Malahide

I took my spiffy new car out for a spin today. This one, not the one above I photographed in front of Malahide castle. Lee Ann saw a house on daft.ie that looked interesting to us, so I drove to Malahide to walk around the neighborhood it was in. I called the agent, but it is not yet ready to be shown.
While I was there, I walked to several other locations where there are houses and apartments for rent, and took some pictures. You can look at all of them here.
Malahide is a small town just North of Dublin. It is picturesque, has good public transport, and is not very far from Dublin center. I would have to drive to work, but it should be possible to that in 20 to 25 minutes.

There are lots of little shops and restaurants. There is a huge park that surrounds Malahide castle. The castle has been expanded over the years, but the core of it is 800 years old. And, it has belonged to the same family for almost the whole time.

On the way home I stopped at the Swords Pavilions shopping center which is very close to Malahide. It's a large mall and very crowded on Saturday afternoons, but it has two very nice grocery stores. The best I have seen yet here in Ireland. One is a Superquinn and the other a Dunnes. I bought Simply Better Luxury Muesli and some strawberries at Dunnes. Waiting in line to pay, so I could go to Superquinn and get the rest there, a woman approached me and told me that I could go to the 10-item-or-less checkout further down and be out much quicker. I wasn't in a big hurry and just looking around at all the hustle and bustle, and so hadn't even noticed that. The Irish are friendly.

Sorry for the blurriness

Speaking of speeding things up. At Superquinn they have these handheld scanner you can checkout with your frequent buyer card. As you shop and put things into your cart, you scan each item. At the checkout, you hand over the scanner, pay, and off you go. No need to take your stuff out of the grocery cart twice.
By the way, to get a grocery cart, you need a one Euro coin. The carts are all chained together, and by inserting a coin, you can release it. At the end, you get your coin back, iff you bring the cart back to it's designated area. In other words, you pay a Euro, if you leave your cart parked at the tree next to your car.
In Switzerland, and most other European countries, there are no grocery baggers. You do that yourself. And, you had better brought a (reusable) bag, otherwise you may have to buy one. This keeps cost down and is good for the environment.
In Ireland, some stores have baggers. They are not high-school kids. I read somewhere that they are volunteers; they are not employed by the store; and you are supposed to tip them. On the other hand, tax drivers do not expect a tip, but gladly take it in these economic harsh times.

Back from Switzerland

This year I spent St. Patricks Day in Switzerland. The taxi driver on my way home had his cab decorated in a Catholic theme: Maria figurine on the dashboard, rosary with a picture of the pope hanging from the fare meter, and holographic cards depicting Jesus laying around. He told me the weather had been great and the parade in Dublin outstanding this year. During a News segment on the radio about the Vatican report (also here) on the abuse scandal in Ireland, my driver didn't say anything. Church attendance here has fallen dramatically in the last few years.
I did visit the IBM research lab in Zurich, but the main purpose of my visit was a class reunion. I had not seen my classmates in almost 35 years and only in the last few years, through facebook and a web site that specializes in reuniting high school students, have I been able to reestablish contact with some of them.

My class in in 1976

There are nine mandatory school years in Switzerland. You start at 7 after kindergarten and finish with 16. Most kids then do a three or four year apprenticeship or go to a prep school for University. My class had more or less the same composition for the final five years, and some of us knew each other even earlier. We spent our early teenage years together and grew up knowing each other.
There were a couple of people who could not be found. A few people who did show up, had had no contact with any of us for even longer than me. Even our homeroom teacher of the last three years came. The organizers went through a lot of trouble bringing us back together and trying to unearth artifacts from back then.

There aren't many pictures of us from back then. Few of us had cameras and none of us had a cell phone. Apple was just being founded!
A day after the class reunion I went with Stef to the transportation museum in Luzern where I took the pictures you see sprinkled throughout this post. I thought they would fit nicely with this nostalgic story.
The reunion started at two in the afternoon and I didn't get home until four in the morning. Not all of us stayed that long, but many did. There where several hundred years worth of stories to be told among us! It was fun, interesting, sad, thought provoking, and emotional. I'm still trying to digest some of the stories I heard.

