Preliminary information about our spring quarter visit to Ireland (4/20-5/26):

First, the money.

Everyone has to pay $1000 for Oideas Gael's tuition in advance of going; it has to be early because teachers have to be hired in advance and Oideas Gael has to know how many of you are coming in order to book the cottages you'll be staying in. I'm afraid there's nothing I can do to change this (it's not my rule), and I apologize for it. The tuition for Oideas Gael is due on Wednesday, January 31st, to our account in the cashier's office. (Don't try to pay it just yet because the account isn't set up. It will be, though, and I'll let you know.)

Airfare is cheaper the earlier in the spring you travel. Furthermore, traveling between Tuesday and Thursday is smart because it's less crowded and the fares are lower. I did a hypothetical search (4/12-5/27) on cheaptickets.com, my favorite discount website for airfares, and found airfares to be frightfully expensive (about $800). If anyone finds a cheaper fare, please use the listserve to let everyone know about it. There are always promotions by individual airlines, but you should be budgeting about $800 for the flight. I also subscribe to travelzoo.com, which sends me a weekly e-mail about travel promotions all over the world, and they always have cheap fares to Europe. You could even consider flying to London or Berlin or something (cheaper than flying to Dublin) and taking the ferry or something. Swim? Also, in December of every year, Scandinavian Airlines has a month-long promotion in which a different destination every day is deeply discounted. A bunch of Evergreen staff and faculty keep a close eye on their website and grab flights to Europe that way. Europe is small. You can get to Ireland from the mainland. But start looking for fares NOW.

Lodging: there are two main options. One is a lovely and roomy "dorm," made all of wood with big windows and beautiful views out to the ocean and across the glen. It has a big kitchen and dining area, and is about one minute's walk downhill to Oideas Gael. Cost is 115 euro (about $145) per week for five weeks (therefore, about $700+). You would be sharing a room with someone, although there are different configurations of double and single beds; out of 8 rooms, 6 are double rooms with two beds each. Hope that makes sense. The other accommodations ("self-catering cottages") are either three or four room houses, accommodating three, or four or five students. All houses are close to Oideas Gael and have all "normal" facilities, including cooking, bathrooms, etc. The cottages cost 100 euro per week (about $127), or about $635 for five weeks. All room charges in either the dorm or the cottages include heat, light, coal, bed linens, etc. You cook your own meals; there are two shops in town, about the size of a 7-11 but with decent local produce and even some oddities (for Ireland) like soy milk and organic food. How much you spend on food is up to you, and I urge you to track your food spending for a week, then add about 20% because of things being somewhat more expensive in Ireland. In addition, we'll be spending a little time in Connemara and/or Derry, and there will be a few days' worth of lodging there to pay for, like about a hundred more euro each. You pay for the five weeks' lodging up front; for the dorms you can pay with a credit card or cash, and for the cottages you pay cash right when you first get there.

How to save money? There are no scholarships, and I don't know of anyone who is offering to subsidize any of your visits to Ireland (and please don't ask me to pay, as students have in the past. I can't.). So here are some strategies, with apologies for the general tone of this paragraph. First, ask your family to give you the plane ticket for a graduation gift in advance. A plane ticket is much more concrete than the more vague gift of "money," which (while always wonderful to receive) has a way of evaporating. Now let's say your family has no money or they think you're wasting your time anyway. Fine: how about a graduation gift to yourself? I got a credit card for the first time in order to give myself airfare for a year-long trip to Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. And I never regretted it for a minute. I paid it off within just a couple of months of coming home. Second, alcohol and cigarettes are really, really expensive. They are a stunning drain on finances both here and in Ireland. One of my past students spent over $2000 on alcohol during his five weeks in Ireland. Have YOU budgeted $2000 for alcohol? I haven't. He didn't, either. Yet he complained, constantly, about how low his money was running, while nonetheless continuing his chain smoking and drinking. Think about how much you spend on these items. If you stopped either one of these, just for the time being, you would save significant money. (please note: this is NOT about "sin," this is exclusively about money.) Third, seriously consider bringing your lunch to school instead of buying it here. You can make a fine lunch for less than a dollar (a carrot, an apple, a sandwich, and a little piece of chocolate). Can you buy a good lunch at school for that little? No. Fourth, if you have a car, consider selling it. Seriously! I've done it myself for the extra cash right when I needed it. If you budget $3000 total for the entire trip, you should be covered (and that's what I estimated when I wrote it into the catalog copy).

Now, we're done with money and we're on to the daily logistical stuff.

First, Oideas Gael is our home base. It is a two-story building very close to the beach. It has a main teaching room and several smaller rooms for other classes. There are a couple of s-l-o-w dial-up modem computers upstairs where you can check your e-mail, but it is, frankly, REALLY FRUSTRATING and you will have trouble answering all your e-mail. You will need to have a blanket e-mail that you send out to all your friends and family once a week, otherwise you'll spend a lot of money and many of your messages won't go through anyway. The server is in Dublin; using the internet is a LONG-DISTANCE CALL!!! Aargh! So just tell everyone that you're off doing more important things than responding to every two-bit e-mail that comes along...

