Since last time we talked:

July 15th: The morning of the 15th, an international diving team arrived to stay in King William’s College with the archaeology students and I. They have members from England, Scotland, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, France, Germany, Sweden and Spain and, for some reason, they’ve decided to come to the Isle of Man to dive in the Irish Sea. They leave at the crack of dawn to hike down to the College’s stretch of the beach, and take off on their boat. They spend nine, ten hours a day at sea, and return looking battered and beaten. They go on to cook themselves a giant dinner in the kitchen, and tend not to leave the kitchen until 11 at night.

That diversion aside, I travelled up to Peel on the West of the Island.

King William’s college is in Castletown (yes, it’s named entirely after the Castle) and I usually go up to Douglas to take care of business.

Peel is home to a large amount of the Island’s antiques. I went from shop to shop, trying to find every last book in or about Manx Gaelic. After five hours of searching, I’m happy to say that I’m almost certain that the eighteen books I’ve collected compose a complete set of the aforementioned category, and Harvard-Westlake will most certainly be The United States’ foremost authority on Manx.

July 16th: I’m disappointed to announce that I spent most of my day shipping all of my books back to the US for the H-W library. The customs process here is a bit insane… you see, the Isle of Man is a tax haven, and is a hotspot for offshore banking. As such, smuggling is a bit of a problem (to say the least), and there’s an entire Department of Smuggling and Piracy on the Island. I had no idea that shipping a box of books would take me from the post office directly to the Department, where I was asked if my package contained drugs, weapons or money. I told them they could open it up and see for themselves, but they had none of it.

After four hours of my life slipped from my hands, the parcel was seabound for the United States. I stopped for lunch and then went back home to deal with some accounting. July 16th, then, is perhaps the only day on this Island that I haven’t had some sort of an adventure. Well, I suppose you could count the smuggling thing as an adventure?

Today I’m off to the very Northern tip of the Island (Port Ayre, the tip of the map above) for my next adventure, which I’ll detail in the next most.

He’e miu.