Zumba and Seaweed to beat off the rain



A pint of the green stuff



The rain has settled in and the view ahead is disturbingly dark grey and wet. Depression was beating at the door, with no sign of work and the prospect of being stuck inside for the next six months...

So attack being the best form of defence I am trying a two pronged approach- exercise and healthy eating. I have joined Zumba, a craze that seems to have overtaken the whole of Galway (see flash Zumba mob video below in the city recently.)  There are three jam packed classes a week scheduled in the village alone. The nice part is that you pay for eight sessions but you can take them as you wish and Arisa, the beautiful, sunny, blond, tanned, Polish Zumba teacher (so skilled at twirling the tassles on her back pockets) punches a hole in your card when you attend so you don’t have the pressure of committing to one time slot each week.

When I walked into my first Zumba class in Johnston’s hall it was apparent that I was the last person in Kinvara to take it up. All ages were flamencoing, bellydancing, salsaing and cha cha cha-ing. Even senior members of staff from the school had all the moves off for Tina Turners ‘Rolling down the River’. Combining mambo dancing with aerobics is guaranteed to leave you sweating and put a smile on your face. And your muscles won’t let you forget that you did it the next day. One lady had a calorie monitor on and we burned 620 calories last night!

Inspired by Prannie Rhattigan’s cook book ‘The Seaweed Kitchen’ and the benefits of eating seaweed- full of vitamins and minerals (and also free..), we went down at low tide to the Flaggy shore searching for ‘Alaria’ the ingredient in her super green smoothie (see the photo above) that I wanted to try and make. Alaria contains vitamin C and K, all the B vitamins, calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, zinc, copper, potassium and iodine. It is meant to grow on stony ledges just past the tide level on wave beaten shores. I peered over the edge of lots of rocky ledges and got soaked by beating waves but didn’t see a frond of Alaria even in the washed up piles on the beach. We did find Duileasc, Egg wrack, Saw wrack and Sugar kelp. Duileasc is also commonly eaten and potently nutritious.

So I made a power packed quinoa salad with roasted carrots and beetroot, sprouting broccoli and feta cheese, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice and topped with shreds of Duileasc. It was delicious, the seaweed tasted nutty with a nice tender, rubbery texture.

So far the two pronged approach is working and I am really excited about zumba-ing through the recession and cooking more seaweed recipes!

the guard



The G Hotel, Galway

We are probably among the last people in Ireland to see the film The Guard. We had a delicious M50 hamburger in Eddie Rockets beforehand (topped with melted Swiss cheese NYC cart onions, grilled mushrooms and ER secret sauce) not knowing the diner features in the blackmail scene from the movie and the cinema is next door to the G Hotel, where Gerry Boyle spent his ‘day off’.

The G Hotel has won over even the grumpiest begrudgers with its pink walls, silver chairs, sumptuous carpets and velvet furnishings. It was decorated by the celebrity hat designer, Philip Tracy, originally from the tiny village of Ahascragh. It is inspiring to know that it is only one small step from Ahascragh to world hat domination.

We are grateful to have The G as a vibrant remnant of the Celtic Tiger (the bonsai tree outside the front door is reputedly insured for €30k.)

The movie is a good introduction to Irish dead pan humour (see video below for the main character’s take on this). Trying to ‘knock a rise’ out of people, just to raise a smile is a national pass time. Or interspersing the truth with swathes of lies, just to brighten up the day, and to stop people taking themselves too seriously, can be confusing for the uninitiated. Brendan Gleeson is an expert. It also illustrates brilliantly the boredom and monotony of being loyally stuck in a small corner, of a small country but craving the bright lights and mental stimulation of the metropolis.

Somehow the brazen jokes manage to take the power out of the racism and show that sometimes precious PC behaviour can be more divisive than cohesive. The stereotypical bigotry, bad language, corrupt gardai and weak drug running gangster plot are lifted to box office triumph by the skilfully written script full of snappy one liners, that mature nicely on reflection, and the brilliant casting of the magnetic characters. It is a movie that is destined to wear out many DVDS and sit on the shelf with Man about dog, Into the West and box sets of Father Ted.

Back to reality- the Kinvara Minors hurling team lost their semi final. It was a hot, messy, overcast game with very little good play that deteriorated from an even match at half time to an all out thrashing. But the good news is…

The Cardiac First Responders Group saved their first patient yesterday. There was a collapse in the hotel and CPR was started, someone raced down to the school for the defibrillator and shocks were delivered. When the ambulance arrived the casualty was breathing. So our neighbour’s death, that inspired my sister in law to start the group, has saved a life. (She is a bangarda and everyone from the station loved the movie by the way..)

Enter the stillness

The meditation hall  at the Sunyata retreat, Sixmilebridge, Co. Clare

I spent the weekend at the Sunyata retreat centre in County Clare, looking for a bit of silence. It was a weekend course  called ‘Enter the great stillness:the mystical side of Qigong.’

Friday morning was difficult.The cows had to be put in the pen for the second half of the TB test, which entails looking at the injection site to see if it it is inflamed. Having all been stabbed in the neck on Tuesday they decided it was a really bad idea to go back in the pen. They ignored the bucket and raced up and down the fields refusing to go in the gate. Eventually my husband got into the car and tried to turn a VW golf into a cattle dog. It resulted in a broken headlight and a cow with a nasty cut on her back leg. So we gave up and hours later got them in using patience, stealth and lots of confusingly placed buckets of feed.

Then I started on the computer. I had agreed to turn the Kinvara Cardiac Response Guidelines, that we are drawing up, into a nice little A5 document. After downloading a huge and complicated free publishing software package and eventually understanding how to work it, I was about to complete the last page of the booklet and a message popped up ‘if you need another page please send $90’ at which point the children were home, exhausted, starving and clingy after the first two days of school.

So I got out the credit card, googled ‘meditation retreat’ rang Marion (originally from Texas) at the Sunyata centre and she said their was a place left on the course. I had never heard of Qigong, all I saw in the title was ‘stillness’ and thought it sounded perfect. It was. My husband had got through to the next stage of interview with Boston Scientific, an engineering aptitude test, which he did on Friday. As soon as he got home I was winging my way down to County Clare.

Qigong is the ancient practice of gathering the healing energy of the universe through gentle, graceful, mystical movements. For two days I did 8 hours of Qi Gong with about two hours of meditation in between. I did movements such as 'arrive at oneness' and 'bridge over heaven's river.' The hall was beautiful, looking out over a vast expanse of green countryside and trees, with little birds chattering. The retreat is in the middle of nowhere and the only visitor we had was a lone white puck goat that wandered into the courtyard. A short stroll away through a bit of forest brings you to a waterfall where dark peaty water pours in rivelets, over two boulders, into a pool and rolls over a log to splash into the stream below.

I returned on Sunday buzzing like a buddah, my head clear, full of energy, with my feet firmly planted on the ground.

Our teacher Max Weier, learnt his skills from Master Lee (see video below for a short introduction to sitting qi gong) who was a famous kung fu expert, even winning a Chinese oscar.
He gave up kung fu to become a Qigong master.