It's everywhere!

The Limey and I went to the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin this weekend. We go every few weeks, more frequently in May and June when the peonies are in bloom. We go so often we feel guilty that they don't charge admission or anything. Once, we asked if there was a donation box, and they thanked us for the thought, but said no. So now we just try to buy juice or ice cream in their cafe whenever we go.

We saw the usual plant-y things, like these tiger lilies:

and these great maples with their bendy twirly branches:


and these artichokes, one of The Limey's favourite plants and vegetables:


In all this time, we'd never gone up into the exhibition rooms in the visitor's centre, and we decided it was time. The exhibit on right now is titled "Baobobs and Big Beans: an exploration of plants for people," and what did I see?


Yarn and fibre! Plus some finished objects:


And my favourite:


Wool dyed with a variety of native Irish plants. Those colours are awesome. I know the Irish SnBers include some spinners and dyers. Wouldn't this be a great project for a field trip?

More yoga breathing necessary...

...and not for a good reason this time. I have just about had it with the Department of Justice and the immigration people. I tried not to write about it, because it makes me dish-throwingly, wall-punchingly angry whenever I even think too much about it, but it's now gone way beyond ridiculous. This is going to be a long rant.

I'm allowed to come into Ireland because I'm married to an EU national. Now, the actual EU law (Directive 2004/38/EC) gives me a host of other rights: residency, permission to work, etc., etc., but Ireland has basically chosen to completely ignore all that. According to the Irish authorities, this is all I'm allowed to do: enter the country.

I've applied for residency and permission to work via their EU1 form, but the DoJ has decided, in its infinite wisdom, to require that all couples applying under this Directive have lived in another EU country first. Otherwise, no deal. You read that correctly. If you are an Irish national, of course you're allowed to bring in your family. If you're a work permit holder from anywhere else, you are allowed to bring your family into the country, and, in fact, they are allowed to work. If you are an EU citizen? No dice. How this can possibly be in line with EU freedom of movement laws and basic human rights laws is beyond me. It means if you're a non-Irish EU citizen, you are not allowed to marry a non-EU citizen and have your family come live with you. Full stop. They've been denying the EU1's of many couples because they can't show prior residency in another EU state. Of course, they do this after 9-10 months of deliberation and fucking around, despite the EU law saying it should take no more than 6 months. In another week or so, my six months will be up. I don't expect a decision so soon, of course.

From searching around the internet, I've found lots of people in this situation. People from Japan, South Africa, Brazil. It doesn't help that no part of the Irish administration knows what the other parts are doing. Lots of these people called up embassies beforehand, and even called up the immigration department here in Dublin. They were told: Oh, yes, come on over, if one of you is an EU citizen, the family has a right to live and work in Ireland. So they pull the kids out of school, pack up, sell the house, use their savings to move the family half-way around the world, only to arrive and be told, Oh, wait, no...you can't live here.

After several months of banging my head against the brick wall that is the DoJ (their phone lines are open 6 hours a week, and are perpetually busy before they hang up on you; and their website achieves the amazing feat of holding not one piece of useful information in all its dozens of pages), I gave up. There were few jobs for me here anyway, so I looked in the UK and we planned on moving over there. The Limey is British, of course, so we can always enter under UK immigration laws.

Except...except, the Irish DoJ has still managed to fuck this up for me! You see, they won't stamp the passports of those people waiting for EU1 processing. They won't give me a GNIB card. They won't give me any proof that I am a legal resident of this country. I'm in a weird immigration limbo. The Limey and I went over to the UK in March, and when we came back into Dublin, it took half an hour to convince the immigration officer at Dublin airport that I was really allowed into the country. What has really just totally blew me away recently, though, is that, since the Irish immigration people won't give me proof of residency, I can't apply for a UK visa from Dublin. I have to go back to the US to do it. The British embassy here will only process applications from those who are legally resident in Ireland, but I can't prove my residency! EU law says I'm legally resident, but since the Irish DoJ prefers to leave us in limbo, I'm screwed on this matter.

