Observations

After a little more than a week here in Dublin land, I've noticed a few things and confirmed a few things I alway knew. For example:

• I hate public transportation. OK, as a concept, I guess it's OK, but practically, I despise it. Case in point - there's a bus that runs straight from my crappy temporary apartment to my office. In theory, this is perfect. In practice, however, the fucking bus shows up approximately once every 30 minutes, if you're lucky, and even less often if it's raining.
  
  Of course, there's always the LUAS, which is much like Boston's T. It's clean, reasonably fast, and affordable. Again, not bad. But, it's a 10-minute walk to the nearest station, which is always fun in the rain, and the train stops a good 15 minutes from the office. Again, practical it's not.
• Walking is a great way to learn the nuances of a new city. I've been doing lots of walking in the past week, and I've seen a fair amount of downtown Dublin already. Of course, Downtown Dublin is fairly small, so it's pretty easy to take a lot in on an impromtu walking tour.
  
  Also, I've been able to see some neighborhoods I know I might want to live in, and a few I know certainly don't. For example, right next door to Ranellah (I'll figure out the proper spelling one of these days) is another neighborhood named Harcourt. I wandered that way today thinking it was worth checking out. It was, but only because it's the first hard-scrabble part of Dublin I've really come across. Tenements, grafitti, clapped out cars. Definitely not a neighborhood I'm going to consider.
• California has softened me when it comes to dealing with weather. It's not that I don't enjoy weather and, in fact, it's sort of nice to experience something other than 85 and sunny every day (or, more recently before I left, 100+ and sunny). Still, I've forgotten how annoying having to walk moderate distances in the rain can be, especially when you're carrying a computer bag and your dinner.
• Driving in Dublin is going to be an experience. Of course, I'm not ready to buy a car just yet, but I can see it happening sometime in my future. That said, I don't have a lot of experience driving on the opposite side of the road, and it's going to take some getting used to.
  
  As for a motorcycle, which is the form of transporation that I think would actually work best here for many reasons, the aforementioned rain may well put a damper on that plan. As miserable as it is to walk in the rain, riding in it is even worse.
• The combination washer/dryer is another great sounding idea that, in practice, sucks. Sure, the clothes get clean, but they don't get dry. Ever. Also, I can't figure out for the life of me why it takes three hours to do one load of laundry. At least I'm not using quarters.
• Drinking here is a sport. More than a few years ago, I'm sure I could have been competitive. As it is now, spending a Friday night in the Temple Bar and Grafton Street areas of town is certainly fun, but inch-for-inch, I think this is the most densely packed bar scene I've ever experience. And I'm not just talking the number of bars crammed into this relatively small area - I'm talking about the number of people crowding into each of these establishments. It's an amazing scene.

There's more, of course, but I'll save it for later.

Until then...