belgianwaffle

Ireland

IKEA


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland

IKEA has opened in Dublin. The first branch in the Republic of Ireland. The Irish Times ran several articles, there was a play (“Waiting for IKEA” – I am not joking) and the city is filled with those IKEA poster ads. You know the ones I mean. The nation is beside itself with excitement. It was discussed extensively at a dinner party in our house last Saturday night. I flaunted my superior knowledge of IKEA and its products (the Billy bookcase, the Expedit shelves, the Malm drawers, the inedible meatballs) until my husband glared at me and said “Yes, Anne knows all about Swedish flat packed furniture” and I was suitably quashed. I was also slightly amazed that none of our other guests had been to the establishment which supplied a depressing quantity of our furniture. They were excited and enthusiastic about IKEA and its works. Not quite as excited as the Irish Times on Saturday which observed:

Those who have not before ventured into an Ikea outlet are likely to be gobsmacked by their visit. It’s not just the scale of the store, but the sweep of its ambition. Ikea stores have more in common with attractions such as zoos or large garden centres than shops; they are destinations for a day out, where cheap and cheerful eating and putting the kids in the creche are as important as the shopping.

Still, I understand the enthusiasm from my superior perch. When I moved to Belgium for the second time in 1998, I had to buy furniture. I fell in love with IKEA. So cheap, so handy, so beautiful. As the years went by, I fell out of love, so cheaply made, so challenging to assemble and so exactly like what everyone else has. As my ultimate ambition becomes to get rid of all my IKEA furniture and replace it with slightly more unusual things I can find elsewhere, my contemporaries are desperate to hand over their hard earned cash to the Swedish giant. I am enjoying the feeling of smugness that accompanies me everywhere. I said proudly to my husband the other day, “I will never cross the threshold of IKEA in Dublin.” “Mmm,” he said, “did you say that we needed a big plastic box on wheels to store the boys’ train sets in? I wonder where we would find something like that?” “Trapped like a trap in a trap,” as Dorothy Parker would say.

Tough job


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland

The other day while I was languishing at home on my sick bed, two lovely old men from the Legion of Mary called to the door. God help them, the catholic religion is a bit of a hard sell in Dublin these days.

In the spirit of the new economic circumstances – tourism at home


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland

Recently I took a day off and the Princess and I explored the delights of Dublin.

I took her for a bun (queen of tarts), then to Marsh’s library (where she was allowed to write with a quill and elderly Protestant ladies smiled at her with unmerited indulgence), then to St. Patrick’s Cathedral where she chanced her arm, then to Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street where I brought her two books and then to Milano’s for lunch. I am the best mother in the world. While I am writing of the joys Dublin has to offer residents and tourists, can I mention that we went on the Viking Splash again recently and it was very successful. The best bit is roaring at innocent passers-by. I am not making this up.

Temple Bar is Dublin’s “cultural quarter” (insert hollow laugh and any number of pubs here) and is almost entirely filled with tourists. Irish people do not go to Temple Bar except as a short cut to elsewhere. However, we were lured into Temple Bar recently for a free outdoor circus. As it was bucketing rain, we also took in Temple Bar’s “The Ark“, a cultural centre for children which, if you ask me, is a bit dull. As well as not going to Temple Bar, Irish people do not wear raincoats either (bear with me, I have a point). They are a sign of weakness. On looking out at the weather, the normal Irish reaction is either “it’s definitely clearing” or “it will hold off”. Regular readers (she said hopefully) and relatives will be aware that my husband was born in Canada and this can out in his use of rain gear. We were wandering around Temple Bar in the rain looking for the outdoor circus (found, incidentally, and, because it was in Dublin, pictured in the Irish Times subsequently) and the children and Mr. Waffle were all bundled up in their rain gear. As a proper Irish person, I was soaking in my non-waterproof summer coat. A Polish woman with leaflets approached us encouraging us to go for the early bird special in La Caverna. As she wasn’t a native English speaker, she couldn’t tell we were Irish by our accents. It is odd to be treated as a tourist at home but clearly, her instincts were spot on, wandering Temple Bar in rain coats, we could only be tourists.

