Beirlín, Baile Átha Cliath agus Jenna! Gach in aon lá amháin!

First, I know what you’re thinking if you’ve been paying attention to the language of my subjects; yes, they obviously speak English in Ireland, but I thought it would be more fitting if I kept with this theme until we got back to the states, and chose Gaelic instead.  It’s really different, but cool.  Anyway, on to the post!

So after getting on the train, figuring out how to buy our ticket, and sitting down for our hour-long train back to Berlin, I found myself looking out the window with this longing to come back to this beautiful country; on different terms.  It really is beautiful, so organized, and just generally adorable.  It was then that I decided that this awful HelpX experience wasn’t going to ruin my impression of the entire country, because that just isn’t fair.

When we arrived in Berlin, we searched for lockers to put our luggage in, ate some more breakfast, and set off to enjoy our few hours in Berlin before our flight that afternoon.  The area of Berlin we were in was really nice, even though we had no idea was we were looking at.  We just did a lot of walking, enjoying the clean streets, sausages, pretzels, free apples and the beautiful sun above our heads.

As we started to head back to the train station to catch our train to the airport, I started getting really anxious.  Every passing hour I’d look at my watch and exclaim “ONLY __ MORE HOURS UNTIL WE GET TO SEE JENNA!”  I’m sure Jon thought I was a complete dork, but I couldn’t help it.  5 months without seeing anyone I knew from home, of course I was excited.

Getting to the airport was interesting.  We forgot to validate our ticket before we got on the train, so we were freaking out trying to figure out what to do, since we had already sat down.  So Jon hopped off the train at one of the stops, bolted to a validation box, and managed to get them validated and back on the train before it set off again.  Naturally I was worried the whole time, but it worked out.

The Berlin-Schönefeld Airport is way out from the city center, and extremely small.  When we got off the train at the station, I thought we had mistakenly gone somewhere else.  It was a long walk to the airport, made even longer by the weight of my backpack, but the very clever and adorable Easy Jet ads along the way made it somewhat entertaining.  Once we got into the airport, we were surprised to find that we had to go to through security before we could even get to the check-in desk.  They had some handy system of tagging bags that had to be checked verses ones that didn’t.  Then we sat on the floor for about an hour until the RyanAir desk finally opened, since this airport is too small to have seating for such a thing.  We decided to pay the 40 euros to check our two walking sticks we acquired in the Czech Republic, checked ourselves in, and walked around the gift shop looking for some delicious German chocolate to bring to Jenna.

Almost an hour of more waiting and we were heading to our gate, only to find that there was a passport check as you leave the airport.  Uh oh… we heard bad things about Germans and their enforcing of Schengen rules, and thought we were in the clear one we got past the mandatory RyanAir passport check.  So as we walk up to the passport desk, two months over our visas, the gentleman behind the counter starts flipping through the pages in Jon’s passport.  We both got the heart-beat-in-your-throat sort of feeling, and could only hope for the best.  He waved Jon through, free of the “don’t return” stamp, and it was my turn.  He didn’t spend as much time with my passport, probably because it was obvious that we were together.  Whew.

The flight itself wasn’t awful.  2 hours long, not enough leg room, flight attendants constantly trying to sell you stuff, but we managed to squeeze in a nap.  Once we landed, got our Ireland stamp in our passport, we were just fine; out of Schengen and totally legal again.  It felt nice.

Since it was pretty cheap, we opted to just take a taxi to Jenna’s apartments.  The driver was a gentleman, really helpful, and nice to talk to.  When he dropped us off, it was only about a minute before I saw Jenna walking down the street, and then I felt great.  I couldn’t feel how heavy my backpack was, how bad my feet hurt, or how cold my arms were.  We went to her apartment for a while, talked, relaxed, and then set out to find a nice place for dinner.  We found a cozy bar/restaurant in the Temple Bar district, enjoyed some bangers and mash, fish and chips and a few pints.

Since quarters were cramped, we had to sleep on the floor in her apartment, but we stole the couch cushions from the living room and slept on those.  The next couple days were filled with rather touristy things: a duck bus tour of the city, completely with Viking hats and screaming and people on the streets, more fish and chips, eating lunch in the lawn of Christ Church Cathedral, seeing St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Guinness Brewery, Carrol’s Irish Store, the Dublin bus system, lots of walking, and rain.  Good thing we read all the guide books and know that going out in Ireland without an umbrella is like asking to get pushed into a swimming pool fully clothed.

It was a very nice weekend with Jenna that I absolutely needed.  I needed to sit and talk with someone in person from home, enjoy all the excitement of the city with someone other than Jon (not that he’s not wonderful, but since she had been there a few days, she sort of knew her way around), and talk about everything that’s going on at home.

