belgianwaffle

Ireland

Summer Timetable


Posted in: Ireland, Mr. Waffle, Princess, Twins

Fresh from our experience of Belgian summer “stages”, in the spring we started looking for ways to entertain our daughter in the month of July when she would be on holidays but we would not.

In March I signed her up for a week at the National Concert Hall. It cost €150. The week before the course started in July, they were advertising places for €75. The early worm gets the bird. The course started at 10 and none of the other aspiring musicians appeared to be the offspring of two parents who worked as there parents were able to drop them off and collect them. A task which we delegated to C, a nice French girl on our books. Nevertheless, it did run for more or less the duration of the school day and herself learnt to conduct and to sing:

Haydn’s Great Surprise
SURPRISE SYMPHONY – JOSEPH HAYDN
Listen very carefully/To this noted symphony/Maybe you will recognize/Haydn’s Great Surprise
Though it’s slow make no mistake/This piece will keep you awake/With a trick that typifies/Haydn’s Great Surprise
Did that outburst startle you?/Well that’s what it was meant to do/Don’t forget its name implies/Haydn’s Symphony’s the Great Surprise
Oh there’s that burst again/You will hear it now and then/Every time that we reprise/Haydn’s Great Surprise
And if you think you’re smart/Try to learn this piece by heart/See if you can memorize/Haydn’s Great Surprise
Just be careful goodness knows/While list-e-ning stay on your toes/Heed this warning to the wise/Haydn’s Symphony’s the Great Surprise

Then the next week, it was off to the Municipal Gallery which, for €60, undertook to entertain her from 10.30 to 12.00 for four days (closed Monday). On day one she spent the whole time “staring at just one painting, can you imagine how boring that is?” On inquiry, it transpired that the painting was Waterloo Bridge by Monet:
Waterloo Bridge.

I don’t think that she’s going to like the Impressionists. In any event they’ve got off to a rocky start. Day 2 was better; they made a drum and didn’t look at any art. Day 4 was rendered hideous, for me, by having to tackle the much loved babysitter C, in relation to the (unknown to us) boyfriend whom my husband met on returning to the house unexpectedly at lunch time on Day 3. She was contrite.

Weeks three and four were due to be spent in the Alliance Francaise for an eye watering €450. I hope that she will thank me one day when she can properly roll her French rs. In the first week she really seemed to like the course and it made French seem much more real to her to be speaking in French to children her own age again. In the past month, she had stopped speaking to her father in French though he has nobly kept us his role and suddenly she was back speaking to him in French again. I have to record, in proud parent fashion, that as her English reading has improved her French reading has come along in leaps and bounds and she is now at a stage where she can (more or less) read age appropriate comic book material which means that she is doing a lot more of French reading than when she could only read baby books. Anyhow, I felt very warm towards the Alliance until late Friday evening when we discovered an email telling us that the course for the following week had been cancelled. I fail to see how a two week course could have enough children in week one but not in week two. On finally, after many irritated hours on hold, getting through to reception on the following Tuesday afternoon, I was greeted by an outstanding member of staff. My irritations were many but she soothed them wonderfully by making noises of competent contrition. She made no excuses. She apologised with gratifying thoroughness. She asked me to send in my complaint in writing (something I have been itching to do) and she promised that she herself would see my refund cheque was issued that evening. I felt distinctly less chilly towards the Alliance than I had done over the weekend. Emergency arrangements were made as follows: the Princess went to her loving Dublin grandparents for a couple of days and I took part of yesterday and today off to whisk her down to Cork for the end of the week. My loving husband is off from today until the end of the summer; remaining holiday cover falls to him to deal with. And there’s plenty of it since the boys finished Montessori today (something you might think would merit a post on its own – I’m getting to it) and herself is now officially finished all her courses. Thank heavens we are all off on August 8 for a fortnight. Mr. Waffle might otherwise collapse from the strain.

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.