Playtime!

If you read my last blog post, you know a good deal about what I've been doing here in the rural farmlands of Western Ireland. It's often hard work, long hours, and fairly early bedtimes. But lest you think that all work and no play makes Jake a dull boy, my travel-mates and I have still been managing to have ourselves a grand old time here, trying to squeeze as much juice from the pulp of Irish culture as we can. After all, we didn't just come here to work, we came here to have the most awesomely fun time of our life!

Unfortunately, the local Sheep-Shearing Festival was too far away, and Bog Week was happening during our work schedule. We did hear on the radio that last year's sheep-shearing champion was planning to attempt to shear 800 sheep that weekend, and we wish him the best of luck on that endeavor (those famous Irish woolen sweaters don't grow on trees, you know).

Despite our despondency over missing these two epic events, we spent the first two weekends hanging out in downtown Galway to try to explore the best of what the city had to offer. The first stop, of course, is the outdoor market where our host Flo works in his falafel stall. It must be said that as humble as it may sound, Flo has operated his stall in countless festivals and catered events and has easily the most professional-looking cart in the market.

After getting our complimentary falafel sandwiches with our WWOOFer's discount, we head further into the market, which is populated by all sorts of interesting folks and friends. There's Mick, who runs a creperie and has in his past starred as the "evil white guy villain" in several low-budget Japanese action flicks. There's also Daniel, who is originally a New York Jew, but after 10 years of living at sea among Irish fisherman and another 10 years of living in Galway selling freshly made donuts in the market, and recently adopting an injured wild crow as a pet, there seems to be very little of the N'Yawker left in him. We love Daniel, first of all because he's endlessly friendly and entertaining, regaling us with his life stories I probably shouldn't submit into the public forum. He's also let us sleep over at his house a few times after late nights in town when our ears are blown out from too much live music and our coordination is off from too much Guinness.

One such night was during Galway's Latin Street Party. Apparently, to the surprise of us WWOOFers and even several locals, Galway has a Latin Quarter, and it's big enough to warrant its own cultural festival. This was no cheap pinatas and mariachi band festival either. This was three days and nights of music, salsa dancing, street performers, some of the most terrifying clowns I've ever seen, and Cuban Rum specials at every pub in the area.

As far as I was concerned, however, the highlight of this festival was a pub hosting Australian Pearl Jam, a tribute band that is, as the singer said, "Not Australian and not Pearl Jam." This wasn't just some kitschy throwback party celebrating a 20-year-old band either. Co-WWOOFer Amanda and I entered the pub to the sight of a hundred plaid-clad Irishfolk belting along to the songs and partying like it was 1991, and we happily joined the fray (easy enough for me, I knew all the words and I am almost always wearing a plaid shirt and jeans anyway). As the concert let out, and we worried that the night had hit its peak, Amanda and I went bar-hopping for a little while, trying to see what other fun we could conjure up before retiring. Our travels landed us in The Western Hotel bar, which, at shortly after midnight, is populated entirely by drunken Irish out-of-towners of the AARP-age variety. One particularly indecipherable old man came up to Amanda and I at the bar and asked us, or rather, asked Amanda, "Scooze meh, ung layd, woz ur nemme? Yoo frm roond her? Her ya liiike de pless?" The conversation went on in that manner for a few minutes, and when the tired musician in the corner - warbling out of tune to country songs lazily strummed on his guitar - picked up the tempo, Amanda was escorted to dance by her new gentleman friend. I sat back smugly and watched this happen for a song, but as the next song began, and Amanda was twirled in my direction, she snarled at me "Finishyourdrinkandlet'sgo!" before being pulled back onto the dance floor by her old and drunken lothario. The night was officially over.

