Talking About Chemistry and Saying Goodbye

Yesterday I presented what I did for the past 10 weeks in the lab along with all the rest of the UPCRO students who did the same program that I did. There was 12 of us, so it ended up being pretty much a full day of presentations that lasted roughly 20 minutes each. We had a crowd of 25 people or so (including all of the students). My talk went pretty well, I think. Afterwards they gave us some free food, after which we cleaned out our desks, gave back our swipe cards, and left.

After taking the free food that we were given, we all went our separate ways, walking home from work for the last time with plans to meet up to celebrate finishing our presentations and say goodbye. While I'm not leaving Cork until (very very early) Monday morning, most of the non-Irish students are going home earlier, today or tomorrow. The end of the program leaves me running around to finish off the last few things that I need to do before I fly back to the States on Monday wondering if I'll ever see any of these people again.
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Inexpensive Haircuts and Future Visitors + Completely Unrelated Picture

So the pint of Guinness to the left is completely unrelated to this post unless you want to start pondering the half full or half empty question. Actually, that is also pretty much completely unrelated to this, but it might be slightly more interesting if you're into internal intellectual questions that have no real answer. In any case I got a haircut today for 8.50 Euro. I was shocked at how cheap it was. I stumbled upon Frank's Barbershop completely by accident, it is on the 2nd floor of a storefront on the fringes of downtown Cork and is not particularly well marked. A small little place that seemed pretty much identical to an American barber shop except for the Cork accents.

Also, my dad will be in Ireland starting tomorrow and will be spending some time in Cork. The plan is to head over to the west coast into West Cork and Kerry, possibly Dingle, and do some sightseeing. It should be a good weekend.
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Cobh Broken Down Trains

Yesterday I attempted to go to Cobh with one of my housemates. Cobh is about a 25 minute train ride from Cork, so we walked to the train station and bought tickets for the commuter train to Cobh. It was the second time I've ever been to the Cork train station. I have yet to successfully leave said train station actually in a train.

First, the train scheduled to leave for Cobh was running late, so the boarding and departure was about 10 minutes after it was scheduled. We all got onto the platform at track 1, right next to an empty train on track 2. After about a 5 minute wait somebody thought to announce that the train to Cobh was actually the one on track 2 right behind us, which had been there the entire time we were there. We all turned around and boarded that train and waited for what we assumed would be a minute or two so everyone could get on and then we would depart. We were, of course, mistaken. The doors closed, we sat there for about 2 minutes, and then a muffled voice announced over the PA "mumble mumble train mumble mumble service to mumble bus service mumble".

People began to trickle out of the train and it became clear due to some individuals who either possessed incredible hearing or the ability to speak airport announcement translated the message to "Train broke down, we're trying to get you a bus to wherever you need to go". By the time we returned to the terminal it was about 5 minutes before the train was scheduled to arrive in Cobh. By this point we figured that it was late enough that it wasn't worth the hassle of getting a bus, so we got a refund and walked back to our townhouse.
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On Friday we went to Belfast Cork Airport and back

On Friday I learned a useful lesson; If you are younger than 23, it is pretty much impossible to rent a car in Ireland (or at least Cork). As I said a few days ago, the plan for the weekend was to rent a car and drive up to Belfast and sort of tour Northern Ireland for a few days. This effort, as you may have already guessed, ended in utter failure because 21 year olds are not really able to rent cars here in Cork and having a car was pretty central to our plans. On the positive side we got to go to ORK (yes, I will use any possible excuse to type the abbreviation for Cork Airport) and the weather was pretty nice.

So that didn't really work, and the revised plan is to go to Cobh tomorrow and then Waterford on Monday (horray for bank holidays). Hopefully this plan will work out a little better. Fortunately no car rentals are involved.
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Rental Cars and Northern Ireland?

The plan for the upcoming (bank holiday!) weekend is to rent a car and drive (basically) completely across the island. In theory, 2 of my housemates and I will rent a car tomorrow morning and drive north with the stated goal of visiting Belfast, Derry, Donegal, Mayo, and Galway in roughly that order.