I just cannot believe how absolutely fucked up this is. How can any first world country behave in such a cavalier matter towards immigration issues, and how can a whole government department be run so haphazardly?! I rant and rail, but there's nothing to do it at. Like I said, the DoJ is a brick wall. There's virtually no way of actually reaching anyone in it. Even if you could, they refuse to do anything and pounding against the brick wall hurts only yourself. I'm so totally tired of this situation; I've completely run out of patience; I'm so angry and upset, and it's salt in the wound to not even know who I could be properly upset at.

Happy birthday to me!

Because of that stupid-ass sappy Valentine's Day crap, the flights to anywhere even remotely nice were totally expensive for the weekends around my birthday (but, hey, I could still go to Liverpool for cheap!). Instead, the Limey and I drove out west, to the Dingle peninsula. I'd been to the town before, but didn't have much chance to look around the area, so this time, that's what we were going to do.

We took off work early on Friday, and were heading out from my place at around 3:30. We were hoping to make it to Dingle town (or An Daingean, as it's been rechristened (or re-rechristened, I guess, as this is its original Irish name)) by dinner time, as we'd been told it would take 4-5 hours of driving. Hahahahaha! No way! We made it to Tralee at 9:30. Traffic out of Dublin was, true to what we'd been told, absolutely horrible. But even if it had been clear, we'd never have made it to Tralee in less than five hours, and it was another hour, at least, to Dingle. Instead of arriving at Dingle and trying to get a room and dinner at 11 o'clock, we decided to stay in Tralee for the night. We drove around a bit until we found a B&B that looked okay, inspected the room, agreed to pay €30 each for the night, dropped off our bags, and went looking for food. The first two places we stopped in at were packed. The third place, The Cookery, seated us after we promised we'd be quick, as the kitchen was closing. The food was good, verging on very good.

The next day, we had breakfast and drove straight out to Dingle. Unfortunately, I had a horrible headache, so couldn't enjoy the drive along the south side of the peninsula. Luckily, the headache cleared up a little bit after we arrived. We walked around town a bit. I went into every shop that looked like it might sell yarn, and hit jackpot at a little place called Commodum, which sold Aran weight tweed yarn from a Kerry mill that, the proprietor claimed, was the last place in Ireland that still spun and dyed yarn. I bought 400g of the darkest red they had. I should have bought more, and it was very hard choosing a colour from all the ones they had. They will mail stuff, though, and the proprietor dude very thoughtfully checked the colour number for me before we left, in case I wanted more later. There was also another little shop that sold yarn, but it mostly had eyelash and other novelty yarns; not quite what I was looking for. I did buy some knitting needles from there, though.

After a bit more walking, we stopped by a couple B&Bs, which turned out not to have opened for the season yet. (Dingle's pretty touristy in summer, I think, and a lot of places close for the winter. We passed few tourists on our walk around town.) Eventually we got a room at An Caball Dubh, dropped our stuff off, and decided to drive out to Slea Head while the light and weather remained favourable. The drive was gorgeous; the coast is lovely. We found a little beach that only had a couple of surfers on it and walked around, poking at things with sticks. (Hey, we're scientists.) We took the long way back, along Slea Head drive, and got back to Dingle in time to have some tea and cake at a cafe, then went back to our room to change for dinner.

The Chart House had been recommended to us, and I'd called them Friday during the drive up to book a table. It was good I had, 'cause when we arrived, people without reservations were being turned away right and left. And the food was just absolutely wonderful. I had mussels to start, and herb-encrusted skate on risotto for my main course. The mussels were pretty good, but the skate was done perfectly. The Limey had duck confit to start and a filet of organic, free-range Kerry beef (we probably passed the cow it came from during our drive) which looked amazing, even to me. I tasted a bit of it, and it was indeed good. We finished off with chocolate terrine and a glass of port, for him, and muscat, for me. We were so stuff that we could probably have rolled back to the B&B, if it hadn't been uphill.

The next day, after a small breakfast (still digesting from the night before) we drove around the peninsula some more. Connor's Pass took us through the mountains to the north side of the peninsula. It was properly, San Francisco foggy and misty at the top of the pass, which was fun to drive through, and the other side had beautiful blue water and green fields. (And hillsides dotted with sheep! Who knew that actually existed outside of schoolbooks?) Drove up to Brandon Point, with a great view of the Atlantic and the bays along the northern peninsula. After that, we started our drive back home, this time at a much more leisurely pace. Stopped in Adare for a late lunch. We tried The Wild Geese, but it wasn't open, so we had some blah lunch at a non-descript place a few doors down.

