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Mar. 18th, 2013 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dchenesSo, Ireland.
Things I learned in Ireland:
- NOTHING is open at 7 AM except McDonald's.
- Half the tourists in Dublin seemed to be French, and it all made sense when I found out about the rugby match on Saturday night.
- Nobody in Ireland can pronounce my last name either. I had a couple of hotel people apologize for calling me by my first name because they couldn't pronounce the other one.
- There's Starbucks in Dublin, but not in Galway.
- The Walk/Don't Walk buttons do mostly work, but mostly you wait for about two minutes after you push the button.
- If a pub is called Murphy's/Flanagan's/Doyle's/etc. and it's in Ireland, it's not automatically trying too hard; they've all got names like that (with some exceptions).
- Dublin's got egg statues like Boston had cow statues a few years ago. I thought the eggs were confined to St. Stephen's Green, but I found one at Trinity College and a couple elsewhere too.
- Galway is medieval in its street design and layout and commercial in everything else. I don't think anybody lives in Galway City; they just come there to sell things and catch buses.
- The scenery in Connemara is worth seeing. I really don't want to know how much work went into getting stone walls to go up the sides of some of those hills.
- Apparently you can contain sheep with less-than-four-foot walls. Or you don't care when they go over them, although I never saw any sheep try to go over any walls.
- All of the bilingual Irish/English signs and announcements put the Irish first.
- Next time I go to Ireland I should wait until April and see if it gets any warmer.
Things I learned in Ireland:
- NOTHING is open at 7 AM except McDonald's.
- Half the tourists in Dublin seemed to be French, and it all made sense when I found out about the rugby match on Saturday night.
- Nobody in Ireland can pronounce my last name either. I had a couple of hotel people apologize for calling me by my first name because they couldn't pronounce the other one.
- There's Starbucks in Dublin, but not in Galway.
- The Walk/Don't Walk buttons do mostly work, but mostly you wait for about two minutes after you push the button.
- If a pub is called Murphy's/Flanagan's/Doyle's/etc. and it's in Ireland, it's not automatically trying too hard; they've all got names like that (with some exceptions).
- Dublin's got egg statues like Boston had cow statues a few years ago. I thought the eggs were confined to St. Stephen's Green, but I found one at Trinity College and a couple elsewhere too.
- Galway is medieval in its street design and layout and commercial in everything else. I don't think anybody lives in Galway City; they just come there to sell things and catch buses.
- The scenery in Connemara is worth seeing. I really don't want to know how much work went into getting stone walls to go up the sides of some of those hills.
- Apparently you can contain sheep with less-than-four-foot walls. Or you don't care when they go over them, although I never saw any sheep try to go over any walls.
- All of the bilingual Irish/English signs and announcements put the Irish first.
- Next time I go to Ireland I should wait until April and see if it gets any warmer.