My last 35 years have been interesting with many ups and a few downs. Some of my friends had had interesting times as well. Several of them horrific, with a boy dying of cancer at four years old, a grandchild born in an American prison, addiction to drugs, and extreme cases of marital problems.
Most of the evening was very upbeat, though: counting who had the most grand children, finding out who had an eye on whom back then, who recognized whom with today's body and face, and lots of stories which are now, that many years past, pure fun.

James Bond's car in Goldfinger which was partially filmed in Switzerland. Note the gun nozzle behind the direction light, and the tire shredder sticking out from the back wheel.

I'll go back to Switzerland in June to attend the confirmation of my goddaughter. Once again in church, I will think back when it was my school friends' and my turn to be up front and start, what we then called, the second life. I hope I'll get to see some of my old and new friends and hear more stories.

A Car

Sitting on the right, driving on the left, shifting with your left hand!

Last week I bought a car. It's four years old and because it just had its birthday, it was time for the NCT: The National Car Test. Cars must pass it when they have been registered for the first four years and every two years after that. They check emission but also tires, breaks, glass, lights (including aim), mirrors, instruments, alignment, suspension, rust on structural elements, and other safety related things. You can see the 92-page manual here.
I bought my car from a dealer so they did a service on it and made sure it passes the NCT. One reason I chose a dealer is that it is hard to buy a car, when you don't have a car. I found this car on the web and then rode my bike to the dealer to go look at it and test drive it through Phoenix park. The whole time we talked about triathlons because the dealer did the Dublin City Triathlon just like I did last August and then got sick, just like I did.
Cars are expensive in Ireland. One reason is that they get taxed quite a bit when they are first registered here. Then you also have to pay a tax to drive it every year. Until 2008, the tax used to be based on the size of the car's engine. Since then, the tax is based on the CO2 emission. My car is in the lowest class and gets 50 miles to the gallon. Petrol too, is expensive here.
In my search I did see a couple of sporty cars that were relatively inexpensive. Insurance, gas, and road tax are high for those, because most of them have big engines. Even if they don't emit a lot of CO2, the 2008's and older are now very expensive to drive around, hence the good deals available. I was tempted to have a midlife crisis, but my budget calculations sobered me up again.

My calculator from 8th grade.

There is no publicly available Kelley's Blue Book or an edmunds.com to look up how much a car should cost. But there is a way to cheat. In order to calculate the vehicle tax when a car is first registered here, its value is taken into consideration. The revenue service offers an online tool to perform this calculation. You enter the car make, model, mileage, age, etc. and get back how much it is worth and how much the tax is. You can try it out yourself here.
I paid a little bit more than that at the dealer, but get a year's worth of warranty, road side assistance, a full service, and the NCT. Insurance is another matter. It's pricey as well, but goes down with each no-claim year and as long as you don't have any traffic violations. I qualify for all that, except, of course, I'm in none of their data bases. I have no driving history here. I'm trying to get some kind of statement from my US car insurance and hope an insurance company here will accept it.

The first insurance company I called would not even insure me until I have been here for at least two of the last three years. The next one wanted 1,700 Euros. I'm glad I didn't go for that sports car!
I have gotten some more reasonable offers by now, but it still seems like a lot of money. It reminds me when I first arrived in the USA. Same thing: no credit history and no driving history; premiums were sky high. I remember walking into a Sears and Discover had a stand setup there. They told me I should get one of their credit cards and it would help me build a credit history. I didn't really want one, but after a while let her convince me to fill out an application.
A few weeks later I received by mail (that's how things worked back then) a notification that they would not issue me a credit card because of my missing credit history. Ever since then I gleefully tear up offers from Discover. Now they would love to have me as a customer. Sorry guys ;-)

License plates in Ireland encode the year when the car was first registered, in the first two digits. That is usually followed by one or two letters that indicate the county where the car is registered: D for Dublin, KE forKildare, etc.
So, by looking at the license plates you can see how old the cars are. At work, it seems, many are between three to five year old on average. Where I live, most of them are around ten years old or older. Ever since I learned about this, I had this urge to drive around various company parking lots and see which ones pay their employees the most.
The other neat thing you can do is to take the license plate info and enter it here or here. You'll get back some basic info about the car (brand, model, color, diesel or petrol, etc.) If you pay them, you can get more information: whether it has been in an accident, whether there is a loan and a lien against it, how many owners it had, and other useful information about a car before you buy it. Like car fax in the States.