Category: Ireland

The Luminarium came to town again for Paddy’s Week:

giving the opportunity to take lots of spooky disposable camera photos like these:

Cool, my IOL DSL connection gets bumped up from 512kps to 2Mps for free in a couple of weeks. Eircom are doing a similar upgrade. (Both are presumably a reaction to Smart Telecom‘s recently-announced intention to offer 2Mbps broadband for €35/month.)

…only in Ireland would you get an item on a radio news bulletin
that starts “A man was beheaded in broad daylight today outside a
school in London.  The man, in his 60s, suffered severe head
injuries…”

As it turns out, it sounds like the man wasn’t “beheaded” at all, but nonetheless came to a pretty horrific end.

Julie’s parents were over at the weekend, one consequence of which was a trip to see Disney On Ice – Toy Story 2 at The Point. Was certainly well staged, although it was just a re-telling of the movie, and given the high standards you’d generally expect from a Disney production, for me there was just a bit too much falling on backsides to make it quite the belief-suspending experience it might have been. (After all, you don’t see the guys doing the stunt shows at Disneyworld crashing into the other cars through lack of practice when they’re doing their now-obligatory extreme parking…)

Dublin’s Evening Herald newspaper isn’t generally a barrel of laughs, but I had to chuckle last night at the caption accompanying the photo of the late Irish blues guitarist, Rory Gallagher:

Gallagher who, unfortunately, didn’t wake up one morning.

Finglas isn’t an area of Dublin you would normally associate with quality leisure facilities, but we went swimming at the new Finglas Leisure Centre last night, and it’s the business.

Last night we had our last ever Cadbury’s Choc Fudge bar. Only ever available in Ireland as far as I know, we’ve been stockpiling them since Christmas, when Cadbury’s told us that they were being withdrawn due to lack of customer demand.

If you know of a country with more discerning customers where Choc Fudge is still available, you know how to get in touch 🙂

Dublin’s long-awaited and massively over budget tram^H^H^H^H light rail transit system, aka Luas (the Irish word for “speed”) finally got rolling last week. Despite coming in for heaps of criticism for as long as I’ve been living here, it does look kind of cool, and the offer of free travel for the first week has seen queues of up to 1000 people at some stops.

Within the first few hours, though, one of the trams had already hit a car…

Spent much of my **th birthday today taking in the rather excellent Wexford v. Kilkenny Leinster hurling semi at Croke Park (and snapping a few photies such as these into the bargain). We’d decided to support Wexford beforehand on the informed basis that they had the coolest shirts. Having already reached my Guinness limit for the day, though, we celebrated the result with several slices of Julie’s home made dark and white marbled chocolate cheesecake instead.

Back in residence after my trip to Norn Iron with Julie. Took in all the usual touristy things, like the Giant’s Causeway (I’m sure in Scotland we were taught that it was Finn MacCool who ran away from Benandonner though!), the Tyrone Crystal factory, the Belfast bus tour and the traffic jams in Dundalk. (Okay, so Dundalk’s actually on this side of the border.)

Still not quite sure what to make of the fact that said bus tour includes the Shankill and Falls Road these days… the fact that open top buses can now freely parade around (perhaps not the best choice of phrase) interface areas is a sign of remarkable progress, and our ironically-monikered tourguide Billy’s irreverence towards the tricoloured-kerbstones, murals and army observation points would probably have seen his kneecaps in some danger not so many years ago.

But the 12th of July bonfires were still being readied, and I don’t suppose we’ll hear any fewer poisonous party songs at the next Old Firm game.