I began the day with the walk from the B&B into the town of Birr, which the B&B lady said would be about 30 minutes but actually takes an hour. Good thing the weather is nice now. (Here is a picture of Birr. And the picture is basically the whole town, that is the only street.)
Then after the long walk I came to this sad little community center where my day's activities were going to be taking place.
It was a Set dancing workshop. Here are some people Set dancing.
Anyways. I had been a little nervous about the whole event because I figured I would be 1) the only American 2) the youngest person by about 50 years. I was, in fact, the only American, and I was the youngest person, but probably only by about 15 or 20 years. I was also nervous because this is partner dancing and I didn't have a partner. There were some men without partners though. About half of the time I was dancing with a middle aged balding man named Patsy. Yes, Patsy. And the other half of the time I was dancing with a very old very smelly French man who was there with a group of about 5 French Set Dancing enthusiasts. (I guess they just really like Irish folk dancing). I certainly stood out from the crowd, but I threw around the words "independent research fellowship" a lot today, so I think that made me seem a little more scholarly and impressive.
The whole event was from 10:30am to 5:00pm. We had a lunch break...but still...that's a LOT of dancing with smelly old Frenchmen. It was overall, a very unique experience. I was kind of laughing to myself all day long just because it was all so amusing. It was fun though, and it will be good for my research. Afterwards I had a brief interview with the man who was the instructor, so that will be REALLY good for research.
As I was sitting interviewing the instructor the event-organizer man came over and invited me to have dinner with all of the Set Dance regulars. I did not want to have dinner with them, but I couldn't really be like..."Oh no, thanks for that really generous offer, but I already have plans to eat alone." So I was forced to accept. This is all making me sound very rude and antisocial. Anyways, dinner. Dinner was awkward. It was the dancing instructor and his wife, and the event organizer, and like three other old couples who I assume are just the usual Set Dance crowd. They all know each other very well and thus, I was very much out of the loop on most things. Add to that the fact that here in central Ireland people's accents are very very hard to understand. So whenever anyone spoke to me I had to say "uh...what?" about three times and whenever anyone was not speaking directly to me I was completely lost. Smiling and nodding only really gets you so far...It was another very unique and amusing experience.
At least I got a ride back to the B&B. Tomorrow, I was planning on skipping the other events, but these people are like...making me go. Oh my.
A note: Their accents are just SO thick. Because I find that "Katherine" sounds more scholarly that "Katie" that is what I have been introducing myself as, but they all pronounce it "Kat-rin."
By the way, I totally rock at Set dancing.
2 comments:
I sure hope you got some good photos of these Frenchmen. I had another good LOL and I look forward to reading about the followup activities.
I missed the part that explained exactly why there are old French men in Birr. I do understand that when it comes to the French some things cannot be explained.
Tell your sister how to enable images to enlarge when clicked on. That is a nice feature which she has apparently not mastered. Maybe it has something to do with her being in Italy
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