/travel/ireland/Flight
LHR to YYZ, seat 38G on an Airbus 340, VGML. DUB to LHR this morning. Heathrow announced gates only just before they were to start boarding, and apparently this flight is carrying two flights worth of people, so we got off a little late. Windspeeds are in our favour, the cap says.
Air Canada seems to be better-run than the last time I flew with them -- perhaps last Christmas? The very first time I flew, it was to move to Saskatoon, paid for by Rio Algom. It was first class, and they handed us hot towels with tongs. This seems to have moved back to economy class, though they're more J-cloths now than proper towels. A nice touch. The desert is served separately -- two Quaker chocolate chip cookies -- one imagines this may be due to low desert-consummption rates. Now, with those cost-savings, they can afford those hot J-cloths.
It's about the half-way mark. The movie is over, people have returned to their magazines, books, and blog postings. Well, okay, I don't see anybody else writing a blog entry. They showed Finding Neverland. It was good..the kind of film both myself and my parents would enjoy.
I'm headed to Toronto, for my mom's 60th birthday party weekend. She doesn't know I'm coming, which is why I haven't mentioned this trip much. Then on Sunday I fly to San Francisco, for five more weeks of training.
I've caught a few taxis lately, trying to squeeze things in here and there. I stlil don't have a "low-end" bike that I'm comfortable leaving locked outside banks and grocery stores, so it's foot or taxi. One was of the species Imigratus Integratus Maximus, a rare find in Dublin. Another remarked that the reason for Dublin's bad urban design is that it didn't get bombed recently, and what they needed was another war. It was amusing, if a bit absurd. The problem with Dublin's urban design is that too many people want cars, houses in the country, and jobs in the city.
Yesterday I went and visited Clare's college. The taxi driver (Species: Incomprehensibilus Accentus) dropped me at the wrong end of campus, so I also got to walk through the campus. It felt like a University, which feels a bit like going back to visit one's High School.
They seem to be showing the movie again. Weird.
The couple in front of me are sleeping on each other's shoulders. It's cute.
It's nice to hear Canadian accents. My accent-detector is definitely getting better with travel, though I still have a hard time with the Irish ones.
At Heathrow, as far as I could tell, everyone picking up a connecting flight gets re-security-checked. I'll have to pay more attention when I go back through -- it could have been just because I switched terminals. They didn't like my carry-on bag, and suspected something of being a throwing-star. It got a good swabbing, but the security guard was friendly. It bugs me when they think they have to be surly to do their job.
I bought a copy of The Economist. The lazy beside me (with a British accent, but from the Canadian version of Hastings) has The National Enquirer. Little bumps now. I predict the seatbelt sign will go on any second.
My veggie meal was couscous and a sort of over-cooked ratatouille. Relatively tasty, though it seemed smaller than usual.
I'm looking forward to seeing my family...sounds like it's going to be a pretty good gathering.
Oooh! They're playing another movie..apparently re-showing Finding Neverland was a mistake. That's all from me, then.
(No more turbulence, and no seatbelt sign. Guess my atmospheric-spidey-senses are miscalibrated.)
New Albums from the Gallery
/travel/ireland/Power Down
One of the cool things in my flat, and in normal construction in Dublin is that I can reduce the electricity usage in my flat to zero. Not "almost" zero or "probably" zero, but zero.
Every outlet has a little switch by it. The oven has a big switch to turn the whole thing off. The immersion (water) heater can be switched off, and so can the lights. If you do this, everything is off, except the heat, which I don't control.
But there's more. TVs here have three states: on, standby, and off. In the off state, the power-draw is zero whereas in the standby state it's enough to listen for the remote. My amp, two, has three similar states.
That's not all! The microwave has no LED clock, nor a digital power-drawing panel. Every appliance has a clear efficiency rating. Lightbulbs are on a one to nine scale, I think, whereas fridges are one to five.
These savings are small, but if you're otherwise careful with power, they're significant. And mostly I think they're interesting because they represent a smooth transition: from a relatively impoverished past where these things were driven by necessity, to a progressive future where these things are (I presume) driven by EU-based standards. There was no gap between these, as far as I can tell, and indeed there seems to have been overlap.
Time to suspend my laptop, turn off the lights, and go to bed.
/travel/ireland/Some Dirt On Dublin
So it's been a while since I've posted. I was trying to get my photos caught up (there're some new galleries up, and some old ones captioned, but still a lot of work to do) before I made another post, but since that doesn't seem to be happening, it's time to post. Especially since I'm being outdone by a certain sister of mine.
So, I'm properly settled here. In some ways more than I've ever been -- the other day I remarked on how one of our two potted plants had several blooms coming. This is the sort of remark I expect to hear from my parents, or perhaps one of my house-owning sisters. But not me, no sir.
But then, the kitchen is still missing proper mixing bowls, and I don't have packs for my bike yet, so I can't be that settled.
Here's some things about Dublin, Ireland, and the Irish, that I'm now reasonably sure about: it's not very cycling friendly. There's lots of litter. The canal is filthy. Fill-thy. They're touchy on a couple of sore spots -- if you're bored and have too many friends, try suggesting that they're not a leading voice in literature over the last century. Things are changing fast here. Three years ago, they were ten years behind Canada in recycling. Next year, they'll be ahead of most Canadian cities. Dublin is eight years behind Saskatoon for broadband, but they'll only take a year or two to catch up. Country-wide smoking ban came in a year ago.
They drink a fair bit, but it doesn't bother me as much as England -- though I can keep up alright now, so it's hard to say. I think it's still bad here, though. After Paddy's day (a Thursday), I decided to see how long I could go without drinking or feeling really out of place. It didn't last through the weekend, although it was my own fault since I sorta forgot about it and invited someone out for a pint.
They're quick to anger. Someone was talking about how, in some far-eastern country that they had been to, people maintained a level of decency unheard of in Dublin, even if they were drunk to the point of passing out. It's like the alcohol let them go a little beyond social boundaries, but not too far.
There's some dirt. (aka "observations".)
My German friend Peter (the same one that drove me to the beginning of my cycling trip) came to visit me here. It was pretty fun. One of my coworkers from Mountain View also came, and we did some nice touristy stuff. The highlight of that was probably our trip to Newgrange, a ~5000yo tomb on top of a hill that was found about three hundred years ago. It's a giant mound, but apparently it was covered in forest, and the locals sorta knew something creepy was there, but that's about it. There's a thin, long passageway, and in true pagan style, the light runs through the passage into a little nook at the end of the passage on the winter solstice. Except it doesn't anymore, because the angle of the earth has changed since they made it.
We also went to Glendaloch, which I've been to before, but it's very nice. And we went to a beach with Peter and Clare and Clare's friend Nuala (pronounced Noo'lah). The beach had great big sand dunes, which Peter and I climbed up. It was fun. I said perhaps the most tactless thing I've ever said, but we'll not revisit that. Suffice to say it was very bad.
Today I went for my first proper bikeride. I just sort of left with no particular plan and low expectations, and had a delightful time. I even made it onto some fairly quiet roads, and up the side of the same mountain I climbed on my Wicklow Walk. Coming down that was scary, since the road was bumpy and narrow and I'm used to having lots of gear hold my rear wheel down. And I'm a wimp.
So that about catches you up.