If that happens or not remains to be seen.
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Midleton

Yesterday I went with a few of my housemates to the Old Midleton Distillery, which is now owned by Jameson and is the distillery where over half of all Irish whiskey is produced. The old distillery itself was bought by Jameson in the 1960s and had previously produced its own whiskey since the mid-1800s. Midleton is a small town located about a half hour east of Cork City on the Owenacurra River. We went there by bus and it was actually rather remarkable to see how much of the one main street in town was shut down because it was Sunday.

The tour of the Distillery itself was pretty awesome. We were led on a tour of the grounds and buildings where they at one time produced very large amounts of whiskey, although now all the production occurs at a modern distillery pretty much next door. The old distillery is in fairly good shape for its age, however, and going through the grounds and learning about the distillation process was especially fascinating for me as a chemist. For most of the tour whenever the guide mentioned distillation or their big condenser I was constantly reminded of work and the ochem lab I took for all of last year.

In any case, the tour took us around the grounds for about an hour and enlightened us to the basic principles of distilling whiskey in addition to the differences between Irish, Scottish, and American whiskeys. Generally, the differences lie in number of distillations, the way the barley is heated and dried, and the type of barrels in which the whiskey is aged. Irish whiskey is distilled three times, and the first of the stills (distillation vats) is (or was, it was not too clear) the largest still in the world.


After the tour they had a whiskey tasting where they had us compare small samples of American, Scottish, and Irish whiskeys, and seeing/tasting the differences between them was actually quite intriguing after having been walked through the process of making them and having the differing points of their production described.

Completely unrelated random fact: According to Wikipedia, Cork Harbor is the second biggest natural harbor in the world (behind Sydney, Australia).
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Failure

The past few days can be summed up very well by this picture. On Friday I figured out that the compound that I have been working on for the past week or so degraded so it is now useless. Today I attempted to go up to Thurles to watch Cork play Galway in hurling but we were not able to get train or bus tickets that included a return journey so we gave up. Both disappointing, but these things happen.

It was a gorgeous day in Cork today and walking back from the bus station after realizing that going to see the match wasn't feasible we saw some people doing a bizarre sort of martial art seeming thing except it was not any recognizable martial art I have ever heard of. In any case we returned home and watched the match on TV. It was an incredible match that ended up as a Cork victory by a mere two points after battling back from being behind at halftime and playing a man down for the entire second half. It is disappointing to have missed it but the match itself was still very exciting on television and there was no real way that we could have made it to Thurles in time once we realized what was going on with the train and bus.

The past couple days have remained sunny (for the most part). It has been over a week since it last rained harder than a 20 minute drizzle. It's almost spooky.
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Is that....Sun?

Today is, I believe, the 6th consecutive day that it has not rained significantly in Cork. This is by far the longest streak of its kind since I've arrived in Ireland. Its almost spooky. We've had brief drizzles on a few of the six days, but they have been so inconsequential that you would not be able to tell that they were happening if you were inside. Its a different side of the Irish weather, I suppose, although one that does not often stick around for more than a day or two.

Yesterday I walked into the City Centre Center and passed a pub named Costigan's. I'm sure I've passed it before because I have walked down this street before but this was the first time I really noticed it. For maybe the next 10 minutes all I could think of was DiCaprio's character from The Departed.

Tennis balls are expensive here. The cheapest can I could find was 5.50 euro, which is ridiculous when compared to 2 or 3 dollars back home. Its easy to pay 10 euro for a can as well, which is roughly a third of the price of a (slightly discounted) GAA jersey I saw in the sporting goods store where I saw these tennis balls. The thought that nine tennis balls could be worth the monetary equivalent of a replica jersey of any sort is completely mind-boggling to me.
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A Weekend of Hurling

This weekend is shaping up to be a potentially rather sports-packed few days. Later today Cork play Dublin in an All-Ireland hurling qualifying match at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork. I'm still debating if I should go and watch that match live but i will definitely at least watch it on TV. The more exciting hurling-related event of the weekend, however, takes place considerably further away.

