Live from Ireland..

Land of the grey skies, wind, cold and rain. Dublin is playing host to three of us from Mountain View for a few weeks. We've been out to the pubs a lot, mostly local places, staying away from the touristy parts like Temple Bar, although I did venture there my first weekend here to buy my brother a Hard Rock shotglass for his collection. Trinity College was dreamy and I walked through the Book of Kells exhibit to drool on it for a bit (I swear I thought they'd kick me out for staying so long) and then ventured up to the Long Room - the old college library. When I entered, I gasped and people looked at me as though I were nuts. That room is stunning.

The next day I went to see Kilmainham prison and tried my best to find the Guinness Storehouse with the other two coworkers I'm out here with. If you're familiar with Dublin's layout, you'll know that both of those are pretty far from the city center. We took a taxi to Kilmainham and then walked around the Guinness lot (the wrong one, mind you) trying to find the entrance to the tourist part, gave up and headed back towards city center. By then it had started raining and was very windy. Spurred on by my coworkers we ended up walking all the way back to our hotel (about an hours walk). In total we probably walked a good 10 miles that day. Surely enough, a day later I had the flu. It has made my week pretty difficult and miserable. The lingering cough is killing me, but my revenge has been swift. Both of my travel mates have the flu as well.

When booking my travel here, I tried to land a room at the Burlington, which is a sort of ritzy (by Dublin standards) hotel; it's probably 4 star. They couldn't book me a room for the first weekend however, something about a 'Hurling' final. Well, as most Americans can claim, I knew nothing of this sport. The same wretched rainy, walking day that gave me the flu , I had the pleasure of sitting in a warm pub drinking Smythwycks and watching Hurling. It's a great game! 80,000 or so Irish were packed into a large stadium to watch it (we ran into most of them, I think, walking on the way home.) I highly suggest catching some footage of a Hurling game some time.

Google maintains an apartment in Dublin for visiting Ops people, I imagine it's extremely less expensive than hotel camping for long periods of time. There is a washer/dryer there and I was hoping it would be the most blessed part of my trip but it's turned out to be one of those amusing things. It's a combination washer/dryer so when the wet part is over, you just flip a switch and it becomes a dryer. Problem is, the inside stays hot and humid and the clothes never dry. Fours hours after putting three pairs of jeans in, I pulled them out to find I had nothing but hot and soaked clothes. So much for apartment luxueries. They do have better TV than the hotel though.

We get CNN, Skynews, BBC 1,2,3 and some other misc. channels in the Hotel. Most of the time they play American shows or silly British/Irish shows. Law and Order is decent, but on MTV they play multiple hours back-to-back of Jackass.

More later...