Luck of the Irish

What kind of music does a leprechaun band play? Sham Rock. Ba-dum-dum.

I headed over to Ireland for St. Patrick's Day. At 45 euros round-trip airfare, I just couldn't say no. I mean, that's cheaper than a non-sale rail return to Berlin for goodness sake!

I wanted to photograph a green Liffey (the river dividing Dublin into north and south). While it appears they’ve stopped that tradition (replacing it instead with green night lighting — probably a more environmentally conscious choice), I took more than a few photos of the colorful parade.

If some of these pictures seem weirdly sized, it is because I had to crop out the green hats and bald heads of Spaniards standing in front of me. The parade was heavy on puppets, stilts and American marching bands. What do a giant eye and a few monsters and dinosaurs have to do with St. Patrick’s Day? I can’t riddle you that either.

There is a chain of stores, Carroll’s Gifts of Ireland, which must earn half of its yearly income on Irish-themed kitsch and krap this weekend alone. Everyone — native and tourist alike — gets into it, sporting garish hats, leprechaun beards, shamrocks, and orange-white-green anything. Here two examples:

I don’t think you even have to know Gaelic to get that one.

From the parade, I headed over to the Ceili Mor — an outdoor street dance with Celtic music. The company sponsoring it handed out big foam fingers, which these kids put to good use:

Also there, I spotted this little guy, showing that Irish men learn to hit the bottle pretty early on St. Patty’s Day:

All in all, I thought Dublin seemed well prepared for the crowds and their refuse (littering is a popular Irish sport), with police officers and cleaning crews on duty everywhere from my arrival to my departure. Having been to Ireland twice before on the day after St. Patrick’s Day, I can attest to a marked improvement. You can read more about the events and the windy, snowy weather here.

Celebrity Sighting of the Week

I was in Berlin attending a conference on arms control and disarmament, sponsored by the German Foreign Ministry and the German Foundation for Peace Research. For the most part, I found it well-organized. The panel topics were interesting, the speakers informative and approachable. There were a wide variety of experts from government, academia and the third sector, and I was impressed both by the number of American panelists as well as the number of women involved in security analysis and policy. I left feeling heartened by the possibility that a new American administration may be able to make meaningful steps towards elimination of nuclear weapons. The American news media are not alone -- the world, it seems, is already orienting itself to the 2008 election.

Since I realize not everyone will recognize my Celebrity of the Week, the conference's keynote speaker and a well-known figure in this field, I will give you a few hints under our picture together.


1) In Swedish, his last name is related to the word for lightning. (Thinking of reindeer might help on this one.)
2) Not only is he hansome, he is incredibly disarming in person.
3) You may remember an Iraq Commission that bore his name?

I was naturally disappointed that all he knew about Minnesota was the name Senator Norm Coleman had made for himself bashing Kofi Annan. Way to represent our state, Senator!

Grabpflege

Literally grave care, it's the German word for tending to the graves of one's loved ones. They made a word for it, because it is such an important part of the culture.

I'm currently visiting Berlin and yesterday headed over to one of my old haunts, the Dokumentationszentrum Berliner Mauer, to see if anything had changed since I finished my thesis on the Berlin Wall in 2005.

In order to get to a very interesting section of original Wall that was removed in 1989, you have to enter a neighboring cemetery and walk through the gravestones. Very few people know or do this, even though I was impressed at how many visitors the Center seemed to have that day.

My mom was recently joking about me liking cemeteries, because it's not unusual for me to seek them out while we're traveling -- less in search of famous people (no dancing on Jim Morrison's grave here) and more in search of gravestone art and the peace of a park of the dead. Moscow's Novodevichy and Prague's Vinograhdy are two of note. (I guess having two favorite cemeteries must make me a little weird.)

This cemetery in the Bernauer Street is totally mediocre except for its history. It came to fall on the "front line" between East and West Berlin, and therefore neighbored the Berlin Wall for the Wall's 28-year existence. In order to visit and tend graves in this highly secured border area, East Germans had to apply for a permit. Only closest relatives -- grandparent, parent, child, brother, sister -- were granted such exceptions for fear of attempts to cross to the West. Those relatives who suddenly found themselves on the western side of the Wall were now unable to visit the graves at all, an everyday concern that illustrates the absurdity of drawing a dividing line through a modern city.

The care Germans give the graves of their loved ones is extreme by American standards. My dad's secretary yearly places a planter of flowers on her father's grave -- probably on Memorial Day -- but asks my father to go and water them, since we live much closer to the cemetery than she does. My grandparents' plots are so far away that I've only visited their parched eternal resting places once. My parents have bought adjacent plots, meaning that I will only rarely visit their graves as well. For people like us, cemeteries have subscription services of flag planting and flower watering, in addition to the lawn mowing and other care they already provide.

This would be unimaginable here, where I passed graves that not only had spring bulbs planted by a loved one blooming, but also new bouquets of fresh flowers. Of course, this is not every family and every grave. But it is many and it is overwhelming. On graves of people who died the year I was born. That is 26 years of actively tending to a grave, a ritual I appreciate and yet will never participate in. I imagine grave care as a ritual of the old, of the recent widower or of the aged wife and children of the family patriarch. Since I don't really know, I thought it would make a great anthropological study -- what keeps habitual gravetenders coming back? What do they do while at the grave? Who is this ceremony for -- the loved ones or themselves? Add to this the history of this cemetery -- did this loved one die while you were in West Germany? Were you not permitted to visit this grave for decades? Is this a form of atonement for your absence, for a divided Germany?

Behind the pieces of Wall I was headed for was a (excuse the pun) graveyard of old and broken headstones from untended, unloved graves. Here a couple images from the scrap heap of the eternal sleep.


In this image, you can see some of the heap in the foreground. In the near background, by that sand or dirt mound, are the backs of the original Wall elements.


Poor Charlotte.


What do you suppose happened to Luise? Buried in West Germany? Still alive?