The Munster hurling final is on Sunday. It is Tipperary versus Claire and is taking place in Limerick at the Gaelic Grounds there, one of the largest GAA venues in Ireland. The plan is to take either a train or bus up there from Cork around noon to make it there in time for the 4pm match. Its supposed to be quite a good match, and I get to see a town that has poems named after it in the process.
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Munster Final (Football)

Today at 2pm, Cork played Kerry in the Munster Final for Gaelic Football at Páirc Uí Chaoimh just outside of Cork City. I was fortunate enough to go to the match and watch Cork pull off an amazing comeback upset over Kerry, the reigning All-Ireland and Munster Football champions. The final score was Cork 1-16 (for a total of 19) to Kerry's 1-11 (for a total of 14) after Cork had trailed at halftime 0-3 to 1-8. The game was immensely entertaining and a ton of fun to watch in spite of some very fickle weather.

We arrived at the stadium by bus about 50 minutes before it was supposed to start and got to watch the end of the Minor (under 18) Munster final between Kerry and Tipperary, which ended in a draw. As we arrived it was raining fairly steadily but not particularly hard and that rain kept up until about five minutes prior to the throw in of the Cork-Kerry match. The weather and expected result (a lopsided victory for Kerry) kept attendance on the rather low side, with the announced attendance at the Páirc Uí Chaoimh only around 22,700 (its capacity is closer to 30,000 or 40,000).

We watched from the very top of the West Stand, the end closest to the city. We happened to be surrounded mostly by Kerry fans with a few Cork fans sprinkled here and there between them. Cork and Kerry are rather bitter rivals as they border one another, and their teams are referred to, interestingly, as the Rebels (Cork) and the Kingdom (Kerry). The match started out pretty well for Cork with the Rebels scoring the first point within a minute of the start of the match. It remained fairly even for a few minutes after that until it was tied at two points each. At that point, Kerry began to run away with the match. By halftime it was 0-3 to 1-8 in favor of Kerry and the general feeling was that it would be kinder to use some sort of mercy rule so that the Cork players didn't have to suffer anymore. The only solace for the Cork fans was that after the rain had stopped just prior to the start of the match the sun had come out and the weather had turned quite warm, sunny, and very plesant.

After the last of the stragglers wearing Cork red trudged to the locker room for halftime, a sort of mini-pitch was set up in the middle of the real field and the girls teams from Cork and Kerry ran out to play a football match of their own, presumably for halftime entertainment. About 60 seconds into their mini-match, however, the sky darkened and the entire stands rustled as literally every person in the stadium put their jackets back on and reopened their umbrellas pretty much simultaneously. It was actually quite an impressive sight to see thousands of people very abruptly and rather frantically put on water-resistant outerwear. Just about as the last of the fans were done getting ready for the rain, it began pouring. It was quite possibly the heaviest rain I have ever been in. In about 60-90 seconds the weather went from quite warm, sunny, and apparently perfect to buckets of rain and strong wind. Fans huddled under umbrellas, some crouched against the back wall of the stand, others rushed out of the stands into the inner hallways of the Páirc Uí Chaoimh. The pouring rain persisted for pretty much the rest of halftime.

Strangely enough, the rain began to taper off before the half started and after about two minutes of the second half the rain had stopped completely although some clouds persisted. Cork looked better to start the second half and began to pull some points back but after about 5 minutes a Cork player was sent off for a second yellow card, making the outlook for the Rebels even bleaker than before. Nearly right after he was sent off Cork scored a point, but it seemed small consolation as Cork were still down 5 points and a man.

The Rebels didn't give up though, and a few minutes later scored a goal to put them within 2 points of Kerry, making the match interesting once again. At that point you wouldn't have been able to tell that Cork were a man down without counting. A mere minute or two later a Kerry player was sent off for what appeared from my angle to be a vicious elbow/shoulder to the head of a Cork footballer sprinting down the wing. At this point Cork were trailing by two but seemed by far the better side of the half, and they quickly got two more points to draw level with the Kerrymen. The teams traded points, but by looking at the two teams it seemed only a matter of time until Cork pulled ahead for good, which they did soon after. Cork eventually won by 5 points, a remarkable achievement considering that they were down by 8 at half time.

