Woohoo - that was just awesome.

I will definitely write more detailed reviews of the vacation later. Some highlights:

• Eire is absolutely beautiful. The sceneries alone are worth everything. The lakes, forests, green hills, endless grass pastures… ahhh, heaven.
• One week is far from enough for an Irish vacation. A month is more like it…
• We only did the middle+south part (Dublin -> Galway line and souther). Must get to the north sometime
• The Irish are very nice people.
• They’re very polite on the road. Gave me some inspiration (it will pass soon here in the holy-land…)
• It’s terribly expensive. But they say all of Europe is.
• The expensiveness is sometimes just bastardous. For instance, we went to a shopping mall in Dublin. Not only that we shopped, but we paid E 5.40 for parking, E 0.40 for toilet ! Argh. Maybe it’s common in Europe/USA, but I’m not used to such things.
• Driving on the left side is not too bad. Good that I took an automatic car though.
• The car was nice - a new Corolla hatch-back, automatic (for the left side driving shock…). Only went 2K miles before us - very new ! We added another 900 miles =~ 1500 km to its repertoire. No A/C - argh !!! (In Israel new cars w/o A/C are illegal…)
• Fuel is more expensive than here in Israel. Didn’t think such thing is possible
• It’s raining a little bit too much, in August. Coming from Israel’s 30 deg C to Irish weather was a little bit shocking.
• I got me a nice green fleece “coat”, with “Ireland” on it, and an official Guinness T-Shirt.
• Bought 3 books: James Joyce’s “Dubliners” and “Portrait of an artist as a young man” (both in my “to read” classics list) and picked Bryson’s “A short history of nearly everything” in the airport - look like a nice, light, pop-scientific read.

When we came back, a nice surprise awaited - two shiny new Perl books - “Mastering Perl for bioinformatics” and “Computer Science & Perl Programming: Best of TPJ
“. Got them directly from O’Reilly through brian d foy, to review for TPR. Thanks, brian.

Related posts:

1. destination: Ireland
2. preparing to Ireland
3. some more observations on Ireland

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2004 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.