Got back to Dublin at 9 or so and collapsed. It always amazes me that I can get tired just sitting in a car all day. And it's not like I was driving.

But the whole weekend was lovely, all around.

Um, and yeah, neither of us remembered our cameras.

Busy Saturday night

This weekend, I had one of those nights that young urbanites with any disposable income at all are supposed to have, if you judged by books and TV shows. My life is usually much calmer and home-bound, which, to be honest, I prefer. If you're coming to Dublin and wish to see what the range of pub/bar/club/alcohol-serving-establishments is, here're the venues.

Early evening (pub): had a couple of drinks with a friend at The Globe on Georges St. A fairly basic pub. Big scarred wooden tables, young-ish crowd, music (but not too loud), okay beer. Not one of my usual drinking holes, but okay for a Saturday night, meaning not absolutely packed. It had started getting crowded when we left.

Later evening (bar): I have no clue what this place is called, but it's a converted church at the intersection of Mary St. and Jervis St. on the north side. As if the sacrilege of turning a church into a bar wasn't insult enough, they turned it into a fake swanky, soulless place, populated by twunts (as someone I know would say). It was all blue lighting along the bar, shiny metally table and counter tops, white leathery club chairs. It was someone's idea of good design, if that someone had only looked at blurry pictures of "cool" places from the tabloids. It was filled with overly-cologned young men in striped shirts and women in pointy-toed shoes with trowel-applied make-up. It was totally silly. Fake fake fake. Soulless soulless soulless.

Midnight on (club, I guess?): Went with Convalescing-GothBoy to Dominion, a goth/metal/whatever place in the basement of Fraser's, on O'Connell St. Filled with chicks with long hair, in black PVC, lace and boots, and guys with, uh, long hair, in black leather, geeky t-shirts and boots. Both sexes wore more make-up than is strictly prudent. Music was...pretty much what you'd expect. I recognized some Nine Inch Nails and the Cure. Convalescing GothBoy knows the Dominion organizers, so I got to sit in the DJ booth with all cool "in" people. Aren't I great? Don't you wish you were me? Anyway, I clearly didn't belong there, but I think I got groupie treatment. Everyone was very nice, and hugged me and offered me alcohol and stuff.

Got to bed at 4; didn't leave the house the next day.

An Irish country Christmas

Well, darnit, aren't they just the sweetest people down there in Offaly! My friend and I took the train out on Christmas Eve. His sister picked us up at the train station, and we squished into her car, along with her 5-month-old and her 5-year-old, who went all shy and quiet as soon as he saw me. This apparently classifies as a Christmas miracle, 'cause I was told that, usually, you can't shut up him up. Went to visit another sister, who was in the hospital (she's fine, just in for a scheduled operation), then along home to meet the parents, who were just the nicest people on earth.

My friend's parents are in their '70s and his father was a dairy farmer. When it became clear none of the sons was going to take over the lifestyle, they sold the farm when he retired and used some of the money to build a new house to retire in. They kept some of the land around the new house, for a large garden and a field that they rent out to their neighbors as grazing land. The new house is large and on one floor, and one whole half of it is taken up by the huge kitchen and open dining room. Though they have a sitting room as well, all the day-to-day living is done in this huge space. There was always a fire in the fireplace, and the mother liked to sit in one of the comfy chairs next to it. Although she's not sitting still very often. They are both quite active, still, and as soon as one of them sits down, the other will get up to make some tea or get more wood from the entryway, or to wrap up some scraps for the neighbor's dog and cats who come calling to the back door (they have already figured out that no one uses the front door). The neighbors, as well as assorted children and grandchildren, also call often at the back door although they aren't given scraps.