The announcer made repeated requests to fans to "please stay off the pitch" after the match was over, but these requests went completely unheeded. Eventually the police simply opened the gates onto the pitch so that the supporters didn't have to hop the fences.

The Cork captain raising the cup (taken from the pitch).

As we made our way out of the stadium, it began to rain once again. The Cork weather ended up bracketing the match with rain before, at halftime, and after. Somehow the times when the players were actually playing stayed fairly dry. Read more

Lawyers, Guns , Money?

Predictably, the day after I write about the sluggishness of the PPS number saga, the numbers arrive. We've given our paymasters the numbers and will hopefully be paid sometime in the next week or so. If all goes well there will be money in my Bank of Ireland account by the end of the week, which would be ideal because the current plan is to visit Dublin on Saturday and a working Irish ATM card that doesn't charge me any fee would be a godsend.

I've been watching a good deal of Wimbledon, which isn't difficult because its on when I get home from work. On Monday night we got to see Andy Murray come back from down 2 sets and a break to beat Gasquet in five sets, and earlier today we saw Nadal completely destroy him in less than two hours (I think). Evidently John McEnroe's commentary is also played in Ireland. His tennis commentary empire extends beyond the United States and to the BBC. I had no idea. I also didn't realize the extent of the pro-Murray hysteria among Wimbledon fans. Quite entertaining, in any case.

Speaking of Wimbledon, I discovered yesterday that the Brookfield complex (where I am staying) has two grass tennis courts. This is, of course, AWESOME. It's been raining ever since I discovered the courts themselves, but once it stops I'm heading down to play on the surface that inspired serving and volleying.
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Americans + Unrelated Picture

Today I ran into Americans for the first time since getting to Cork and starting my internship. We had a social sort of event with the participants in other similar internship programs at UCC and two of the students in one of the more biology oriented were American. Interestingly enough both are from the west coast (LA and Seattle). They lived with a bunch of other international students from their program, just as I did. I later ran into them by complete coincidence on my way home from the pub after watching the Spain-Russia semifinal.

The pub where I watched the semifinal seemed to me to be the complete stereotypical small, friendly Irish pub. When we arrived about 45 minutes before kickoff there were about 3 or 4 other patrons, so we more than doubled the number of people there. The bartender was friendly, joking and conversing with the few people at the bar. It was decorated in a rather quaint way so that it almost seemed like I was in someone's living room. It wasn't a big sports bar type place so the crowd watching the game was not huge, but it was, all in all, an excellent place to catch the match. Sadly, Russia lost. Even more depressing nauseating horrifying were the jerseys that Spain chose to wear. The Irish commentators generously described the color as "mustard" and proceeded to disparage its hideousness. I wholeheartedly agreed.

On my way home from the match I ran into the Americans, who were walking with their housemates to the Lough (pronounced lock, like Loch Ness), a large lake not too far from the UCC campus. I went with them. It was interesting to speak to Americans again. It also occurred to me that from their conversation they seemed to have very little social interaction with their Irish coworkers. I have spent most of my time with my newly made Irish friends, and for some reason this group of international students seemed to remain more a unit, in their own social sphere. Their approach to life and work in a foreign country ends up being a bit different than mine, I guess, although that may be because in their case they are living with other Americans.

In any case though, it was interesting to run into another American, and funny when they ended up being from places relatively close to where I live.

And the picture is of a sidewalk on the way to the grocery store (Tesco!) from my house.
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Pubs, Trivia, and Rainy Mornings

Last night I went to a pub with a few friends of mine to do a trivia night sort of thing. It was a ton of fun, and I felt like I got a very Irish sort of pub experience out of it because I was the only non-Irish member of the group for the majority of the evening, which was a first for me. Later Bartek, my Polish housemate and coworker, joined us. All in all, it was quite an entertaining evening and me being American actually helped the trivia team. A few questions about American TV, tennis, and the Beach Boys came our way, which I happily helped out with. And we finished tied for 3rd, so we won some money out of it as well.

