James' First Impressions

Well, as you may already know, I flew from Seattle to Dublin, Ireland on Tuesday afternoon and evening. The first leg from Seattle to Chicago was in the Economy section, however, the second leg, from Chicago to Dublin was in Business Class. I have now decided that I will never be able to fly any other way! It was posh. A great three course dinner with excellent service. Nice leather chairs that recline and have footrests. I got my own personal DVD player with Bose “Noise-Reducing” Headphones and a large variety of movies to choose from. Then after a few hours of sleep I awoke to a great breakfast as the sun was coming up. All told, I flew for about 11 ½ hours. It really wasn’t too bad and went by much faster than I anticipated.

As we approached Ireland there was a heavy cloud cover and so I couldn’t see much. As we got closer and began to descend the clouds broke up just as we got to the Dublin area. There wasn’t anything too spectacular as we came in close but it was definitely just as green as Seattle.We landed in Dublin with the sun shining and a slight breeze. Never having traveled to Europe before, I really wasn’t sure what to expect when I got to the airport. Amy told me that I should have a copy of our marriage license, a copy of her work certificate as well as my passport. The gentleman in Customs looked summarily at my passport, asked me how long I was going to be in the country and passed me through with a brief smile, and I was officially in Ireland. I waited quite a while for my luggage, thinking to myself a couple of time as I waited that it had gotten lost. My patience won over and it all arrived with no problems.

I walked outside pushing a cart with all my stuff and got in a long line of people waiting for taxis. After about 40 minutes I got up to the front of the line and my cabby wished me a “pleasant g’mornin to ya son”. I got in and told him where I needed to go. We spent the next half-hour conversing about everything from local politics to the life of a cabby. He’d been doing this job for almost thirty years and was very efficient about scooting through traffic and the many roundabouts that are on the main viaduct from the airport over to the part of town where we live. Of course, here in Ireland people drive on the left side of the street than in the U.S. and when I get the opportunity I’m going to try out my ambidexterity at driving on the other side. Hopefully my skills won’t let me down.

Amy had moved into a lovely three-bedroom apartment before I came over this week. I must say, this is a vast improvement over our Seattle apartment. We have a lot of room to walk around, so much in fact, that we aren’t quite sure what do with all the extra space. However, we’re planning on having a couple of visitors during our stay here and the extra will definitely come in handy. We also have a balcony with a view of some buildings that are under construction to the right, and to the left are some older, small, brick houses. The streets are tight and people seem to make up their own rules as they drive and park. Double parking here is the norm and people just go around. You have be careful when you cross the street though, and look the other direction than usual, which sounds easy, but as you are all aware, old habits are hard to break, and this one, if not followed could get you killed. There is no such things as “pedestrian’s right of way” here. You step out in front of a bus, and the driver’s just a likely to step on the gas as the brake.

Just a few blocks walk from our apartment is an area of town called Grafton Street. It is an open air mall, like a cross between the main street in Disney land and the 16th Street Mall in downtown Denver. There are many shops, bars, restaurants, beauty parlors and department stores to choose from. There are also a variety of street performers – everything from very talented musicians playing an assortment of instruments, dancers, mimes, youth groups, etc – some performing solo, and some in groups. The street and some of its side streets are blocked to traffic, so the massive number of people there just wander from place to place checking out the sites. This is also a very tourist-based city and so one sees many tour buses flying down the already crowded streets. As a lover of cars, there are a vast number of cars available here that aren’t available in the US which is fun. I choose to keep most of my comments about this to myself because Amy falls asleep on her feet when I start talking about cars.

They don’t really have the typical kind of grocery stores here that they do in the states and people apparently don’t eat out all that much in the evenings because aside from the vast number of bars serving Guinness and other Irish beer, food is more difficult to find after 6pm than one might think. So instead, you can either go to the little convenient store around the corner once every day or so or you can go over to bigger store off of Grafton Street, get your things, then lug them the mile or so walk home. Or, as we found, you can order your groceries online and have them delivered. This is much easier, and it doesn’t make your hands hurt. The accent here is relatively easy to understand. However, you quickly find yourself accenting different syllables of words, and eliminating others from your vocabulary altogether here such as the word “awesome”. Amy found out the hard way that they think that word is dumb. They substitute the word “Grand” instead. Much better!