Jeez. Has ist already been 18 months? It has.

Probably this would be around the time where I’d say, I’ve really arrived. Settled down, got to know everything, and planned next steps.

This all applies, and the latter especially: My time in Dublin is getting to an end. Soon. In about 2 weeks, I’ll finish up my little “living abroad” experiment and transfer back home to Germany, to work as an Agency Product Consultant in the Google Hamburg office. When I was offered this role, I couldn’t quite resist, although it hasn’t been an easy decision. I’ve got my life here, my work, friends and colleagues that I’ve really well connected with.

I’m however not completely new to that new place – as my girlfriend lives in “The most beautiful city in the world” (as it unhumbly claims) – and I’ve visited her quite often during the past 18 months. I’ve also worked together with colleagues from Hamburg such as the Marketing department on several projects, so the transition is expectedly going to be smooth.

My new role involves quite a bit of traveling, so apart from the north of Germany, I’m going to come around a little. Maybe this offers opportunities of visiting friends that I haven’t seen in a long time.

I’m not sure yet what’s going to happen to this blog. I’m probably going to keep it up and update it with my Hamburg experiences for a while. So, stay tuned for some stories from the German side of my life.

Photo credit: King of Monks.

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:

Unfortunately, this accident will foreseeably not lead to the abolishment of neither of them.

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.