The most amusing part of the evening was when we ran into a group of English tourists. It was a group of about 6 girls who were part of some sort of organized Cork festival. As they loudly proclaimed their love for all things Irish, it occurred to me that by doing so they very obviously marked themselves as non-Irish, especially because they were describing Irish things in very non-Irish ways. They marked the first group of people who I've come across outside of work who have appeared more obviously non-Irish than I am, or at least the first group that I noticed. I suppose I'm not a particularly good judge of such things, but it seemed a rather interesting thing that I observed to myself at the time.

This morning was gray and rainy, standard Irish weather. I actually quite enjoyed it. A short walk to work in a rather light rain is not an altogether negative way to start a day so long as you're wearing a jacket that does a good job of keeping you dry.

On a completely unrelated note, this is an awesome website.
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Sports, Shops, and Rain

People in Ireland like sports. A lot. It seems like there is always some form of sports on television and nearly half the people you see on the street are wearing some form of replica jersey, usually either something related to the County Cork GAA or an English Premier League team. Gaelic sports, specifically hurling and football, are huge. They vary in relative popularity depending on the part of Ireland you're in. In East Cork, where Cork City is, hurling is more popular, although football is quite popular as well. In West Cork football enjoys more popularity than hurling, although hurling is still quite popular there. You see a lot of red Cork shirts walking around town.

There always seems to be some sort of sporting event on TV. If no Euro 08 match is on at the time there is always something on, either cricket or rugby or non-European soccer or hurling or Gaelic football. I even saw a bit of of USA v Canada in rugby yesterday. All of this on standard television, with about 10 channels. I'm pretty sure you'd need uber-cable to watch that rugby match in the United States, and here its on their equivalent of NBC. They like their sports here, obviously.

Earlier today I saw the end of a hurling match. Its fascinating to watch. Everyone here claims that its the "fastest game in the world". I'm not quite sure what that means, but the game is very high tempo, although I'm pretty sure its impossible to quantify speed of play and compare across different sports.

Unfortunately, the Irish love of all things sports-related does not seem to extend to tennis. Yesterday I went into town and looked in at least 3 sporting goods stores for tennis balls and returned empty-handed. This could have something to do with the weather. It rains quite often here, making regular tennis training a rather difficult goal.

Speaking of rain, on the way back from town after looking for said tennis balls I got caught in a rather heavy downpour. It rained nearly 2 inches yesterday, and as luck would have it most of that came all at once in the afternoon during my 20 minute walk from the City Centre Center to my house near UCC.
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Soccer match + Pictures

Cork City FC 5, Cobh Ramblers 0. The match was at Cork City's home stadium, Turner's Cross. It was about a half hour walk from my townhouse. It was quite an experience. Cobh (pronounced cove) is about 20 miles from the City of Cork, making this a derby of sorts. I went with the Irish guy who lives in the townhouse with me. I enjoyed it immensely. Its much much different from watching soccer in America, but mostly in ways that are difficult to explain. Oh, and we got front row seats, which was sorta cool.

That picture is of the 4th goal, which was actually scored by a guy who isn't in the picture. Cork were wearing green, Cobh that sort of maroon.

As we were walking to the match, the closer we got to the stadium the larger and larger the crowds who were joining us became. It was a fascinating and awesome sort of enlarging stream of fans who simply walked to the stadium or parked far away and walked, converging on a single place by walking down ordinary streets. The stadium didn't have a parking lot, so this was the only way for people to get there. There was a pub right next to the gates, and the stadium is surrounded on all 4 sides by streets so that it turns out that all the gates are literally right on the sidewalk. When we got inside we went into the stands and sat in the front row of the Curragh Road End (apparently also known as "The Shed"), nearly directly behind the goal. Off to our left there was a large group of committed supporters waving flags, holding scarves, and standing for most of the match. There was another such group over at the far left corner (from my perspective) in the Donie Forde Stand as well as a bunch of away fans in the far right corner in the Derrynane Road Stand.
vocal Cork fans with flags in the Donie Forde Stand.

Cobh free kick behind which you can see the Donie Forde again.

The fans sang or chanted in some sort of semi-organized way pretty much throughout the game. One of my favorites was about a 5 minute stretch when they yelled in unison "hey!" when any Cork player got the ball and "boo" whenever any Cobh player touched the ball, which became rather amusing after the first 10 or 11 yells or boos. The stadium itself wasn't particularly nice but it did have a sort of character and charm to it that made it a pretty awesome place to watch a match.

