatedly, on-gier) we met people from all over the world. Most were just passing though, struggling under the weight of backpacks almost as big as themselves.
Two girls we met, Sarah and Candle, shared our room for a couple of nights. I marvelled that the skinny little things could even lift their bags, let alone carry them around Ireland, to Lithuania and all through Europe. They were American. We met some Canadian backpackers, too. Sharon, Graham and Jeremy. It was one of those weird situations where we only knew them for one night, but by the end of we were hanging out like old friends.
Javier slept on the bunk underneath Jez for almost the entire time. He had a habit of walking in just as I was daring to take off my shirt. Inconvenient. But, he reassured me, “I am not a pervert or anything…!” And he wasn’t. He was a sweet guy who’d recently fallen in love with an Australian girl who chose a drunk over him. He was from a beautiful coastal town in Spain. He showed us pictures on my laptop. At the time - early May - in Dublin, it had been pouring rain and cold for days. And, looking at the pictures of people on beautiful sandy beaches, I had to wonder why he’d left. He even spoke of the town with love. But I guess we all need a change. And none of us realize what we have until we leave.
Dublin has bars that are older than my entire country. Dublin has beer with lunch. Dublin has the Temple Bar district. We drank our fair share of pints in Temple Bar. The joy of Heineken. There were more tourists than anything. One night, all five of us girls in the bathroom were from Canada. But there were some Dubliners around. Mostly, I’m sure, to pick up tourists. But damned if I could understand more than a third of what they were saying, with the thick accent and loud music.
Dublin is a place where you find lots of other people. But not, I could tell, where you’d ever be able to find yourself. In the crowded streets and pubs, I knew I’d always be perpetually lost.
I’d two favourite places in Dublin. One I saw the first day I was there. The other I never saw until I went back with Kristen.
The first thing I loved about St. Patrick’s Cathedral was how it reminded me of being in France. It was another gorgeous, magnificent church. But as son as you step inside the gates, you see that it’s flavour is purely Irish. Along the fence there are plaques dedicated to Ireland’s most famous writers and their work. A church for the Bards. Joyce, Yeats.
There’s a liberty bell that mostly looks like a huge hunk of metal. A little sign saying “Here is the sight of the well St. Patrick used to baptise the Irish.” Just a sign. Small, white, wood.
There’s a fountain, too. A small Irish boy was leaning in so far, I thought for sure he’d tumble in. No one else seemed concerned. I moved closer, just in case. Turns out the boy was filling his bucket with water from the fountain. And he seemed to have found a perfectly safe system - as precarious as it had seemed to me. He was leaning against the drain grate with one hand. His feet were in the air, but he didn’t slip at all. His family, nearby, didn’t seem the least bit concerned. Apparently, this is normal. Either that or their rugby game was more interesting.
The thing about European churches is that when I walk in, as a non-religious person, I suddenly understand how a person can feel a connection with God. Because it’s beautiful. Cathedrals are certainly the most striking art. These buildings were designed to inspire - not simply to function. This is where, for me, architectures transcends into art. The ceilings, the stained glass, the gold candlesticks and wooden pews… There’s so much beauty that it’s like looking at a sunset. You know there must be something bigger because beauty can’t be merely human. The fact that these cathedrals are man made makes a great argument for organized religion. Religious or not, you can’t help but feel spiritual in a place like St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

c’est tout, pour maintenant.