Collecting Moments

My friend told me the other day that when her sister was dying she cried and said "I never got to be me. I never got to be me". And I immediately remembered what I heard from another woman in completely different circumstances also somewhere in Ireland... GO HOME Go home and tell your husband Go home and tell your kids Go home and drop your burdens on the floor in a pile of the laundry Tell them who you are, who you were, who you could be... (© Tina Pisco) The more I stay in Ireland the more I realize how damn lucky I am to allow myself to be me. And that's why it's time to move on now...

The day started with a hitchhiking trip from Clara to Roscommon. Two lifts, 70 kms, one hour... I got out of the car on the main town square and immediately someone greeted me. Are you the guy from the “Melting pot” pub? - I asked. - Yes. - Do you know Sean? Sean O'Neill? - I do, yes. Where are you coming from? - I just came from Clara hitchhiking. I'm Katya. - Oh, hello Katya. Sean told me a lot about you. Feels like a real melting pot... And I've only been here for a month! Gerry Jago - сгусток ураганной положительной энергии, смеха, счастья. Живет настоящим, и каждый момент с ним живой и настоящий. Такой ирландский буддист :)

Hitchhiking from Clara to Clonmacnoise Today the three of us, an English man, a Chinese girl and a Russian immigrant from Israel, hitched along a dead empty country road from Clara to Clonmacnoise. I honestly thought we'd never move from that spot. But... after fifteen minutes a car stopped. It was an old lady who said she didn't like to drive people but we seemed to be too nice to be left stranded. She was going only ten kilometres down the road to see her daughter, a hair-dresser and a wife of a local detective. When we actually arrived at her daughter's house, a young lady greeted us and offered us a lift all the way to Clonmacnoise. So we just got out of her mother's car and got into hers. Clonmacnoise, an ancient monastic site and a cemetery, turned out to be a horrible place with a new tourist bus arriving every thirty minutes and an entrance fee of seven euros. But since I'd already spent one month in Ireland hiking mostly on private farm lands, it was just ...

Ирландская пустыня изумрудно-серая. Дно древнего моря - трещины, промоины, впадины. Белая лошадь. Поющий ветер. Как в кадре Тарковского...

No matter where you go in this country, that’s what you see - forty shades of green…

Hitchhiked in the Ring of Kerry with a German girl that I met yesterday on the bus, - 150 km, 9 lifts, 10 hours. One of our drivers was a tree surgeon...

Today I visited a tiny island in Bantry bay. There are only twenty people living on it at the moment. A peaceful, green little spot surrounded by the sea. They speak some kind of dialect here which I'd call "whiddish" and everybody is just "alright" (apart from this word, which is added to the end of every sentence, I couldn't understand anything :) A local lady told me that there used to be seven hundred people on Whiddy island at some point. I managed to get into an old teacher’s house with a beautiful view of the lake, and an abandoned school which was built in the end of the XIX century.