Spinning

Activio Bikes in the ToneZone

This will be short (I think) because I was busy tonight getting some documents together to import my personal belongings into Ireland. The documents are to show that I am moving between the two countries and don't have to pay duty. The freighter is supposed to arrive on April 7th. It'll be nice to have my things again.
Earlier this evening I went to the ToneZone at the National Aquatic Centre (NAC). I'm a member at the NAC so I can use their pool and gym. Part of the membership also includes classes such as the spinning class pictured above.
I've never been to a spinning class and thought I would try it out as part of my training for the Ironman this Summer.
Spinning is a room full of overweight, middle-aged people going really fast on stationary bikes; trying to keep up with a young, skinny instructor. What is different (I think) at the ToneZone is that everyone gets a heart rate strap around their chest and a computer displays everyone's heart rate zone as a colored dial on a big projection screen.
Your strap number is displayed, but who the person behind the strap is, is supposed to be anonymous. I think the idea is to compete, without embarrassing yourself.
Last week was the first time I went and the instructor did not pay much attention to the dials. He told us what to do and not to worry too much about the heart rate. It was a good workout and I felt faster riding my bike all week long after that. (Which is probably an illusion ;-)
I had a really hard time understanding the instructor. A bike is a "boik", but after that most of his instructions were lost in his accent and the loud music.
I had to watch the other people to see what he was telling us to do. The problem was that after each shouted set of instructions, each participant did something different. Some turned the resistance up, some down. Some went faster, some sat back down on their saddles and slowed down. And these were Irish people! Maybe it's an output-only language ;-)
This evening was different. The woman leading us was all into heart rate. She would tell us to go to 75% of our maximum individual heart rate, which we entered into the computer at the start of the session. When people went much above, she would ask who number 13 was, and tell them to take it easy. For slackers, she would again ask for them to identify themselves and go over and turn up the resistance dial on their bike.
She watched me for a while and then asked what I had entered for my maximum heart rate. She was not happy with my answer and increased it first by five and after a while by ten. In the meantime I was huffing and puffing, and there was a big puddle of sweat around my bike that hasn't moved at all.
Increasing my max heart rate lowered my percentage, so soon she would be back and increase the resistance on my bike again. Then turn around to the class and yell at everybody not to lower their resistance. I think that's what people have been doing when they thought she was not watching ;-)
The woman next to me was going "fock, fock, fock..." (more Irish for you ;-)
This instructor was easy to understand, because she is an immigrant with an eastern European accent and speaks more like the rest of us foreigners than the Irish. I'm used to people who say things like "move more far away", but I do have trouble with the natives. More on language in another post.

Bike Ride to Trim

Today's long bike brought me to the town of Trim. Pictures are here, and this is the route I took (more or less).

I got an even later start than usual. I slept in, because some Bozo kept playing "music" really loud last night. I went to bed past midnight, which is not that unusual for me on a Saturday, and this loud "music" started (it certainly wasn't Beethoven or Mozart). My neighborhood here is not exactly quiet, and at first I thought it was a car and hoped that it would drive away soon.

After a while I concluded it must come from one of the apartments and stuck my head under the pillow. Sometimes they turned it down a little and then back up again. For the most part I only heard the boom, boom of the base notes. I would even fall asleep for short periods of time, and then somebody turned it back up again, or the party makers would make some other loud noise.

Saturday night, kids need to party. I figured it mould eventually quiet down or one of the neighbors would complain. 1:30 am, still going strong. 1:50 am, a girl is leaving. While stomping down the staircase she was explaining to someone on her cell phone that she was coming home now. Good; the party is breaking up.

The party continues; no one else is leaving. I get up to look out the windows and check which room is closest to the noise. The streets are empty. It seems the racket is coming from my entrance to the apartment complex. There are seven apartments, including mine, at this entrance.

Back to bed. This must stop soon. Someone will complain. It is 2:00 am. What is the non-emergency number in Ireland to call the Garda?

Now they switch to rap, which is even further removed from music than the stuff they have been playing so far. Now I can hear the boom boom and some idiotic deep voice fragments. Plus, somebody starts banging their foot on the floor completely out of sync with the rhythm of the noise.

At the very least, I need to get out into the staircase so I can figure out what apartment this is coming from, so I can complain Monday morning. In the meantime I can't sleep and what good will a complaint do anyway? Why is nobody else complaining? I know at least one of the apartments has small children. How can they sleep?

2:30 am. Technically, it's 3:30, since we just switched to daylight savings time. This is nuts.  Get dressed and start walking upstairs. For that matter, what is the emergency number for the Garda?  (It is 999 or 112. I looked that up afterwards.)

It's not the apartment above me, it's on the top floor. How can the people on the floor above me stand this? I bang on the door. Nothing. The noise is too loud, they cannot hear me.  I use my fist to bang on the door. Still nothing. When there is a "dramatic lull" in the racket, I really bang on that door with my fist. Someone yells, the sounds is turned off, and I hear shuffling and voices.