There are plenty of good discoveries I've made just wandering around Galway, like kayak-water-polo matches on the river, or the plethora of random buskers. But after a couple weeks, we were feeling stir-crazy and decided to head to Cork for the weekend and see the Street Performers World Championship we had read about in the paper. Every year, in several Irish cities, the SPWC is organized and famed performers of every kind from all over the world are invited to come in and perform for thousands of people, who will in turn hopefully throw a few euro into their hat at the end of the show. We saw quite a few acts, among them beat-boxers, illusionists, acrobats, pogo-stickers, flaming teacup-balancers, weight-lifting midgets, and at least half a dozen people juggling flaming torches on unicycles insisting that what they were about to do is "one of the most astonishing and dangerous tricks you've ever witnessed." (I'm not about to discount how hard it is to balance on a single wheel and juggle fire, but with the number of people there doing it, it goes from impressive to downright tedious and predictable - "Come on, try juggling chainsaws, ya pansy!")

Among the events was also planned an attempt to break the world record for the most people gathered in one place dressed as Waldo of Where's Waldo fame (Wally, as he's known here in the UK), because apparently the World must be starting to run out of useful world records to break. Nevertheless, for 12 quid, with the proceeds going to the Africa Aware charity, thousands of people bought their official Wally costumes and shortly thereafter became very confused, since the newspaper said the event was at noon, the organizers said it was at 6, and radio said it was being canceled for rain. The result was the city of Cork being overrun that Sunday by hordes of damp, frustrated, and very easily spotted Wallys. Eventually, the misinformation was sorted out, the rain ceased, and two-and-a-half thousand of us descended on the public park for our picture to be taken. We did end up breaking the world record, and keeping our title for a full week until the SPWC and the record-breaker organizers held the same event the following weekend in the bigger and less rainy city of Dublin, where our record was shattered by nearly 1000 souls. But now, if nothing else, I have my next Halloween, Purim, and any uneventful Sunday's costumes sorted out.

After spending a month with hardly any good long solo time, I decided to take a vacation and spent last weekend on the Aran Islands, which Flo told me was the one place I must see before I left Western Ireland. I took a ferry out to the largest island, Inis Mor and got myself an overnight hostel room and a bike. The island landscape is basically an amalgamation of most of the Irish postcards you've ever seen. It's nine miles long by two across, with two main roads going up and down the length of the island. Those roads tend to be crowded by speeding tour buses, and offer a fairly restricted view of the landscape. Once on the smaller, unpaved roads, I found myself biking through endless grids of stone walls dividing the pasture lands between different farmers' fields. Cows and sheep grazed everywhere in the electric green pastures, and dotted among the new modern homes were the remains of old stone cottages and churches where the thatched roofs had long ago rotted to nothing, offering a view inside of the old fireplaces now filled with grass and thistles. On top of one of the hills is what claims to be the World's smallest church (more dubious world records) built centuries ago in memory of one of St. Patrick's disciples. Elsewhere is the island's main attraction, an ancient stone fort built right up to the edge of the cliffs which look like God had taken a chisel and split a mountain cleanly in half so that there was a straight drop from the top where we were and the bottom where the waves were smashing against the side. Since this isn't America, the Land of Liability Litigation, there was no fence or protection from the cliff edge, save a couple guards stationed way off to the side, so just about every visitor who came was able to force themselves to work up the courage to crawl up to the cliff edge and look into the abyss, over 300 feet straight down.

This weekend is taking us back the joys of simple country life. Thursday night was a bonfire for St. John's Day, where Flo and I lamented together the burning of tons of perfectly good free firewood - a bit of a scarcity in Ireland. Sunday will be what is the local Irish equivalent to the 4H Club festivals or county fairs held in the States. There will be livestock and horse competitions, vegetable judging, and probably more country fun than you can shake a stick at. It's all part of the fun, here in cloudy, wet, and lovely Ireland.

What's The Craic?

Here in Western Ireland, there are quite a few people who still speak traditional Irish, or Gaelic Even among those who don't, there's still a healthy sprinkling of terms thrown into everyday speech, not unlike fourth generation Jewish Americans like myself who still toss in a bissel Yiddishe for emphasis. One of my favorite expressions that is heard all the time here is "What/how/where's the craic?" The craic, pronounced crack, is the news/state of affairs/good times, and the uses are plentiful. So now, for this blog entry, I will regale you with the news, state of affairs, and maybe a couple of the good times being had by me and my WWOOFing buddies here on "Uncle Flo's" farm.