His mother had apparently said, "Oh, God!" when informed earlier on the phone that I was a quasi-vegetarian. Her plea of, "Won't she have even a little turkey?" was answered in the negative. So when I arrived, I found that the father had gone out to the greenhouse, picked some lettuce and herbs, washed them, and had put a huge plate of it in the fridge for me. They cooked a fry-up for dinner, making me an extra egg and offering me enough toast for half a dozen people. After dinner, my friend and his father went off to midnight mass (at 9; I don't know either). His mother had been feeling poorly that day, so she stayed in to listen to the mass on the radio and said she would go to the Christmas morning service. They did not expect that I would go with them. They showed me where the DVD player was, and where the various foodstuffs were kept and told me to make myself at home if they were gone to mass when I got up the next morning. I was relieved and disappointed. Relieved because I didn't have to go to a Catholic service I knew nothing about and would have to sit through awkwardly; but disappointed 'cause it would have been an interesting thing to see. I've never been in any kind of a church service before.

The parents were great. They just mostly liked to sit about and talk and they've lived together so long and it totally shows. She does the cooking; she takes her time, moseys about, does a bit here, a bit there. He does the dishes, and sometimes she'll join him at the sink to dry. On Christmas Eve, they made the Christmas dinner dessert, which was a fruit, cake and sherry trifle. They'd done this so many times that it was like a cozy, choreographed dance. He opened the can of fruit, she cut the cake into slices and they both put their respective ingredients into the bowl, then he pours in the sherry and jelly while she stirs. It was so cute. Plus, the dessert smelled great while they were making it. They're totally cool. I asked about the service after they came back from mass, and she was saying how everyone loved the new priest, 'cause the old one was all fire and damnation and everything was sin sin sin, and this new one is totally more upbeat and happy and was really good with the kids and young people.

Christmas day was spent at the house of one of the sisters. Another sister came by for Christmas dinner while we all sat around and played with the kids' toys. The 5-year-old had gotten a robot that shoots out these foam rings; it was cool. Dinner was turkey (here, and in the UK, Christmas dinner means turkey and brussels sprouts), goose (which I stole a little bite of, as I'd never had goose), mashed potatoes, yams, brussels sprouts, and two kinds of (veggie) stuffing. One of the sisters had already started cooking me some fish before I could stop her and say that the veggies would be more than enough.

The next morning, I sat around a bit, the father showed me the paintings he'd done since he took up the hobby when he had hip surgery and couldn't work, ate some more salad, at lunch (salmon for me, turkey leftovers for them) and then they drove me to the bus station so I could get home to feed the cat.

And you know what else?

I totally dig the Saturday market in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar. Organic fruit and veg, a crepe stand, a French baker's stall, a chick who sells flowers of the kind that you would actually grow (sweet peas, wildflowers) instead of your fake-looking standard hothouse lilies and roses, two cheesemongers, a few butchers and plenty of other stands filled with food you can buy to bring home or eat right there.

The absolute best thing, though, is that it's open during decent hours. Now, I'm as excited about farmer's markets and local produce as the next person, but who the hell wants to get up at the butt crack of dawn on a weekend to rush to the market? That's just positively uncivilized! On a Saturday or Sunday morning, you want to stay in bed at least a couple hours past when you'd have to get up for work during the normal drone week. Then lie around, maybe read the paper, have your first cup of tea or coffee, then make your way leisurely out of the house and have a pleasant stroll to the market. Who the hell wants to get up while it's practically still dark out, shivering and tired and sleepwalk to the market so you can get there before all the good tomatoes get snapped up? I mean, Jesus, no wonder most people take what they can get at Safeway.
The Temple Bar market, however! Now they know what's up. I get there between noon and three most times, and it's still swinging. The workers at the big veg and fruit stall that anchors the market are still bringing out fresh stuff, the chick who works at the baker's stall is still reinforcing her wall of bread at her table, the guy who sells cereals, grains and dried fruit still has his sacks of product half full. If you get there at three, there's still a good couple hours of browsing and buying. At the places I tried (rarely) in Seattle, stalls were packing up as I got there in the early afternoon. It makes no sense.

The only way they could impove upon this market is to open it on Sundays, too. But I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.

And now for something completely different

Since the last Dublin post was a whinge, this one shall be a rave.