But Oideas Gael is a great facility, and has an office and a little kitchen for making tea and treats. It also has a fabulous facsimile of the Book of Kells, done on actual parchment. And one of its best features is its wonderful bookstore! I love this place and I always spend way too much money there. It has all kinds of Irish-themed books (in Irish and English), unbelievably good CDs, dictionaries, language instruction books, tin whistles, children's language books, bodhráns, novels, non-fiction...all in two small rooms. I could LIVE in there.

Oideas Gael is located outside the village of Gleanncholmcille by about five or ten minutes depending on how fast you walk. It is surrounded by sheep and has great views. The village itself has a post office, three pubs, a school, a number of B&Bs, two food shops, and a handful of other shops that will be closed when we arrive, but will sell things like linens and sweaters and porcelain teacups when "the season" begins on May 1st. There is no ATM machine in the village; the closest is in Teelin, about fifteen minutes away by car. I will probably do periodic runs to Teelin in my car every few days in case you have to visit the ATM. Assuming it works and/or has any money in it. Which it doesn't always. Further away from the village but in the other direction (five minutes' walk from Oideas Gael) is the "folk village," a brilliant re-creation of a traditional village that includes farm implements, household items, a three cottages from three different eras in Irish history. It has a huge soup pot leftover from famine days. It also includes a nice little gift shop and tea house with great food for lunch. We'll all go there for a tour.

We will have Irish language classes every morning, five days a week (more or less) except when we're traveling in Connemara and/or Derry. We start classes at the highly civilized hour of 10. We are split in half into two hour-and-fifteen-minute sessions, with the first group going from 10 to 11:15, and the second group going from 11:30 to 12:45. The second group prepares tea and cookies ("biscuits") for the first group so that the tea is ready during the break. We'll switch halfway through so the second group has the first class, and the first group prepares tea and biscuits instead. The break is a lovely moment in the day!

Afternoons vary wildly. You might be learning to do small-scale tapestry weaving, or tramping over the hills with an herbologist to learn about medical uses of local plants, or studying the position of Donegal and the Gaeltacht regions within the European Union, or doing landscape painting, or learning the tinwhistle. You could be listening to and studying singing with one of two major, world-class Donegal sean-nós singers like Lillis Ó Laoire or Gearóidín Breathnach (both of whom have won the all-Ireland sean-nós championship twice). We take a break in the afternoons, have other classes in poetry writing (with Northern poet Kate Newmann, mostly, and at least one session with Cathal Ó Searcaigh if he's home from Nepal) or a seminar or whatever. You can have dinner at home or go to An Cistin (next door to Oideas Gael) for brown bread and sú mara (seafood chowder). It's heavenly. There is also a little greasy fish and chips place in the village, about a ten minute walk from Oideas Gael.

In the evenings we meet at 7 pm for singing, or play reading, or Donegal-style dancing lessons, or bodhrán drumming lessons, or a session of storytelling, or a lecture or workshop on something local. Some people finish the evening with a pint or a cup of tea at one of three local pubs. It's a chance to meet and hang out with local people, who are familiar with Evergreen because we have brought students there before (and because one of my previous students married a local guy and still lives there; you'll meet her right away). Some people gather in the dorm (including if they're not living there) to hang out. Some people pass out from exhaustion in the (relative) privacy of their own rooms.

If we go to Connemara, it will be to attend the annual festival celebrating the life and music of Joe Heaney, my teacher. He passed away in 1984, but there is a commemorative festival every year at which all kinds of people come and sing and do sean-nós dancing. It's great. It's also a chance to be in another Gaeltacht where people speak much, much more Irish than they do in SW Donegal. We'll probably swing through the Burren as well, depending on our schedule. Galway is sort of the gateway to Connemara, and it's a lovely town to walk through (I go there just for the exceptionally good bookstore, Kenny's!). If we go to Derry, we'll visit the center for peace and reconciliation, talk to people who were there for Bloody Sunday (1972 -- you'll learn about it next quarter), view the political murals, and tour the city on foot. Derry is gorgeous and dark in its own way. The Siege of Derry is still a recent memory. If the weather is nice we'll go out to the Giant's Causeway on the Antrim coast and swing by a stunning archaeological site (Grianan of Aileach) on the way home. These would be separate trips to Connemara and Derry (three nights in Connemara, two nights in Derry).

Why is this schedule so packed? Because we fit ten weeks of classes into five weeks of time. This is why I recommend that you arrive in Ireland a week before classes begin...you will need to be all finished with jet lag, and NOT have a cold, and be ready to work and play. The weather will be terrible, I mean "changeable," when we first get there. It will warm up. By the time we're ready to leave, it will be beautiful.