A blog about my third life in Dublin, Ireland, after growing up in Switzerland and living in the USA for 22 years. And now a fourth life in Forest Grove, Oregon.
This is the mirror in the Halfway House pub men's room. A couple of coworkers and I were there Friday night to have a beer and some dinner. The other side of the room was less pretty but equally antique looking. It seems that Irish men have the same problem with aim as their neighbors across the Atalantic; the floor was quite sticky.
Other than that, a very nice pub. I promise to start taking nice pub pictures soon.
Look closely at the roofs of the buildings in the center of the photograph; they have solar panels installed. I took this picture from the bus station outside my apartment; i.e., this is Ireland! It made me wonder why there is not a solar panel on every roof in New Mexico.
While in Albuquerque we all went to see a performance of Cherish the Ladies, a group of women who play traditional Irish music. It was nice to hear and watch the dancers with my family, even if I had to come all the way to Albuquerque to do it ;-) Here in Dublin I don't go out enough to hear and see it live.
Before the concert started, the announcer told us to turn off our cell phones and not to text during the performance, which caused a chuckle from the audience. Anika did not understand why they found this humorous: It is obviously impolite to text in a dark theater where a bright phone screen would be distracting to others. I told her that this generation of listeners thought it was funny, because they could never in the world imagine why (and what!) you would text during the middle of a performance. To which Anika replied she hopes to never get so old and get so far removed from the technology that a younger generation is using to socialize.
I am back in Dublin and need to find a way to make me go exercise. There is just too much to do and it is so easy to push working out to the end of the To Do list, carry it to the next one, and eventually drop it on the floor. I need to sign up for a race...
Part of the problem is that I have been traveling and celebrating with friends and family. I spent Christmas and New Year's eve in Albuquerque, but last week I was in Switzerland celebrating my Mom's 80th birthday.
The picture above is from the party we had. No, wait. That's the Caran d'Ache display in the train station in Bern. They make very expensive but high-quality writing instruments and paints, and have elaborate ad displays like the window above. Growing up, it was always a treat to go to the main train station and run over to the Caran d'Ache window and marvel at the animated figures (usually resembling some kind of fairytale dwarf).
My Mom is doing fine and pretended, as a Mother must, to be glad to see me.
This is one of the better pictures I got of her. Like many of the others in my family, she has a tendency to grimace whenever you aim a lens at her and then to complain afterward that she looks horrible in pictures.
Other than partying, we also went for short hikes to enjoy views and have long talks. It was cold but also quite pretty.
That was on the way up to an observation tower where my brother and I went to take pictures of the sunset. It was so cold that my camera indicated an empty battery and refused to take any more pictures. I had to put the battery into my jeans pocket for a while to warm it up before it would function again. Although freezing, we were rewarded with a nice sunset and a beautiful view of the alps.
Behind those threes, in the valley, lies the city of Bern. I wonder how many solar panels the Swiss have.
We set up our Christmas tree this year upstairs in the "library".
I'm in Albuquerque for another week before heading back to Dublin. I enjoyed some vacation time between Christmas and New Year's (a happy and good one to all of you) and visited with family and friends.
Listening to the car radio the other day I heard Iko Iko on the radio. I have always liked that song and have been meaning to purchase it. Not understanding all the words and not knowing who sang it made it a little bit more difficult to find. The version on the radio sounded a little bit different, but I remembered hearing that song during the opening sequence of Mission Impossible II.
With that tidbit of information it was easy to track down the song and learning that it has an interesting history. This is the version by the Dixie Cups I heard on the radio:
That video clip shows the lyrics of the song which did not help me much understanding what this song was about. As (almost) always, there is an informative Wikipedia entry. It turns out that the song is older than the Dixie Cup version and talks about Mardi Gras Indians, something else I had never heard of before. Even with that information it is still not clear what some of the words mean and scholars have ventured that some of them have made it to Louisiana from West Africa via the slave trade through Haiti, and have mixed with Native American languages.
Other people than just me have like the song and it has been covered by many artists and used in several movies. The version in Mission Impossible II is this one:
Much more instrumental, different words, and modern sounding than the original. Plus a very suspenseful climbing scene thrown in. Watch that scene in HD on a big screen to get the full impact!
Digging around, I found other versions including this one from another Tom Cruise movie: Rain Man. This version is also modern, but closer to the original than the above one:
The Wikipedia page about Iko Iko had another intriguing hint pointing to a Swiss dialect version of the song. Of course, I had to investigate that as well! That version of the song uses the original melody but replaces the lyrics with tales of children staying out past curfew or misbehaving in other manners, including Lisa who wanted to know for sure and sat for an hour in a pond, randomly kissing frogs. The refrain in Swiss German means: come home; come home; immediately; a slap behind the ears and off to bed without dinner:
The groups name is Schtärneföifi, "star five" in English. That, in Swiss German, is a (mild) profanity. It's along the lines of "small stick gate", which I heard frequently growing up, but not quite as bad as "holy land thunder". One way to elevate the seriousness of a profanity in Swiss German is to add "once more" at the end. There are worse, and often English language inspired, profanities in common, and more frequent, use, but non-Swiss Germans tend to think of those milder ones as cute and benign. I tended to think that our arsenal had limited fire power as well, until I heard people using "fiddlesticks", "horsefeathers", and "baloney" over here.
In 2009 the group Schtärneföifi went to New Orleans, hooked up with the Dixie Cups, and sang the Swiss version together with them. In the video below, at about 2:05 you can see one of the Dixie Cups trying, I assume, to make sense of some of those Swiss words. It cannot be any worse than "Iko iko unday; jockamo feeno ai nane".