Getting to our host in Ireland was fairly easy.  Two buses, and we were met by a very enthusiastic mother of three to bring us back to her home.  The place here is absolutely wonderful, by far my favorite place so far.  They have so much to do here, so many birds (ducks, geese, and hens; baby chicks and ducklings too!), and such a successful vegetable garden.  They live in an old stone house that they’ve fixed up themselves, at the bottom of a hillish mountain thing, with the Motty Stone at the top.  I’m not sure what it is exactly, other than a really big stone that you can climb up on for views of the surrounding mountains and the Irish Sea.  We’re staying in a rather well kept trailer just at the bottom of the hill, which is nice when you’re staying with a family of five; you have your own quiet space where you can be out of the way.  I love it here.

I’ll fill you in on all the unique experiences I’ve had since arriving to “The Barnyard” (a nickname they’ve given their home) at a later time, I feel this post is long enough.  Until next time… Bíodh lá iontach!

Auf Wiedersehen Sklavenarbeit!

Before I get started, I would like to once again relay how very difficult it is to blog while traveling the way we’re traveling.  Nights when you know you have the time to blog, you usually just want to sleep, or spend time with the family you’re helping, since after all, that’s what this is all about.  But, you can breathe at last.  We are at our final destination already, after some changes in our plans, which I will elaborate below.  They do have Internet, and we will be here for the next 20 days or so, so I should be able to fill you in on all of our adventures here in Ireland nearly as soon as they happen.  But first, let me start by filling you in on our time spent in Germany…

I’m going to keep this bit relatively short, because I don’t have many good things to say about Germany.  Well, let me rephrase that: I don’t have many good things to say about our farm in Germany.  Germany itself is a beautiful country; very green, plenty of lakes where we were, clean, and just all around wonderful.  I plan on giving it a second chance at some point in my future.  The farm however was a bit more like slave labor than any of the other ones we’ve been to.

The day started at 6:30 in the morning, with our rather tiny breakfast (usually muesli or oatmeal), considering it’d be six hours of usually pretty hard work between that and lunch.  They were the first commercial farm we worked on, so we expected more work and were prepared for that.  We also expected that a farm that sells meats, milk and various other dairy things would keep their workers well-fed and full of energy.  Oh the contrary.  Lunch (and usually dinner) consisted of bread (tiny slices of it) with various things to spread on top: peanut butter, honey, butter, jam, sometimes cheese if we were lucky, and sometimes eggs if we were REALLY lucky.  Not much at all.  A few days go by and I can really feel that my body wasn’t getting what it needed, despite going to bed early to account for the early mornings.  We were greatly looking forward to the weekends, since there were lakes around for swimming and canoeing, until we found out that despite what their profile said about working 5 days a week (the reason we decided to go there despite their early mornings), we would in fact be working 7.  7 days a week, basically 10 hours a day, on hardly any food, not nearly enough sleep, and never a “thank you” or a “well done” for the hard work we had finished  I know that last bit makes us sound terribly needy or something, but it’s just proper etiquette, regardless of how small or large the task is.  Nevermind the fact that it wasn’t terribly enjoying being with them, whenever we were awake enough to do so.  They were nice enough people, if you could get them to actually talk.  We weren’t connecting with them in the way that we had hoped, so absolutely nothing was making up for the roar in my stomach.

Well, we had pretty much had enough, and on the Wednesday before we were supposed to leave (we were originally going to leave the following Monday), we booked a flight (with RyanAir even, we were that desperate) for the following Friday, just two days later, and planned to tell them that things arose at home and that we were leaving early.  No emergencies, I don’t like faking those, but it was really none of their business what we were “going home” for anyway.  Well, before we had a chance to tell them, they practically ambushed us after we finished hauling some rather heavy doors to a dumpster, and we had the following conversation:

“You two don’t seem very happy here.”

“It’s not that we’re not happy, we’re just really tired.  We’re not used to such early mornings and long days.”

(I’m going to skip the part about them asking us our expectations, and my unwillingness to mention that its hard to work on the very little food they provided us.)

“Well, our customers pay very high quality prices for our very high quality produce, and having you two around looking tired or unhappy isn’t good for business, so I would suggest either working with more energy, or finding another farm”

After that bit we informed them that we would be leaving Friday morning anyway for family business, and that the next day would be our last work day.  Now, had the whole thing been “you guys don’t seem happy here, what can we do to help” I would have felt a little bad about leaving early, but considering the direction it did go, I didn’t care in the slightest that we were leaving early.  On our last day we built them (from start to finish) a raised paved patio, so they could eat outside without the table wobbling, and even after working 12 hours on the thing, they hardly uttered a thank you.

On Friday morning I woke up with more energy than ever; I was soooo excited to get out of there.  I was even more excited because instead of going to Holland like we had originally planned to do so (though we would have loved to have seen it, the host we had originally planned with gave us some really odd gut feelings after some rather condescending and demanding emails, so we opted to skip it), we were flying to Dublin, where we would be spending a few days with our friend Jenna, since she has an internship there!  Getting out of Germany and seeing a close friend all in one day?  I couldn’t have been happier.  But I’ll fill you in on our travel day and our time with Jenna in my next post.  Until then; Auf Wiedersehen!