Not so homogenous as all that


Posted in: Cork, Ireland

By default, I tend to think of Ireland as a country with a very homogenous population until the recent wave of immigration. A recent conversation with my parents made me rethink a little.

They were talking about Hadji Bey’s Turkish delight (a Cork speciality) and it occurred to me that it was unlikely to have been the brainchild of an Irish native. They moved on to talking about a family (from Iran) with whom my father’s family had been friendly. They spoke about the “old lady” who spoke broken English and the children who became fully integrated (always a particular challenge in Cork).

Then there were all the Lithuanians in Cork (which my husband says boasts some of the most unusual surnames in Ireland). They were going to America but stopped off in Cork for reasons which are unclear to me and probably to them too. And then there were the Dutch butter merchants from the 18th century. And come to think of it, my mother is probably a Palatine (her grandmother’s maiden name was very germanic and a bit odd). There were Hungarian refugees in my mother’s class in school and one of them subsequently had a very handsome son who was a couple of years ahead of my brother in school. There were Vards the furriers who were very exotic, probably Jewish, I reckon (my mother remembers one of them in college arguing strongly against going to fight the communists in Hungary – he felt there was no point and thus the Hungarian uprising of ’56 was denied the assistance of a bunch of UCC students).

Perhaps, immigration is not the recent phenomenon we’ve been led to believe.

Outings


Posted in: Dublin, Family, Ireland

Often our excursions with the children are unsuccessful (see, for example, our trip to Leinster House recently) but last week we went to the Dead Zoo at large and it was excellent. The Natural History Museum has been shut for a number of years following the spectacular collapse of its staircase (nobody injured but a number of attendants and tourists were shocked). It’s a great museum. It has cabinets filled with excitingly posed stuffed animals; things in bottles; insects on pins. It’s all very 19th century. Pending its re-opening (works clearly approved before the economy fell over a cliff), a part of the collection is being housed in another museum. We went to visit. It was wholly successful. The factors were as follows:

1. What we wanted to see was right inside the door. How many times have I been to places where the children have used up all their energies on the wrong thing and I have had to drag them away from the amphora at the entrance to see the enchanting puppet show. They have then spent the remainder of the time whinging that they want to go back to playing hide and seek with the amphora.

2. The (large) space was enclosed with only one exit.

3. The attendants were pleasant, chatty, helpful and tolerant of running children.

4. The exhibition was fantastic. Nothing like an enormous crystallised slug with spikes to appeal to the under 7s.

On a very wet Sunday, in a brief interval between showers we took ourselves to Play Day in Merrion Square. It was billed as a chance for children to play with normal, cheap, easily available things. The children absolutely loved it. The rain continued with enthusiasm all afternoon. They couldn’t have cared less. There were army tents filled with clothes for dressing up, puppet theatres, tea sets, drums made from saucepans and chopsticks to bang them. There was a large piece of cloth which the children could run under (remember running under sheets when they were being folded – like that only on a grander scale); there were bubble blowers the size of sieves (apparently glycerine in the water makes for superior bubbles); there were footballs and large inflatable yokes you could roll down the hill on; there was plasticene (made gooier and better by the driving rain), there was a cornflour/water/food colouring mix which had a bizarre and deeply satisfying consistency; there were pillow fights; there was a microphone where Michael sang several verses of “London Bridge is falling down” with great confidence and verve. There were no sweets on sale anywhere but they were giving out free fruit. I found it an enormous relief not to have to spend my afternoon fending off requests for ice cream, sweets and crisps. I spoke to one of the organisers and he told me that the previous year, it had been standing room only. The advantage of the rain was, I suppose, that our children had unimpeded access to the blue goo.

Oh dear


Posted in: Dublin, Family, Ireland

I was talking to my mother-in-law about the school play. She said that afterwards as she was waiting outside she saw some of the other parents and she thought to herself “I’d be quite scared of you, if I hadn’t seen you inside.” It’s probably the tattoos that are unnerving her.