In general, we work five days a week, but usually only three days at Flo's garden. The reason Flo brought us in as volunteers in the first place is because he's got a head full of ideas that he wants to actualize since moving into his house in January. Some of it is pretty basic, like turning his ragtag gang of vegetable and herb beds into a proper garden, which will provide produce for his house and his falafel stand. He's got a polytunnel as well, which we've been filling to its maximum capacity so that Flo can add an enormous lettuce battalion to his "Gourmet Offensive." Ideally, we'll be creating a permaculture, where the placement and variety of what is grown works to benefit the greater good of the garden, like stacking plants on top of each other for efficient use of water runoff, or growing nitrogen fixing plants next to nitrogen users.

I've also been recruited for the odd household task such as cleaning out the old rainwater catchment tank that came with the house and had a thick murky layer of sludge on the floor that needed scooping-out with a dustpan. One of my proudest accomplishments was when Flo told me he needed to prepare tapas for a wedding that he was catering, while also filling a bakery order for 15 bags of 50 falafel balls each. In one Friday, over around 6 or 7 hours, I rolled, fried and bagged nearly 800 falafel balls, while enjoying the company of constantly skipping CDs and an anxious, angry, and foul-mouthed Dutch-Irish chef. It was a good day, until Flo admitted that if I wanted to work in his falafel stand someday, I'd have to make that same number of balls in about a third the amount of time with a broken deep-fryer, and my dreams were shattered, just like that.

We've also been working at a larger-scale organic farm, Green Earth Organics, run by Flo's friend Kenneth. Over there, we've been doing fieldwork more typical of a big commercial operation than what Flo has. Lots of weeding, sowing, more weeding, other sowing, sandbag-filling, more weeding and sowing, and soon, when the sun has come out long enough to let the plants grow to fruit (which takes a while under the fluffy, gray skies of Ireland), harvesting. Kenneth has acres and acres of fields and a half dozen polytunnels where he grows all manner of vegetables and herbs. Fruit and more specialty items are imported, and then he sells it all to try to make a living, using the same land that has been farmed by his family for three generations.

Since most of my farming experience comes from weeding my Mom's tiny garden bed in the backyard 10-15 years ago, and then going to Mali and working with my neighbors in their fields before starting my own plot of corn, I am accustomed to pretty low-tech agricultural methods. Organic farming, despite being closer to a natural way of agriculture, can't be sustainably done without tractors, fertilizer sprayers, and the tools of industry. The thing is, while I knew in my head that there are tools and machines for everything, I didn't know that this was literally true until now. To illustrate, when I was in Mali, people would often talk to me about Malian farmers versus American farmers.

"In America, they have machines to do everything!" they would say. "Do they have machines that plant the seeds too? And machines that tie up the sacks of rice for you? And that roll up the bales of straw?" I would tell them yes, assuming that it was true, but never having actually seen any of these things for myself. Then I came to Kenneth's farm, and I realized that there is, literally, a machine for everything. There's a machine you put on the back of a tractor, and you just sit on a stool, feed the machinery seeds or saplings, and it will plant them in perfect rows with even spacing. There's a tool that will grab wire ties and with a couple yanks, twist the wire up to close up the burlap sacks of potatoes, or sand or whatever. And there's a machine that also goes on the back of a tractor that cuts grass, rolls it up into massive bales, tightly wraps it in plastic to keep out mold, and deposits it upright on the ground, while you just keep your foot on the accelerator. I saw these things in action, and all I could think was "Damn, my Malian buddies would be jealous!" Of course, I have to admit that I miss my daba, a small, cubit-length scooping hoe used by Malian villagers for weeding, which frankly seems to work much better, faster, and more easily than much of what we've been doing here.

But all things considered, I'm still getting a very classic Irish farming experience here. I've weeded acres of potato and cabbage fields. I've plucked boulders from between rows of crops (the very same unpicked boulders that have built perhaps millions of Irish houses and countless miles of stone walls over the centuries). I've been taken out to the pub after work and had whichever farm-owner was my boss that day buying us all of WWOOFers rounds of Guinness (which really is better here - common wisdom dictates that Guinness changes every time it passes over water) and if we're lucky, a live "trad session" of traditional Irish reels and ballads.

