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.

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