california-j1

jj99

Thinking of going to california for summer, but want to go summer a bit smaller than the bigger cities. any suggestions about where to go if we wanted to stay away from san diego and san fran?

mada999

santa barbara is nice....wasnt there on j1 only there for a few days and i liked it!

Sangre

Stay away from Santa Barbara! They'll never give accommodation to the Irish after we left!
Great summer though

The Failed God

living | college life
THE SMASHY SMASHY SESSIONS
Visiting Irish Leave Their Mark
in Isla Vista
by drew ATKINS

Blarney. It’s a noun that means “pleasant talk, intending to deceive without offending.” It is also a village in the south of Ireland. These two definitions became intertwined early in the 14th century, when Queen Elizabeth I began demanding obedience from the lords of Ireland. Cormac Teige McCarthy, the Lord of Blarney, didn’t want to go along with this, so he peppered his communiqués to the Crown with compliments and sly promises of conformity without ever actually complying. Eventually the Queen became wise to McCarthy and proclaimed he was giving her “a lot of Blarney.”

Katie Maher is the property manager of BDC, a company that oversees property in Isla Vista, and she knows exactly how the Queen felt. “It’s so true what they say about the Irish being the masters of blarney,” said Maher. “When these Irish guys came into our offices this summer to get apartments, they seemed so polite and charming. They were a little ‘in your face,’ a little fast-talking, but … I had no idea they were going to do what they did. No idea whatsoever. I’ve never seen anything like it. What they did wasn’t even human.”

Last June, more than 1,000 Irish college students flew to Santa Barbara, some to find temporary employment through their work visas, some to take summer classes at Santa Barbara colleges, and all to spend a few summer months next to the Pacific. The majority rented apartments in downtown Santa Barbara and caused little trouble. This was not the case for the 50 or so Irish men who rented BDC-managed apartments at 800 Embarcadero del Mar in Isla Vista. The purpose of their visit was to drink and destroy, and when they skipped town at the beginning of September, they left behind one of the most savaged properties in Isla Vista history.

The Irish rented three apartments in the housing complex, and about 15 guys reportedly crammed into each one. They left them all an unmitigated wreck—moldy, blackened carpets, putrid smells, and defacements of all varieties—but of the three, apartment Number Eight was clearly the focus of their destructive energies.

The walls of Number Eight’s living room resembled those of a bathroom stall at a rundown truck stop. Scrawled in magic marker were naked women, genitalia, and an artful sketch of a squinty-eyed, joint-smoking mushroom. There was some Arabic writing, strangely enough, as well as various phrases like “Ireland + Britain = 1 Nation!,” “Remember Where You Lost It,” “Get Your Kit Off for the Lads,” and “If You Don’t Remember It, It Didn’t Happen!” The moniker “Snoop Dogg” was written in large, crude block letters. There wasn’t an inch of the wall not covered with some sort of graffiti. And there were multiple gaping holes.

“Some of the holes are from them punching the wall,” said Nader, a UCSB student who lived next door to the Irish this summer. “Sometimes they threw heavy stuff and made holes. Sometimes one of them would drink too much and pass out, and … fall right into the wall. As in ‘headfirst through the wall.’ I know at least one hole was created that way.”

Nader considers the past summer one of the best of his life, and he attributes that to the Irish’s presence. “Pretty much every night there was a party; a lot of drinking, lots of good times. They were cool guys, though sometimes it was a little much. … They had tons of people by constantly, and all the time they’d have Smashy Smashy sessions.”

The Smashy Smashy sessions, as the name suggests, involved the destruction of things. To be more accurate, it involved hurling objects from the upstairs balcony down to the apartment’s courtyard below. Residents of the complex claim these sessions were an almost daily occurrence, and that the apartment’s courtyard was covered with broken glass the entire summer.

“They’d find whatever they could and throw it down, just for the sake of breaking something,” said Nader. “They threw desks, tables, electronics, jamboxes, and such. Over the course of the summer, they must’ve thrown at least three TVs off, and every once in a while, there’d be something really random, like a road sign or a unicycle. I don’t know where the hell they got that unicycle.”

Naturally, the law was a continual presence at the complex. Sergeant Alex Tipolt of the Isla Vista Foot Patrol said they were called to 800 Embarcadero del Mar almost every weekend and many of the weekdays in between, whether it was for noise violations, fights, or other illegalities. “I don’t know the exact number of tickets we wrote the guys over there, but it was a lot. I don’t know if they ever paid them before they left.” The Smashy Smashy sessions usually involved private property owned by the Irish, though, so the police couldn’t do much about that.

The final and most decisive Smashy Smashy session came near the end of August, and it began with a casualty. “One guy smashed the window of Number Eight and had to go to the hospital for stitches. After that, the guys kept throwing beer bottles at the window until it was totally gone. That was the start of their last big session,” said Nader.

After the window was eliminated, the Irish kicked out the doors of each of their three apartments. Two of the doors suffered damage to their knobs and locks, while the door to Number Eight was knocked completely off its hinges. Once the doors were dealt with, they reportedly inserted a portable CD player into a microwave, inserted the microwave into Number Eight’s oven, and then turned the oven on. A large fire ensued.

“My roommates and I were all sitting around in our apartment and we heard breaking glass,” said Nader. “We were pretty used to those sounds by that point, so we were like, ‘Okay.’ Then we saw someone running with a fire extinguisher.” The oven fire was extinguished before it could reduce the complex to cinders, and the Irish left the country soon afterward. They didn’t bother trying to collect their security deposits.

“We realized what these guys were about a few weeks into the summer, but by that time our hands were tied,” said Maher. “When you evict people, you have to give them 45-60 days to clear out, and that’s when they would’ve been moving out anyway. We wanted to get arrest warrants made out before they could leave, but that didn’t happen.”

Though she declines to specify the cost of repairs, Maher said it’s a good deal more than their combined security deposits, and BDC has consequently been trying to recoup some of the maintenance costs. The Irish consulate in San Francisco has been contacted, Maher said, as has the American embassy in Ireland and the directors and presidents of various Irish colleges, but so far this has yielded little result.