Australia Day

Yesterday we spent the entire day in the city centre, to celebrate Australia day with Sydneysiders. On the trip back to the apartment, we overheard - well everybody in the bus couldn't help but overhear - three self-appointed cultural attache's from Ireland having a beer-fuelled debate with some of their equally inebriated Sydneysider counterparts on the nature of a Republic. The Irish lads were probably in their early 20s, but that didn't stop them from banging on about the Union Jack on the Australian flag and '800 years of oppression' etc etc. These lads weren't brought up listening to nightly news reports of atrocities in the name of Republicanism, or Unionism, so I suppose they had the advantage of considering the whole matter from the comfort of an unsullied, theoretical perspective. Whatever their motives (which I'm assuming were at least in part getting into the pants of their female opponents) I found their attitude irritating, and surprisingly arrogant. Is his tthe New Irish abroad?

The Republican debate in Australia is complex, and I don't pretend to understand it. It defies party lines, and motives for either supporting or opposing a break with the UK throne can often sound similar to each other. Even defining what it means to be Australian is famously difficult. The recently removed Prime Minister Howard spoke of 'matesmanship'. The voice-over to the Darling Harbour festivities talked about a place where discrimination had no place. There is definitely a sense of nationalism here, but it is understated. Lots of folks were wearing or waving the flag around the city yesterday, but when the hosts for the evening tried to create a chant of 'Australia' around the harbour they failed repeatedly and embarrassingly. Embarrassing for them: it takes more than a TV and a microphone to distract the locals from their conversations with their mates. The crowd seemed immune to jingoistic manipulation. I loved it. The moment that inspired the most applause, and it was spontaneous, was when a boat carrying 4 new Australians (there were citizenship ceremonies all over the country on the day) did a lap of the harbour.

At the edge of Darling Harbour lies the Maritime Museum. There is a wall on the outside where the names of Australia's official immigrants are being added. When all names go up there, there will be 6 million of them. A third of the population. Inside the museum there is an exhibition about those immigrants, in the form of the personal stories of a number of families. Mostly, they were people fleeing poverty or political upheaval and oppression in their own countries, or indeed people who didn't have a country anymore. This museum is the mirror image of the museum in Cobh, in County Cork - about 20 minutes drive from our house. The Cobh museum records the heartbreaking departure of hundreds of thousands of impoverished Irish, both before and after the foundation of the Free State and later the Republic. The Darling Harbour museum records their arrival to the other side of a months-long voyage.

The three mugs on the bus would have done well to remember that it was places like Australia that provided a home for thousands of Irish with no hope and no future in their own native Republic, instead of trying to rub the locals' noses in it, about symbols and figureheads that have less and less meaning either here or back in Ireland.

Language and Music

One of the themes that I've picked out for this trip, for myself at least, has been music. Why? Because where ever you go on the face of the planet, where you find people, you also find music. Like language itself, it seems to be built in to the structure of our brains. And like language, it is both universal and provincial.

After my review of I Am A Strange Loop, David French pointed me towards a very interesting book called This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin. I'm only into the 4th chapter or so, but already a couple of things have cropped up that are worth mentioning. I had heard - a long time ago - that Asian systems of music were quite different to, say, European ones. In particular, I was told, octaves were divided into finer intervals than our semitone. According to Levitin (who is not only a musician, and music producer but also a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist - don't you hate him already?) this is not so. There might be more use of temporary intermediate notes - the equivalent of a blues string bend - but the tendency to break the octave into twelve intervals is found pretty much everywhere, including Asia.

What does change is the way that scales are organized. Where children in the West learn their Do-Re-Mi scale, each with eight notes, there are 5 specific pentatonic scales (5 notes each) in the Chinese system. Scales are purely internal inventions of the human mind - they don't exist in the real world. As such they are learned - or at least partially constructed on the biological foundations of the brain's ability to understand music - and so have a strong cultural component. This is why Chinese music sounds Chinese, or Irish music sounds Irish.

So just like language, music is something we are all born to understand, even if we learn to speak it differently, depending on where we're born. I think this means that no matter how much I might find I enjoy Chinese (or any other) music, I'll probably never understand it, and so appreciate it, as fluently as a native. Though perhaps the same can be said of any inexpert listener, even of their own music.

Sardinian Singing
Another interesting insight I got from this book relates to a particular kind of singing performed in Letizia's native Sardinia. I have already heard a lot of canto a tenore and I have a few CDs of one of the most famous performers of this style, called the Tenores di Bitti. I quite like this style - though it's best enjoyed, like Italian food, in small portions. Four male voices interact with three of the singers providing close harmonies while the fourth leads. But when the harmonies work just right, our brain - masterful at interpolating frequencies that it feels should be there - put in a fifth, female pitched voice called the quintina. Tradition has it that this is the voice of the Virgin Mary, joining them in song as a reward for their precise harmonies. Even a godless man like me can't help favouring this interpretation.

Getting a visa for China from Ireland

This page on the Chinese Embassy in Dublin explains that one has to apply in person in the Dublin office, or send somebody else. In other words, the postal system here is considered so undependable by the Chinese authorities that they're not going to risk using it!

Holiday visas last for 3 months from time of issue. This means that in order to get the visa for myself, my wife and the two kids, we're going to have to head up to Dublin within two months of departing Ireland. What a pain in the ass!

Travelling in China: Lecture in Cork

As part of a series of lectures on China and the Chinese, Emma Connelly will be delivering a talk called Travelling in China in the Central Library, Grand Parade, Cork City tomorrow the 20th of February.

I've tried to find out a little about Emma online, but unsuccessfully so far.