The door opens and a short stocky guy in shorts and beer bottle in hand goes "What?" (Good. I can take this guy, if necessary. Unless there are more and bigger ones inside.)

"Can you turn down the music?"

"Sure, I can turn down the music."

Great. Now I know he can, but will he? "I know it's Saturday night (Sunday morning really), but this is a too loud."

"Alright, no problem. I'll turn it down --- Who are you?"

I didn't really understand that last part at first. With many of these Irish accents I only understand every fifth word on average. As usual, I was guessing the general meaning of what these people say.

"I'm Rolf, I live here."

"Since when?"

"For almost a month now."

"Really?" Now his girl friend shows up in the background and goes "What?" (Good. Maybe I'll get invited to the party. Make some new friends.) He turns around and says something to her, but I did not understand a single word. Maybe it was in French.

He turns back to me and says "I'll turn it down". (Guess not.) I ask him what his name is: "Paddy". We shake hands and I go back to bed. There are a few more weird noises, but the music stays off and eventually the apartment goes quiet.

Then I slept until 10:30.

---

For my bike ride to Trim, I tried to avoid main roads and use the smallest ones available.  Without GPS and google maps on my phone I could not have done it, since these smaller roads are not exactly straight, well marked, or directly connected to each other. But it worked and I was on bigger roads only a small fraction of the time. Despite GPS, I did get lost a couple of times (the actual geography and google maps don't always quite match up out here).

While these small roads are fun and have much less traffic, they are not completely problem free.  There are the occasional pieces of evidence for the existence of live farm animals nearby, that are left on the road and need to be avoided. These roads are not as smooth as the main roads. I lost a bottle top somewhere. It rattled right off. And when there is a car, crossing and passing is much more difficult, since the road is really only wide enough for one vehicle.

But it is worth it and much more relaxing than the main roads I have relied on so far because I was afraid to get lost.

Trim  is an old town and it houses the ruins of Ireland's largest Norman castle. It is also a Tidy Town, although it has been a while since Trim won it. But signs at the entrance of Trim still proudly advertise it, and it is indeed a tidy little town.

The weather today, and all this week except yesterday, was nice and sunny. Because of my late start, and because I wanted to get home before dark, I didn't have enough time to explore the ruins. I want to come back with a real camera and take pictures on a nice day. The rest of the pictures are here.

---

When I'm not using my bike, I leave it in the stairwell, just outside my apartment. I was worried that Bozo from upstairs would vandalize it after last night. But it seems he is a decent human being after all. Or he hasn't quite figured out yet where I actually live... ;-)

Sunday Afternoon Bike Ride

I went on a bike ride today. I had planed to do this one but ended up doing this one due to sightseeing and unintended detours and getting lost. Today was a partly sunny day, with a ratio of about 10 minutes sun, 25 minutes complete cloud cover. I'm beginning to understand why Google maps has no detailed satellite view of much of the area I rode through today.  The probability of the satellite passing overhead and a hole in the clouds at the same time seems low.

Main street Maynooth

My ride took me through Maynooth, a larger town not far from here. It is home to one of the National Universities of Ireland which is one of the institutions I may be working with. I did not spend much time there but did take a couple of pictures of the main street. Wikipedia has an informative page about Maynooth with a picture of when they had blue sky!
Further down the road is Straffan, which looks very picturesce. I may come back to Straffan another day with my DSLR to make a photo album.  I took these pictures with my phone. They turned out reasonable, but I miss the zoom lenses and settings of my bigger camera. On the other hand, I don't fell like carrying that camera with me on my bike.

Houses on a side street in Straffan

BTW, since I only took a few pictures, I thought I would embed them here in the blog, but that caused all kinds of trouble. I'll put them up on picasa and just show a few here.
My ride ended in Kill, which means Church (I wonder how that came about?) And indeed, it has two churches: the pretty Church of Ireland dates to the 1650s and the ugly new (1821) Catholic one. (The old one used to be the catholic one.) Like any good village, Kill also has a couple of pubs. The Dew Drop and The Old House, which seems to have been around for a while.

The Old House in Kill

On my trip I also crossed the Liffey which further down flows through Dublin and into the Irish Sea, and was the site of the first Viking settlement in Ireland. I also went over the Grand Canal (not the one in Venice). This one connects Dublin with the Shannon River in the East of Ireland.  It, and some other canals, were built 250 years ago to stimulate commerce.  Today they are mostly used for recreation, including vacation on houseboats.

