Irish commentators are infinitely better than American ones in terms of soccer. I feel strange listening to an account in English that coincides with a soccer game and is delivered by someone who has some idea about what is going on. Its awesome though. Not only do they have intelligent commentary, they also have insightful and extensive (taken to a ridiculous extreme, even) post-game and halftime commentary. The thing that surprised me most though was that multiple stations show each match live. It's bizarre. I guess if you don't like one commentator you get a choice, but it still seems strange to me. Sometimes you even get lucky and find hurling while channel surfing at halftime. Always a bonus.
I also went into the Cork City Centre Center today. Twice, actually. A very interesting town. At first I thought that they did not have any street signs to label streets at all but I have since learned that they cleverly hide them by posting them in arbitrary places, often on private houses or walls on the corner of streets. Needless to say, this makes navigation and direction-giving difficult and sometimes rather aggravating. On one of my trips I saw an Irish guy walking around swinging a hurling stick (hurley? I don't know what they call them). I've seen a bunch of people walking around in Cork GAA and hurling gear. Evidently all of their sports teams are the rebels, which I think is a reference to the county's history of resistance to British rule. The downtown City Centre Center district seems rather small but actually turns out to be larger than one would imagine from just looking at its several long, skinny parallel blocks on a map. It contains an almost American-seeming mall, which completely shocked me. I thought those sort of things did not exist in Ireland and it seemed completely out of place next to rows of shopfronts.
Sadly, I saw a Dominoes Pizza on the walk to the City Centre Center. Evidently Dominoes has invaded Europe. I personally think this is horrible news, Dominoes is very low on my list of American food chains that I want to succeed/advertise to the rest of the world. I didn't see any other unexpected American food chains except for a rather interesting-looking European version of Johnny Rockets called Eddie Rockets (and McDonalds, but that wasn't much of a surprise).
Food aside though, I did run into very surprising American items in a sporting goods store that I poked around in for a few minutes while one of my housemates was buying running shoes. Right next to all the Cork GAA and assorted professional soccer team apparel I found a bin of sports balls which held soccer balls, rugby balls, bigger rugby balls, and (to my shock) an American football. Next to it was a rack of 3 or 4 basketballs. They seemed very out of place and I'm sure those same 3 basketballs and 1 football have been in stock for the past 2 months because I can't imagine that there are many basketball courts or football fields in Cork. It seemed like just a run of the mill sporting goods store too, not a specialty store or an extra-thorough enormous one. It was very strange.
Oddly enough, I was almost killed crossing the street today and it was not my fault and not because I looked the wrong way. The guy in the car decided not to slow down coming around a blind corner when turning left on a red light. Fortunately he stopped in time, but rather frightening nonetheless, especially because when I first heard him honk I assumed that I had done something stupid, which didn't turn out to be the case.
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