ultra gaelic

Last weekend I took a bus day trip with a bunch of tourists to various sites in County Wicklow, including the location of St. Kevin’s mission. I was hoping for lots of tacky Kevin paraphernalia, but I’m afraid I didn’t find any. However, you can find my photos online. As with many of my photos in Ireland, I’ve had to adjust the photos after the fact to take into account the low natural light. So if you’re wondering why some photos appear brighter than others, know that it’s likely because I tweaked some of them, not because the sun went in and out so fast.

I just discovered some photos on my camera from my brief trip to Cork last month and finally put them online.

In addition to pondering those two articles on British and American cultural differences that I mentioned last month, I’ve been thinking about a commentary about customer service in France that I read more recently. The anecdotes seem too outrageous to believe, but I get flashbacks to unpleasant encounters in shops in Russia and start to think they are possible. Even the surly English “barman” (bartender) in the New York Times article seems familiar from my travels.

What puzzles me the most is that, despite the turmoil of the French Revolution, France maintained a remarkably polite public culture. American English and French both have commonly used terms for addressing strangers that are used without a person’s name (sir/monsieur, ma’am/madame, miss/mademoiselle), which, it turns out, is uncommon in most of Europe. Furthermore, the French are of course known for their copious use of these terms and bonjour in greeting strangers. I find it strange that, while subservience went out the door with the French Revolution, gentility did not, whereas in Russia both were lost after the Russian Revolution.

dear

expensive

maths

short for “mathematics”, as in “You do the maths.”

estate agent

real estate agent

franked post

metered mail

bio(logical)

eco-friendly (used in reference to laundry detergent, laundry powder, or dish liquid)

stone

pit (of a piece of fruit)

flapjack

granola bar (but square and made with less sugar and more butter)

gentlemen’s club

a well-established private club

think-in

retreat

think tank

retreat (?)

Thanks a million.

Thanks very much.

TK Maxx

TJ Maxx

(I wanna know what’s wrong with “J”!)

Not only can you wander the streets of St. Petersburg without the hassle of getting a visa to visit, now you can also ride the Trans-Siberian Railway from the comfort of your living room. Check out the various things to listen to on your journey.

Google sent their Street View car around Oslo recently, but Boing Boing recently reported that some friends of the drivers waited to ambush the car. While Google Street View hasn’t come to Russia yet, it turns out that Yandex, the predominant search engine in Russia, has been adding their own street views. Some users have discovered an Easter egg (in the software sense of the term) in the street views of St. Petersburg.

Étudiant № 7 est une étudiante portugaise!

You know how some people have a collection of exercise equipment in their basement from unkept resolutions? I have a small collection of French textbooks. My first was acquired almost five years ago in Moscow: a cheap paperback that I could travel with. While learning through Russian was not a problem (in fact, helpful in certain ways), I found two many errors in the book to trust it any more. My second was a gift (book and CD), but I never made time for it. Later I invested in an overpriced textbook with exercise book (and CD), and made it through a chapter or two. But still never found time and motivation to concentrate.

But then, in December, I disovered the Alliance Française in Dublin, conveniently located downtown, not far from work, with courses twice a week in the evening, two hours each night. Put this together with my employer’s benefit of reimbursement of up to €75 from my employer for a personal-enrichment course (every little bit helps!) and it starts to sound like a pretty good deal.

So my first class was last night. Thanks to my years of not actuallly practicing, I started with a beginner class. Naturally you have to start with simple phrases and expressions, so we learned how to say our name, where we live, and what our nationality is. So, our of six people, we had:

• indienne
• brésilienne
• irlandaise
• italienne
• espagnole
• américain ← That’s me!

So … only one Irish person. And it came out that her father is Dutch, so, you know, she’s only half Irish.

Reminds me of the staff at work: one Canadian, one English, three American, one Italian, and one Irish. Or of a meeting I had at NUI Galway in August: four American, one Hungarian, two French (or was one Italian?), and one Irish. “Typical Galway meeting,” they said. Wikipedia tells me that 10% of the country’s population are foreign citizens, but someone I keep running into all of them!

After my encounter with a bland curry with celery, you would think I had learned to stay away from ethnic food in Ireland. However, I fell for it again. At a farmer’s market there was a stand with a Mexican guy and his Irish wife selling various Mexican dishes. (Think Pilar’s Tamales in Ann Arbor.) I thought I would risk it since he was actually Russian, but my burrito came with … carrots and celery. You call that a burrito?

Haven’t really written much of anything about life in Ireland since complaining about the country being unprepared for winter weather. (This despite the Economist warning expats not to complain about your host country.) First, to follow up on my complaints about management of city water, I’m pleased to report that last night was the first time our apartment had water through the whole night. (We had lost water pressure every night starting around 8 p.m. and going through the night for the past month, so I’m hoping things are fixed for good now.)

Anyway, the days are slowly getting longer and warmer, and work has slowed down, so both have allowed me to explore Dublin a bit more, formulating and revising my thoughts on the city as I get to know it better. I could offer comparison between Dublin and Ann Arbor, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how Dublin would compare to a similar US city (Providence seems like a good fit) and about the ways in which Dublin is similar to or different from other European cities. So let me approach it this way.

It’s nice to be in a city and not just a college town. There are real adults on the streets who live, work and shop there. They dress like adults and have good taste in food, sustaining a strong restaurant scene.

As is more common in Europe than the US, the center of the city has real stores that people shop in, and there are convenience stores within walking distance of anywhere you live that have things you might actually buy, not just junk food. Ann Arbor is more walkable than your average American city but still caters mostly to out-of-town visitors.

Through a Russian conversation group, I’ve met a number of students at Trinity. It’s good to see that so many of them, even those not majoring in Russian, have a chance to study abroad for a whole year. I’ve encountered a higher level of language proficiency than I generally find among US students, though I’ll admit that the group is self-selective.

Now for a few things I don’t like:

• hot-water heaters that run on demand: I know it saves energy, but it means it’s impossible to get a consistent water temperature from the tap
• a blind real-estate market: Transactions aren’t public records, so nobody knows what anybody paid for similar houses. Hard to create a liquid market that way!
• the institutional culture: Ask me in person if you’re interested in knowing more. It’s a big, complex issue that’s hard to distill into a blog post.

I came back from Russia drinking more tea than I used to, and I expect to come back from Ireland eating digestive cookies.

If you’ve been avoiding answering an email from me, let me just say that it’s okay that you won’t be coming to visit me. I understand. While I was optimistic that I’d have more visitors than in Russia five years ago, I understand that life keeps people busy. And I haven’t made Dublin sound all that appealing anyway. I’ll soon have to give back the sleeping bag anyway, so perhaps it’s all for the better!