Only 15 euro for a ticket and then 3 euro more for a program. Not too bad, overall. As we were walking back from the match it occurred to me that since I'm here in August I might be able to fly over to England and catch an English Premier League match on opening day. That'd be cool.
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MINSTRELS! and pub

Today I went to the big supermarket after work to pick up some food. I expected it to be a rather uneventful experience but little did I know that a rather surprising find would turn the experience awesome. As I was going through the isles grabbing bread, salami, and other various simple food items I saw a packet of Minstrels, which I rushed over to and grabbed immediately. For those of you who don't know, Minstrels are an Irish candy made by Galaxy. They're rather similar to M&Ms except they are slightly larger, don't have varying coating colors, and are made with better chocolate. They are quite possibly the best mass-produced candy I have ever eaten. My day got exponentially better after I found them. Coincidentally, today has been the worst weather so far since I arrived. Wet and gray much as I expected it to be like all the time.

Yesterday night we had an introductory dinner for the internship program I'm doing here. We sat through a brief introductory lecture earlier in the day and then they sent the six international students off to get some sort of government tax number. After we finished that we had a few hours break and then met at a restaurant in the City Centre Center for a sort of social dinner so that we could meet everyone involved with the program. The meal was excellent (and free!), although the portions were so enormous that I almost felt like I was in Texas. Afterwards the group headed over to a nearby pub, which made it much easier to intermingle and meet everyone than it was sitting at a long skinny dinner table.

Today was my first real day on the job. I met my French student supervisor for the first time and was walked through an outline of what my project for the next 10 weeks will be. My supervisor, Guillaume, will actually only work here for another two weeks which he will spend primarily training me how to do the synthesis he's working on up to the point where he is now so that I can continue it after he is gone. Since Guillaume is the only one currently working on this particular project, once he leaves it will become my project and I'll report directly to my PI, not a grad student, which I thought was sorta cool. I'll even get my own desk. It turns out that I have an access card that Guillaume does not have for reasons I do not understand. In any case, my actual training starts tomorrow, I only did some reading today, so there isn't too much to explain, only Minstrels that need eating.
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The Silent Head Nod

The Irish do not use the same forms of silent acknowledgment as Americans do. In America the generally accepted way to say a silent hello while walking past someone is to make eye contact and then nod slightly. I assumed this was a universal form of greeting and that I could use it without any alteration in Ireland. I was, of course, completely wrong.

In Ireland they have a gesture that serves a similar purpose. Unfortunately, it is just different enough to have completely confused me for the first few days I was here. Their form of the greeting begins in exactly the same way, with eye contact (generally while walking past one another). However, instead of nodding as we do in America, they follow it with a short movement of their head to the side, like an abbreviated shake of their head rather analogous to the American abbreviated nod. Until today I was always confused when I nodded to people and they responded with their own shake of the head because I assumed that they somehow disapproved of me or my greeting. It was rather distressing because I thought that if I were interpreting their gesture correctly that the people of Cork were either generally not friendly or they just didn't like me for some reason. I am rather relieved to learn that this is not the case.

On a completely unrelated note, I got a (cheap) Irish cell phone today at the Tesco near where I am staying, which is evidently the largest supermarket in all of Munster (the southernmost Irish province). It was missing the back, so the battery and SIM card are exposed, although after paying 25 euro including 10 euro of credit towards talk time I can't really complain.

On another walk through Cork this afternoon I passed the large Protestant Cathedral (which was quite impressive and rather on the large side considering that the vast majority of the Irish population in this area is Catholic), a number of interesting shops in the City Centre Center, and a small, pub-type place that apparently is among the best microbreweries in Ireland. I haven't really taken any pictures to speak of so far, I've been trying to get my bearings walking around town and get a feel for where everything is before I go around snapping away with a camera. That should start soon though, I think I've figured out the main parts of the city decently enough to get myself around in a reasonable manner. I'll start posting then when I start taking them.
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Irish Euro Commentators and Cork City Centre Center

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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