River Liffey

The Grand Canal

St. Patrick's Day in Dublin

I went to the city center today to watch the parade. I forgot that this was a holiday and buses would run even less frequently. When it finally came, it was the one that took the long route into town. As we approached the town center most people got off, because walking was faster. I thought I had missed the parade, since I was about an hour late, but was able to overtake some of the floats and marching bands, and get some pictures. Have a look.
Note that most of these were taken near the end of the parade route. That explains the tired looks on some of these performer's faces. By that time they hand been in the parade for over two hours and very ready to be done with it.
RTE 1, one of the national TV stations, covered the event and lets you watch it online. I don't know whether that link works outside Ireland, but try to catch it here: Parade coverage (I'm curious to know whether this link works outside Ireland. Post your report in the comment.)

WiFi in Dublin

In Albuquerque, you find free WiFi at the airport and in some restaurants. In San Francisco, at any major street corner, you get at least a handful of signals you can use, plus twenty more that are encrypted. In Dublin you get nothing.
One of my travel guides lists about three pubs and restaurants that have free WiFi. I spent about 45 minutes to find one of them (street naming and numbering here does not follow any predictable scheme), and when I did, I had a nice dinner and a good conversation with the bar tender, but still no WiFi.
I stumbled across a restaurant another night that advertised free WiFi, so I chose it. After ordering I tried to connect my iPod touch. Password? I asked the waitress and she handed me a strip of paper with a 32 character password consisting of random numbers and lower case letter! It took me two attempts to copy it correctly into my pod. And, that was before I had my Guinness ;-)

This was supposed to be a short post to show that I can be less verbose. Still pretty long; sorry. I expect they'll get shorter and less frequent in the future.

Dublin buses

Until Lee Ann comes over, I want to use the public transportation system, my feet, and my bike to get around. The Dublin double decker buses are everywhere (except when you need one). They are fun to ride. You can sit above the driver at the very front of the bus and get an incredible view of the city. But, it's kind of like a roller coaster. When these buses zip around those round-abouts or try to avoid the speed bumps, you get bounced around quite a bit.
You also cannot see what is right in front of the bus. Often it seems the bus just hot or swallowed a pedestrian or bicycle. Sometimes the bus stops for no apparent reason until you see a small car, that was right in front of the bus, pull ahead of the bus. You look down onto street signs and lights. It's strange to see the top of these things.
When I first got here, elections to replace the failed and hated government were in full swing. Every lamp and sign post in the city had political ads tied to them with plastic ties. When the buses pulled into a stop, they would often touch these posters which were right at eye level on the upper deck.
I like roller coasters, so I think this is fun and sit up and in front whenever possible. But, I can see that some people might not care for the experience at all.
I'm still trying to figure out the bus system. There is a nice web site that lets you plan a trip and tells you what buses to take. You can also get the timetable for each route. But there is no system wide map that lets you see which buses go where, and at what stations lines intersect. For each bus line you can get a nice online map of the route, but it doesn't show you any other routes. You can click on a bus stop and it will tell you what other buses stop there. Then you can look up their routes individually.
I think the time tables are for illustrative purposes only. They give you a rough idea how frequently a bus might come by at various times throughout the day; or not. Work and my apartment are on lines 39 and 39A. Weekday mornings, 39 is supposed to drive by the stop right in front of my apartment every twenty minutes. Consulting the timetable for 39A tells you that it also comes by every 20 minutes, nicely interleaved at ten-minute intervals. Except they usually show up in pairs, and if you miss them, you wait 20 or 30 minutes.
I can understand that with traffic and various passenger loads. You have to wave them down to stop. I was at one stop studying the timetable, when the bus blew past the stop right behind my back...
What I don't understand is why at the end points of a line they leave after the time the timetable says; or, sometimes, before!!! I have seen buses sitting at the terminus and then take off, race car like, five minutes before their time! When they are on one-hour intervals on weekends, count on plus/minus ten minutes around the time optimistically posted in the timetable ;-)

My first blog post! So ever ;-)

Ok, so I created this blog for people who are interested in what is happening to me, and what it means to move to another country, in another continent, and start a new job. I never had a blog and right now I'm thinking I'll write about things that I encounter and experience. I expect that will be a few things per week at first, and then fewer and fewer as time goes by and I start to think this is normal ;-)
I have been here in Dublin for a little over three weeks now and things are beginning to stabilize: I have an apartment not far from work and a major shopping center; I have Internet at "home" (the first two weeks without it felt like prison!); I have an Irish bank account, possibly with money in it, but I can't access it yet; and I still get more mail for the people who used to live here than stuff addressed to myself.
I have started to ride my bike and jogging. Not a single swim yet, but probably this weekend. The Irish National Aquatic Center is not far from here, and I get a discount through IBM for a yearly membership.
Not a single picture taken yet: too busy getting set up, and mostly miserable weather ;-) I also need to buy a new battery charger that can handle 220 Volts.
Turns out the one that came with my camera cannot. So, real soon now...
Feel free to tell other people about this blog, but it is really intended for people who know me and want to stay in touch.