It's not all fun and games though. There are days when I spend so many hours weeding stinging nettles that my hands feel like pins and needles, and when I close my eyes to sleep at night, all I see are endless tangles of leaves, vines and stems until I jolt upright in a cold sweat, half expecting to find soil on my hands and my bed sprouting scotch grass. And there's the intimidation factor, when Kenneth says that today's job is to sow a bed of onions, five sprouts across, and what seems like billions of rows long. At least in Mali, where there were no tractors or expensive fertilizers, the fields were big but at least managable and the days were hot enough that most people didn't work past lunch. Well, nobody said that this would be a total holiday, and anyway, I am enjoying both the good hard labor getting me in shape for once, and the fact that this is the closest thing to a normal full-time job I've had since Summer 2007. Speaking of which, it's past 10pm and work starts early tomorrow. This weekend I'm off to the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway. I'll fill you all in with my next blog post about all the fun we've been having, including the Street Performers World Championships, the Where's Waldo world record attempt, and Galway's Latin Street Festival. Until next time, see you next time!

Who Is Floris Wagemakers?

"Well, based on his email to us and his website, it looks like he's some guy named Floris Wagemakers who moved to Ireland from Holland a while ago and started up his own organic, self-sustaining falafel stand to make a living," I told my Mom when my travel partners and I first got our invitation to WWOOF in Ireland.

"So you're going to be making falafel with a Dutch man named Wagemakers? This doesn't sound like it'll be a very 'Irish' experience..." my Mom responded, skeptically.

"Ach, nah! Flo? He's about as Irish as they come! A real nationalist, he is!" countered a friend of Floris a few weeks later, after I had related the skepticism which my Mom, not to mention quite a few others, had expressed when I told them what I was planning to do in Ireland. To be honest, I myself was not really sure what to expect initially. I'd seen his WWOOF profile and his website (thegourmetoffensive.com) and had communicated with him by email once, when he invited us to come down and stay with him as helpers. All I really knew about him was, well, just what I told my Mom in the first paragraph of this article. And of course, as is usually the case, once we got here, things became a lot clearer and a bit more interesting as well. So who is this guy anyway, other than Galway's premier falafel baron who decided to take in three American kids he didn't know to work in his garden for two months?

For starters, Floris Wagemakers's name isn't pronounced the way you think. Supposedly, the Dutch people, of whom Floris is natively a member, never had last names until that idealistic tyrant, Napoleon Bonaparte, came through and decided that surnames were the way of the future, and so Flo's ancestors decided that since they were wagon makers by trade, than wagon makers they would be henceforth called. Hence, Wagemakers - pronounced not like makers of wages, but more similarly to the old Philadelphia department store Wanamakers.

Flo (who's out of town right now so he'll have to forgive me for any factual inaccuracies) moved to Ireland around 1998 hoping to start a new life for himself. He'd had some professional kitchen experience and knew how to make falafel and after a few years of one thing or another, he decided to fill in the falafel niche that was sorely empty in this part of Western Ireland with his very own organic falafel cart. That's how The Gourmet Offensive began operating on weekends in the Galway market.

There were a few stipulations that were very important to Flo upon opening his business. The first was that he would do this on the weekends so that he would be able to grow produce in his garden during the rest of the week. This served a few functions. One of them, as is advertised on the front of his cart, was that he could grow as much of his own produce as possible, creating a more personal connection from himself to his food to his customers. While this is mostly limited to greens that go into the salads that fill his pita sandwiches, his garden is full of other goodies, which I've been helping to farm since arriving here and which often find themselves on Flo's dinner table as well. More importantly to the garden, though, was the fact that Flo has been growing most of his whole life (growing produce, that is; not growing physically, although he is quite tall).