I love the Georges Street Arcade. It's awesome. For one thing, it's just a great building- all red brick and little turrets. Mostly, though, it's because the teeny shops in there are a great relief from the British high street chains on Grafton St. When you get tired of the endless sameness of Next, M&S, River Island and whatnot (and you get tired of them quickly), you can pop into the Arcade and find shops selling, among many other things, heaps of ethnic silver jewelry, piercing jewelry, hippy-dippy "oriental" clothes, funky alterna-wear, used CDs and books, secondhand German military jackets, cheap Chinese copies of the trendy clothes you see elsewhere, organic foodstuffs, handmade soap and a stall selling nothing but cool hats. It's just great all around.

The second time I was in Dublin, I wandered in while strolling around the city centre and was totally excited at what I found. The next time I was in Dublin, for the job interview, I tried to find the place again, but no luck. (I have absolutely no head for directions, so I had no clue where it was, except that you could get to it from a side street off Grafton.) When I moved here to live, I made it a quest one weekend to find it. Now, I'm happy to see that some new stalls and shops have opened, but I'm sad that one of the guys selling used books is gone.

Mildly frustrating

Okay, I usually try not to do the bitching about Ireland that a lot of people here do, 'cause I think one should be generous with one's host country and, besides, what's the point of moving somewhere else if I expect it to be just like home? However, there are a few little things that I feel I'm justified in whinging about.

For a country that managed to turn itself from one of the poorest to one of the richest nations in Europe (hey, highest standard of living in 2005, according to The Economist!) mostly by luring in high tech companies, it sure is a little strange that, high tech-wise, Ireland is 5-10 years behind. And I'm not talking about the big life-changing things- I'm sure the hospitals here have the latest machinery, and I know the universities are fairly well-equipped. I'm talking about the little things that make my life just a teeny bit more difficult.
For example: the Dublin public transportation system. Look as long as you want, there is no page on their website that will show you a map of the bus routes superimposed on a street map of Dublin. The web site shows you what neighborhoods the various routes go to. That's it. However, this is not surprising, because even if you went to the Dublin Bus offices, there are no such maps. There are maps of some of the neighborhoods with the bus routes, but why they can't make a big one with all of Dublin on it and put it on-line, I don't know. There isn't even a little cartoon of what streets the buses go down and what the cross streets are. The information on the poles at the actual bus stops are less than useless: they simply ugly up the street. And on-line trip planning? Ha!
Example two: high speed internet access is a joke. You can get broadband if you have an Eircom land line. The resulting connection is, I'm told, barely adequate. The land line costs you €40/month and the broadband is €30. If you are unlucky enough to move into a place that did not have an existing land line, Eircom will happily charge you upwards of €100 to put one in. If you don't want to pay the exorbitant sums Eircom insists on, then you could go for one of two other choices. For both, the coverage is patchy at best (doesn't even cover all of Dublin, for Pete's sake) and will randomly cut out on you.

None of this is horrible. Mostly the solutions involve my having to walk a little bit further or to have to stop by an office and talk to someone rather than do what I want over the computer. But I'd gotten too used to being able to do practically everything from the comfort of home. Perhaps it's just as well that this kind of thing forces me to move my ass out of my chair, huh?

Last weekend

So a couple friends arrived last week to visit me and the Emerald Isle. They threw caution to the wind and decided that the left side of the road was a perfectly reasonable place to drive and so, last Friday, rented a car and headed West. On Saturday the boy and I took a train out to Galway to meet them (It took less than 3 hours! We were shocked!). We drove through the Burren in Co. Clare, but, alas, did not have time to stop and look around. In Doolin, we checked into our respective B&Bs and headed out to see the Cliffs of Moher. It is only one of the few times I've seen the Atlantic and, dammit, what a place to see it from.



We had a run of lovely weather, so the sky? Really was that blue.

We had dinner at a pub, where, mercifully, we could not hear the traditional Oirish music being inflicted upon the place. I had mussels (mmmm...mussels...) and we stayed around for a few pints afterwards. Miraculously, we actually managed to find out way back to our B&Bs.

The next morning, we took a ferry from Doolin out to the Aran Islands. The ferry stopped at Inis Oirr, where we walked around for a couple hours, and then continued on to Inis Mor, where we stayed the night.

