Therefore, I was delighted to find pictures from Dublin as it looked like in 1961. These were taken by Charles W. Cushman, an American who travelled around the whole world to take 14,500 Kodachrome color slides. Interestingly, most places I recognize on these photos look very much alike today – the only obvious difference are clothing styles of the people, and cars.

More historic photos of Dublin can be found at fantasyjackpalance.

Gemma Hayes, a very talented Singer-Songwriter from County Tipperary visited my workplace a couple of weeks ago to give a very intimate and intense acoustic session as part of the ongoing “Musicians@Google” initiative, playing some of her more well-known songs as well as some wonderful new ones (Shock To My System, Waiting for You) – definitely worth a listen if you’re into folkish guitar music. Not to forget her nice Kate Bush cover of “Cloudbusting”, which is available for free at her website. Looking forward to the musicians to come.

Edit: The colleagues from VC Ops were so nice and put the remarkable gig on YouTube:

Apart from all the well-known Anti-European resentments, all the unfair and prevaricated election campaigns – e. g., Sinn Fein actually announced the Easter Rising heroes would have died for nothing if the Lisbon treaty was accepted – there are some decisions in this country’s politics that simply appear to come from medieval times:

Ireland just passed a law that criminalizes freedom of speech by making blasphemy a criminal offense, regardless of the religion affected. (Does Scientology count, by the way?) Offenders face an up to 25,000 € fine. Unbelievable.

As my (Irish) flatmates say, the government probably just needed something to distract people from the fact that Ireland’s economy is still struggling, even worse than most other European ones, and thus found new topics outside anything that could be linked to the recession.

Anyway – as Richard Dawkins put it, this is truly a step back to middle ages. Sad for Ireland. But taking a look back at my hometown, where people who say out loudly that “there is probably no God” get nothing but pure hatred back from those oh-so-tolerant Westphalians, I can only conclude: Those Christians must truly be scared of other people’s beliefs.

Read more about it at UK’s Guardian.

Add.: This is what The Irish Independent’s Ian O’Doherty has to say:

So, here we go — Catholicism is a cannibal cult which eats its leader, Jews who believe that God wants them to settle in the Holy Land are deranged lunatics, Muslims who wants to install Islamic law are nothing but fascist terrorists and Scientologists are nothing but a bunch of brainwashed weirdos who have been suckered by the malicious rantings of a failed science-fiction writer.

Alright lads, I’ll see you in court.

(Photo credit.)

Photo by Maria Celeste Gomez

It’s a bit hard for me to assess what kind of topic might actually be interesting for my few frequent readers here. After over six months in Dublin, the most important stories have been told, and the phase of settling in is definitely over. There are changes coming up that I will mention in one of the next posts, but until then, I don’t want to bore anyone with articles about Dublin weather. That would be the same story, over and over.

For today, let’s take a look at the Dublin transportation system. Have you ever been to $yourfavouritecapital ? If so, you have probably been relying on a not perfect, but probably so-so functioning public transportation system. – In Dublin, you’d be screwed, if you did.

Let’s start with buses. I’m talking about these really nice and modern double decker Volvos, that you’ll see pretty often on Dublin streets. Fine. But what if you’re planning on taking the bus to a suburb far away, maybe for dinner with friends? Of course, you could take a look at the online time tables, which thankfully they’ve introduced here as well. Thing is: There is only one of those per route and direction, and not one per stop. In other words: You cannot find out when exactly a bus will arrive at a selected stop. You simply can’t. Instead, you are forced to do the maths by taking the time mentioned in the table (= the time the bus starts its journey at the original stop), and then re-calculating the arrival time by adding an approximate (of course, not exact) journey time listed on the time table.

Then there’s DART. Introduced in 1984, it has become increasingly popular linking southern and northern Dublin suburbs, crossing the city centre on its way. Often packed (mostly in the mornings and evenings, of course), and sometimes even on time! You wouldn’t actually believe there is an electronic arrival time display? (There is.) There are signs and wonders, after all.

Oh, and not to forget the city’s newest symbol of modernism: LUAS. Whatever that stands for. Two lines, “red” and “green”, cross Dublin and link the outer suburbs with the city center. Would you have guessed: Of course, the lines do not connect with each other. The closest you can get from red to green is a 15 minute walk. Argh!

See this hilarious video regarding pretty much all of these issues:

To say something positive: The new Aircoach fleet, that brings you from and to Dublin airport (cause guess what, neither DART nor LUAS go there) is very luxurious and even has Wi-Fi on board, so the one hour trip to the city centre becomes a little less boring. This, however, has got it’s price: a return ticket is 14 Euro.

