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Steel and Potatoes: 5/1/10
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Monday, May 31, 2010. Posted by Alex Moore at 10:37 PM. The train hummed along across the Swiss border, into German-speaking Switzerland. Pip and I popped open the windows, leaned back in our seats and breathed in the mountain air. The Alps surrounded us on either side. Our train navigated a narrow pass that took us past tiny villages and ancient church steeples, alongside skinny lakes, across rolling green farmland. It was beautiful. (It's Switzerland. what do you expect? We rolled into Geneva. The hipp...
steelandpotatoes.blogspot.com
Steel and Potatoes: 10/1/10
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Friday, October 15, 2010. Back in the USSR. Posted by Alex Moore at 1:28 PM. It was the beginning of June. Back home in Pennsylvania, my Masters thesis was coming along great. I was reading, holing up in coffee shops, conducting interviews, and all around being generally productive. What I needed was a distraction. What I needed was Pip. To visit friends. I guess if you're going to do it, do it right. Is the capital of Ukraine and one of the most important cultural centers in Eastern Europe. It was o...
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Steel and Potatoes: 12/1/10
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Sunday, December 26, 2010. Posted by Alex Moore at 10:40 AM. Pip and I landed in Yerevan, Armenia on a hot summer night in June. A strange language filled the air; the airport billboards carried a script which seemed almost too foreign to be real. We stood in line at customs. When it was my turn, I walked up to the window and showed my passport. Stop What do you know about Armenia. If you were like us, not much. From Dublin was there too. He had come to Armenia, independently. Just months before, althoug...
steelandpotatoes.blogspot.com
Steel and Potatoes: The Idiot's Guide to Belfast
http://steelandpotatoes.blogspot.com/2010/02/idiots-guide-to-belfast.html
Tuesday, February 23, 2010. The Idiot's Guide to Belfast. Posted by Alex Moore at 5:49 PM. Belfast and the Boyne Valley. Disclaimer: This post, and all my blog posts, merely represents my opinion, from the limited perspective of an American student visiting a foreign country and a foreign political, religious and social climate. I do not claim my experience to be representative of any larger truths beyond my own personal feelings and initial reactions. We made it to our Israeli-Palestinian talk (a topic ...
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Steel and Potatoes: 1/1/10
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Wednesday, January 13, 2010. Posted by Alex Moore at 11:49 AM. The morning Sarah came to visit me in Ireland is a blur. When she got off the plane, I couldn’t believe it was actually her. It didn’t compute. After three months of staring at her face through a webcam, she ran through the international arrivals terminal in Dublin airport and into my arms. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. We must have walked 100 miles in the 10 days she was there. And somehow, it only rained once. The next morn...
steelandpotatoes.blogspot.com
Steel and Potatoes: 10/1/09
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Tuesday, October 27, 2009. Posted by Alex Moore at 2:12 PM. A lot of people from home have asked me if they celebrate Halloween in Ireland. Not only do they celebrate it; they invented it. Originally a Celtic tradition dating back to pagan times, the Gaelic festival of Samhain. Was celebrated at the end of the harvest season. The Pope moved All Saints Day to November 1st to try to supplant it, but Samhain was never entirely eradicated in the British Isles. Should demonstrate what I might be able to expect.
steelandpotatoes.blogspot.com
Steel and Potatoes: Back in the USSR
http://steelandpotatoes.blogspot.com/2010/10/back-in-ussr.html
Friday, October 15, 2010. Back in the USSR. Posted by Alex Moore at 1:28 PM. It was the beginning of June. Back home in Pennsylvania, my Masters thesis was coming along great. I was reading, holing up in coffee shops, conducting interviews, and all around being generally productive. What I needed was a distraction. What I needed was Pip. To visit friends. I guess if you're going to do it, do it right. Is the capital of Ukraine and one of the most important cultural centers in Eastern Europe. It was o...
steelandpotatoes.blogspot.com
Steel and Potatoes: 9/1/09
http://steelandpotatoes.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html
Wednesday, September 30, 2009. Posted by Alex Moore at 10:57 AM. Howth and Dublin, Ireland. There's a train called the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit) that travels through Dublin and around Dublin Bay. One of the train stations is actually attached to my dormitory, and after listening to it thunder past a few hundred times, I realized that I should probably see where it goes. The town of Howth. They were moored so close together, their masts seemed to crisscross each other in a big interwoven knot.
steelandpotatoes.blogspot.com
Steel and Potatoes: 11/1/09
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Thursday, November 26, 2009. Posted by Alex Moore at 1:49 PM. It's Monday afternoon and I'm in the department, putzing around on the computer, when my friend Pip walks over. He had just gotten an email from an old client of his who wanted a photograph he took at a wedding, years ago, but the negatives were in his family's cottage in Clare. He said he'd have to leave after class. "Fancy an adventure to the West? It was 2 AM when we reached Kilbaha, Ireland. We climbed out the window and made our way throu...