Inis Mor ("Big Island" in Irish) is only 9 miles long, so, despite my reservations, we rented bicycles to get around the place and see stuff. It really was the best way. Besides, there were barely any cars on the island and the hills were totally manageable. (Yeah, okay, so I walked up a couple of them. So what, huh?) We biked to Dun Aonghasa, a stone fort built in 2000 B.C. and overlooking the Atlantic.


Rather refreshingly, they do not fence off the cliffs around the fort, so you can go right to the edge and look down at a beautiful, but cold and rock-filled death.


Isn't the color of the water awesome? We thought so.

The other good thing about renting bikes was that the B&Bs we stayed at served the traditional Irish breakfast, i.e. Heart Attack on a Plate, so it was good to be able to work off at least some of the food. Also, the B&B on Inis Mor has a stray cat and her kitten hanging around. I tell you, Chloe came this close to having a new "friend."

After seeing some other really cool stuff and eating even more, we and our sore butts left, half of us back to the car in Doolin and the other half to Galway to catch a train back to Dublin (stupid work).

P.S. At least a couple of these pictures were taken with my camera. But not by me. So there.

I love Irish drunks

True to their international reputation, the Irish do indeed spend a lot of time drinking. They have the highest per capita alcohol consumption rate in Europe, if not the world. This isn't as surprising as the fact that, apparently, half of the Irish population doesn't drink, which means the other half drinks twice as much.
And when they drink, they really drink. Where I come from, i.e. the world outside of Ireland, drinking until you vomit is embarrassing; it's a sign that you've had too much and can't hold your liquor and have no self-control. At this point, your friends would push some water at you and pour you into a cab, making soothing noises and gently shaking their heads in disappointment. Here, vomiting is simply a stage in the night's drinking. Not only are young people not embarrassed to be throwing up in the streets, they're almost proud! Like, Once again, I've overcome my personal alcohol threshold and forged new ground! Their friends help them wipe off their mouths and the whole group once again stumbles down the street to the next pub. I have never seen so much grossness in the streets on Saturday and Sunday mornings as in Dublin.

However, maybe because they spend so much time drunk out of their minds, the Irish are the best drunks I've ever met. They are the nicest, funnest, most genial alcoholics I've ever had the pleasure of drunkenly slurring at in a bar. In all my time here (and I've spent a lot of it out in the pubs), I've never seen a violent altercation in a bar. During St. Patrick's Day, when the whole Irish population plus almost as many tourists, were out in the streets hammered out of their minds, there were 600 arrests in the whole country. As one of the lab guys quipped, that's barely one episode of Cops in the States! I think maybe the violent drunks have been selected out of the population, Darwin-style.
The first time I encountered drunks in Ireland, seven or eight years ago, we thought, Okay, best to avoid the drunken Irish boys. But now I remember that we were in Temple Bar, which, as I've learned, no self-respecting Irish person actually drinks in. It's mostly kept in business by tourists and English groups over in Dublin for stag or hen nights. So the leering and drunken shouting? Probably not by Irish people. In fact, the Irish boys here have been perfect gentlemen to me. No matter how drunk, they usually make sure I get myself into a cab and always look faintly concerned if I tell them I'll walk or take the bus. (Not that I've ever had any problems with the bus, or with walking around the city.)

So yes, they may all be alcoholics, but they're the best kind.

It's the little things

I need a haircut. Well, not really a cut, just a trim to get rid of the split ends. All the "respectable" places here charge upwards of 50 Euro, which is highway robbery. But don't worry! I'm not here to do the "Dublin is so expensive" whine. This is an altogether different whine.

The closest I have ever come to having a "regular" hairdresser is this Chinese lady at a shady storefront in San Francisco, whom I went to three or four times. I also got a pretty good haircut from a lady in Manchester's Chinatown. I had to respond to her Cantonese with English after embarrassing myself with my broken Cantonese, but the communication was sufficient for the first short hair I had had since I was born. And she did a great job. Both these people charged, like, 20 bucks (or the equivalent in pounds). In Seattle I tried several different places, like Borseno's and Rudy's, but they were disappointing.