Getting the Right Travel Insurance

In a previous post I described the fairly poor selection of insurance options open to travelers who didn't fit in to a very restrictive category (backpacking students are OK, 3-week tripper families are fine too, but backpacking families are as well received as a fart in a church).

I've found two places that will entertain me with a quote. The first is WorldNomad which seems like a popular site and is recommended by Lonely Planet. I got the second quote quite simply by contacting the insurance brokers that helped me with my house and motor insurance: O'Leary Insurances right here in Cork.

First up, Nomad are cheaper at a little over 800 Euro. In fact when I told the Cork broker about their price his first reaction was to tell me to go with them! But I asked him to send me on a quote in any case, asking for a discount based on the fact that I was an existing customer. The price he came back to me with was 1100 Euros.

At face value I would be right to go with Nomad, but there's more to it than that. The insurance products on offer are actually very very different. For starters, the Nomad policy goes up to a maximum combined payout of 250,000 Euro per person per trip. So even if it appears that it'll pay 100% of hospitalization and 100% of Compassionate Emergency Repatriation, there is still that ceiling of 1M in total for the family (might sound like a lot, but compared to what other policies offer it's very modest). And it doesn't protect you in the case of cancellation nor does it cover activities like skiing.

My local insurance broker's suggestion, while costing almost 300 Euro more, has a lot going for it. Firstly, their is no overall ceiling - just a ceiling per cover section. So for example, there is a 6,350,000 Euro maximum per person for medical expenses. There's personal liability cover set at a max of 2.5 M Euro (as we're not going to the US, we're less in need of this kind of cover, but it's nice to have). Adventurous activities like skiing and scuba diving will most likely be covered without any need for extra on the premium. But most importantly, I'd have a broker - with his phone number and email address - that I could contact while on the road (or indeed on our return) to help with any questions or claims. That counts for an awful lot. Already he was able to answer a lot of questions about fine print, and offer advice on when I should actually take out the policy.

I'll do some extra fishing around, but so far, I have to say that O'Leary Insurances are worth the few extra euros.

Insurance says my kids are too young. Oh and I'm too old.

I've started to look around at Irish travel insurance options, before we buy the tickets so that cancellation of same is covered. I've looked as VHI, AIB, AA, ETravelInsure, USIT, JustCover, and GetCover so far. There are many more out there and I'll keep trying. But the problem is that they all offer the same thing! The prices do vary of course, but there isn't a single product out there that covers what I'm looking for.

If I want to cover the family, then I can only stay away for maximum 90 days at a time (what happens after that? Do we suddenly transform at the end of the third month into a bunch of walking insurance liabilities?)

If I want a long-stay, then the kids have a lot of growing up to do. They have to become over 18 in most cases. There is even one policy that excludes all but 18-35 year olds. Oh my god - I'm separated from the kids by the yawning abyss of an entire insurance category!!!!

I noticed that AIB's url includes the words travel-cover.inabox. Small enough box there lads. And very boxy as well.

Now I know that right policy is out there, but based on the fact that we don't seem to fit into anybody's box (ahem) I'm expecting absurd premia. We shall see. Is this another example of the small Irish insurance market doing exactly what they want?

I'll be back.

Oh the Irony!

I forgot to mention in my last post about something that cropped up during out conversation with the principal of the school. If I'm going to support Nina and Sara's Irish language education while we're away, I'm going to have to hit the books myself.

So basically I've been breaking my arse trying to learn Chinese over the last year or more, and Letizia has been studying Spanish. And it turns out that in order to leave Ireland and travel around the world I'm going to have to learn Irish all over again!!

Ah well - maybe I was only waiting for an excuse. Aoife - if you're out there: Heeeeelp!!!!

RTE Radio 1: The Big Adventure (contd)

The episode of this show that I mentioned in a previous blog entry aired on Monday last. The two women being interviewed were Christine Breen and Geraldine Osbourne. My wife has already read Christine's account of her family's nine-month trip around the world, and found it full of useful advice (even if the trip we plan would be reasonably different in nature). Geraldine Osbourne took her young family to live in Nunavut, a vast but sparsely populated region in the North East of Canada.

I found myself nodding and smiling a lot during the show. There's a lot in common in terms of the motivation to do a trip like this. Even if I don't know these families, and probably have had a very different life and upbringing to them, I felt like we belonged to the same tribe. The interest in travel is either there or it's not.

Christine's view on what the experience did for her family was encouragingly close to what I hope the trip will do for mine. She described the family as a travelling bubble, and said that during that time they started to see each other more as people than as parent/child. I'm aiming to chill out enough so that my kids don't have to put up with me managing them so much - but mamma and daddy are still the boss, kids!

Geraldine's view on the effects of the trip on the family were also positive, but perhaps more darkly observed thanks to the fact that some of her kids were teenagers at the time and that she was also putting up with 3 months of total darkness at a time. Her overall view was that this was an experience that the kids would always look back on and come to appreciate even more in retrospect than during the time itself.

Geraldine confirmed one of the effects on the kids that we had hoped for - something that motivates my wife and me a great deal: They get to see how big and varied the world is, how much there is going on, how many different ways there are too live. Living in Ireland in 2007 , I can tell you that this is a big deal. I want my girls to get some perspective, and not get caught up in the drama of little town life to the extent that they close their minds to everything else.

The presenter Manchán Magan very kindly included questions about schooling which I had mentioned to him in previous email conversations. In the case of Christine Breen, she 'got away with' taking her kids out of school - confirming our opinion that much comes down to the way the school management chooses to view the matter. We'll be speaking to the management of our daughters' school in the next week or so, and I'll be sure to post on the outcome.

Nice one Manchán - the show was very helpful to us. Looking forward to future episodes.