To clear things up front: I’m fine, I’ve settled in to Dublin and my work even more, and in Dütti got a first visitor from my hometown. I’ve survived my first Irish-weather-induced cold (altough suffering a lot and learning the term “mancold“) and am getting ready for new challenges at work, such as my first webinar (some kind of an online seminar for AdWords customers), that I’m going to conduct on the forthcoming Wednesday at 4.00pm CET (UTC+1) (also see the announcement in the Official German AdWords blog).

Just a couple of days after my last post, my flatmate Paul celebrated his 30th birthday in the nearby Ocean Bar. Since in this country, they throw you and your crowd out at half past twelve by brutally switching the lights on and the music off, we quickly changed the scene to our apartment, where the party would go on until half six in the morning.

The week after, I was in Hamburg again to visit Cristina, and to redeem her belated birthday present, and see A Fine Frenzy (Twitter) perform a just stunningly great show at Große Freiheit 36. What a lovely, talented and down-to-earth girl!

One of the major advantages of being a “young professional” (some may call it “Yuppie”) I’ve identified is that I always know somebody who knows somebody with free tickets for a venue, a concert or a free dinner. Some might see this as a freeloaderish approach, but until I’ve reached the status of getting this stuff myself and sharing it with others, I’ve decided to enjoy the generosity of the people around me.

This is also how I came to see Poland beating the s**t out of Ireland at Croke Park Stadium, having really nice seats up high in this awesome venue, which holds 82,500 people and is the fifth-biggest stadium in Europe. That day, it was incredibly packed with an impressive number of Polish fans.

And who would have thought that I would ever meet Giovanni Trappatoni, the man who aroused my interest in linguistics at a very early stage of my life? Anyway, this is probably the nearest I’ll ever get to him (taken out of a distance of approx. 500m, so please disregard the lousy quality):

And just a couple of days ago, my team from work attended an Italian Cooking School class in a Dublin suburb, creating some nice Lasagne, Saltimbocca a la Romana and original Tiramisu as a team building challenge.

As the end of the year is approaching, I get a bit homesick, of course. My other flatmate Tricia has announced to get our apartment’s christmas decoration started this weekend – the deal is: NO PINK whatsoever –, and Dublin’s streets and trees glimmer of their seasonal-acquired lighting since… September, I think. At least, that’s how it feels like.

In only two weeks, I’ll go home for the first time I’ve moved to Dublin, and I actually can’t wait to meet all the people I haven’t seen now in almost four months – some, of course, even longer. It’s a nice opportunity to meet all those people and share my experiences with them, and to listen to their stories of ‘08.

Look, they already built me a castle! (No, really they didn’t. It’s just a funny-named estate in South Dublin.)

It’s exactly a month of being a Dubliner now – time to come to an interim conclusion. (Okay, it’s a bit early for that, but there are more of those to come.)

1. Left-sided driving still hasn’t made it to into my awareness. I nearly get run over every second day or so. Gotta work on that.

2. Dublin’s high prices still scare me. 10 Euros to go to the cinema – yes, for one movie –, 7 Euros for a sandwich in the next supermarket, and I’ve already mentioned the toilet paper prices… But I’m getting used to it, every day a little more.

3. I haven’t set up my internet connection at home yet – shame on me. But since I’m working in the Internet throughout the day, my motivation might be a little lowered. Plus, I have flatmates that tend to be more of the cellphone-using kinds of persons (960 texts a month! And that’s only one of them!)…

4. Getting a bank account in Ireland is almost as difficult as Wilhelm Voigt once had to experience with getting a passport in Berlin: No gas or electricity bills, no bank account. No bank account, no gas or electricity. A funny game. It’s helpful though, when one of your roommate works with one of those banks and pulls some strings.

5. Oh, what am I going to do with my first paycheck? Finally get an iPhone? Forget it. Out of stock in Ireland, for months to come, I guess.

So, what’s my conclusion? In fact: I can’t really come to one. It’s a nice place to live, the weather actually sucks most of the time, and I spend a lot of time at work. So far, so good. The next months will be filled with more experiences, I’m sure. (By the way, if you’re bored because I’m posting too rarely, check Patrick’s stories from Manchester.)

Hot waffles with Polish greetings for breakfast, after sharing my half-Polish descent with the waiter (who's from Poland). Sorry for the bad picure quality, I only had my cellphone camera with me.

But before actually moving over and experience the feeling of insecurity adapting to a new country, there’s lots of stuff to complete here in Germany. I have to give notice of departure to the authorities, pack all of my property, find a next tenant, and get rid of unbelievably huge amounts of unnecessary trash that’s been pent-up over the years.

Oh, and of course there’s a goodbye-party to celebrate this Saturday. Did I mention to have taken part in a sweepstake of a major German brewery…? Anyway, I’ve won – not less than a whole stannous bathtub full of Beck’s Gold. On the rocks. So, anyone reading this in time, come along. Photos of that event will follow.