So, naturally, when it came time to get a haircut here, I went looking for little Chinese ladies on dodgy streets. And in my failure to find this mythical shop, was reminded again of how young the immigrant population is here. Only in the last ten or fifteen years has Ireland became a country where people immigrated to rather than emigrated from. You see lots of Asian faces on the streets of Dublin now, but most of them only arrived a few years ago or are students here to learn English. You don't see any Asian-Irish yet. In fact, I haven't even seen very many Asian-Irish couples. I was reminded of this when I saw a hapa teenager on the U-bahn in Berlin; it will be a few years yet before hapas appear here. I do see many Asian couples with babies or toddlers, however, so it won't be long before people hear a Dub accent you could float rocks on coming from an Asian face.

I can't identify very well with, for lack of a better term, Asian-Asians. Almost all my Asian friends have been 2nd-generation or beyond. For the first time since I moved here, I missed having this specific group of people around. I had bought a book called Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism (had to order it on-line through a store in the States, naturally), and it is, to quote a certain friend, hilaaaaarious. I got to a page titled "The Top Ten Things You Wouldn't Want to Steal from an Asian Household" and didn't have anyone to share "#3: fluorescent lights in the living room" with. I laughed and laughed, and at the point where, at home, I would have shown it to someone and pointed and laughed some more, I realized there was no one here to show it to. I knew it was getting really bad when, in a pub a couple weeks ago, I saw this Asian woman speaking with a British accent, and actually went up to her and told her I wanted to say hello because it's so rare that I find an Asian person here who isn't "Asian-Asian." Well, first I asked her whether she lived in Dublin, 'cause Brits coming over here for a drunken weekend don't count. Okay, so I had had a few pints at that point and was maybe a little tipsy. This whole episode was made worse by the fact that I was at the pub to meet a dude that a friend had set me up with, and, from the moment I heard that chick speak with a British accent, I practically ignored him and spent the whole time sneaking looks at her and hoping she'd notice I was speaking with an American accent. That, and trying to work up the nerve to go speak to her. I had developed some sort of instant girl-crush on her or something. Dang. And now I wish I'd drank some more and had had the nerve to give her my phone number.

Needless to say, I didn't have a second date with the guy. Too bad. He may have been able to suggest a hair stylist.

Reading: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones (I usually stick to her Chrestomanci books, but this one is dedicated to Neil Gaiman! How could I just put it back on the shelf?). I'm used to reading multiple books at the same time, but this is getting ridiculous. I suspect Jonathan Lethem's going to have to go on the back burner.

So far so...eh

At a project and funding review session today, I was asked by the outside reviewers why I'd chosen this position and whether I liked working in Ireland. I refrained from saying that I didn't want to have to learn German to take the other offer I had, but did say Yes, I liked working in Ireland. I've been asked this question quite a lot and at first just said yes because I think it was sort of the expected answer, but I'm finding that I'm not lying. I do like it here. The people are friendly, the lab is good, Dublin rocks. I've talked to a lot of people (especially, for some reason, a lot of Germans living here) and was surprised to find out that many of them just hate living here. Amongst complaints such as the roads and other infrastructure being bad and the government and bureaucracy being incompetent, the main gripe seems to be that Ireland is ridiculously expensive. Which, to be fair, is true. I then usually ask why they don't go back home, and the answer is always, There're no jobs at home. Well, so that seems to be the trade-off: you could live cheaply off unemployment at home, or pay 1000 Euro/month from your paycheck to rent your closet-sized studio here. It's expensive here because people can afford it. Plus I think the Irish are overcompensating at the moment for centuries of being desperately poor.

I wonder how much personality has to do with it. I've read about people who visit some place and "fall in love with it," who feel instantly that "they belong there." (It seems to happen to a lot of Americans in Prague. Although my guess is that it's because there are already so many American ex-pats living there that it's no wonder it "feels like home.") I don't know what that feels like or how it happens. I think I have the ability to be perfectly content with wherever I'm living. Or, to put it another way, I don't think my location affects my level of happiness very much. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to move to Manchester permanently any time soon, but I was more or less happy during the time I spent there. And although I don't think I will live the rest of my life in Ireland, I'm also very much hoping that my contract will be renewed for a couple of years. Does this attitude mean I have no discrimination, no taste or preference? Does it mean that it doesn't actually matter where I live? Surely this is an area where one should have a definite opinion?

Reading: Mingus Rude arrives on Dean Street in Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude and Maan gets freaky with a Muslim singer in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.