This ties into the other stipulation of his business. Everything is organic, produced not by the machines of modern warfare in the fight of agri-business versus nature; or the genetic manipulations of the likes of Monsanto, who strive to make tomatoes that will last in the fridge for ages at the expense of flavor and diversity. No no, Flo insists that mankind must narrow the divide between themselves and the food they grow. It's one thing for people not to grow their own food; there has always been a divide between the agrarian sectors of society and the rest of those who benefit. But in the Western world, there is a disturbing lack of interest in quality produce, and an abundance of ignorance of what it is we are actually eating. What the hell is in a commercial hot dog anyway? And how can anyone expect to be able to manipulate a plant to grow all year round or be shipped across oceans without suffering in taste and nutrition? Flo firmly believes that people maintaining a closer connection to their food, and the natural world at large, is the key to improving lives, enriching souls, and getting our society that much closer back to where he says, and I agree, it should be.

Of course, these aren't easy ideas to put into practical action. Most people appear perfectly content to eat the same half-dozen or so varieties of apple, narrow-mindedly selected for mass distribution from among literally thousands of varieties that once covered our planet, despite the fact that this means that in a world of supply and demand, all our other choices will most likely soon become extinct. The pitfall of this is not only the lack of aesthetic options, but also the creation of a monoculture, the worst possible outcome for the natural world. The Irish potato famine, for example, occurred because there was primarily one variety of potato farmed throughout the country, and when the blight came along, there were no resistant strains of the plant. The result was that all the potatoes died and the people starved, and there is no reason to think this can't happen again, despite, or because of, all the efforts to create produce that can resist disease. (There is also a lot of science that assures us that the more disease-resistant strains of produce we create, the stronger the diseases will become until - worst case scenario - we can no longer overpower Mother Nature's adaptive abilities and have a planet full of super-blights flying around destroying all our food.)

Even closer to home, reaching a mutually-respectful relationship with agriculture is a complicated issue. During dinner one night, Flo was serving a lamb stew. His 7-year-old son, Idris, asked at one point, "Flo, is this from a real lamb?" Flo offhandedly answered, "Sure it is. Like it?"

Idris's face instantly sank and tears began to well up in his eyes, as he underwent one of those epiphanies that many poor children find at some point in their youth, like when they realize the Tooth Fairy is really just a sneaky parent with some pocket change. "But I don't want to eat a lamb!" he cried.

"Aww, Jaysus! You're not eating it now?? But you always ask me for meat!" Flo and I have had a couple conversations about meat, and the idea that peoples' perceptions towards it would change if they themselves were a more active part of the "foodification" of animals. In Mali, I regularly found myself becoming personally acquainted with livestock who I would later watch go through the whole process from bloody death, cleaning, and finally to being turned into supper which the whole family would voraciously consume, knowing how much effort they put into raising this animal and keeping it happy until it was time for it to serve its purpose. As I said before, it's been ages in Western culture since agrarianism was universal, and there have always been people who did the "dirty work" of food for the other branches of society, but in today's world, where there is such a wide disconnect between us and something as basic as our food, the idea of having the casual carnivorous American businessman kill his own cow to supply his 16 ounce steak sounds...well, it might be interesting to see how that turns out.

I guess what it all comes down to is prioritizing. Flo has been doing a lot of that. He spends a good amount of time thinking and talking about the problems the world is facing: political unrest, human rights and freedoms, and the rest of the issues that plague humanity on a daily basis. But he also realizes that very few people can effectively take on more than a few of these problems, and even those who do have made little headway in the grand scheme of things. The best approach to making effective change is to choose your battles. Flo's is food. He's not a vegetarian, or an all-organic, all-the-time crusader like some folks I know, but he has his agenda, and he's taken it to the front lines. You can see him there every weekend, making falafel sandwiches with pride and determination, and selling them to all walks of life who pass through the Galway marketplace. Whether they share his agenda or just want to fill their tummies, be they young or old, tourist or local, from every denomination of humanity that comes through, Flo will sell them healthy, humanity-centered food that everyone agrees tastes damn good. The way I see it, every falafel ball sold is more ammunition spent, and every patron is another soldier enlisted in The Gourmet Offensive.