Buying a phone in Malaysia is a little different to Ireland – ever since the recession hit us hard back home, there’s now more and more staff and less and less customers, so you naturally end up with a situation where you’re always going to get served, provided you can prize a member of staff away from chatting to their colleagues. My phone store of choice over here, by comparison, had some unusual system where you had to take a ticket and hang around until somebody was ready to see you. This didn’t altogether tally with what I’d hoped for, which was that I’d be able to select the staff member who looked like they might know more English. In the end, the guy I got knew from the outset he wouldn’t more than likely be up to the job and we ended up making broken-English small talk for a few minutes before he handed me over to his colleague, where we conducted our transaction through one-word-English, which goes a bit like this ‘prepaid SIM?’; ‘Yes, you want?’; ‘Yes, price?’; ‘RM8.50’; ‘Fine’. So, that was that, phone sorted, although it subsequently ended up not working for the next day and a bit, because you couldn’t activate it without making a call, and I couldn’t make a call because it came with no credit – talk about a major catch-22! Even when I bought credit and went to ring the number to top-up, it was having none of it because it knew I hadn’t made a proper call yet; talk about the height of stupidity. Next problem, a transport pass – and with it, came another issue. Over here, they seem to use these ‘Touch N’ Go’ tickets, a little like London’s Oyster Card or Ireland’s…nothing.
All aboard!
The idea is simple; if you throw on 150 ringgits, then that covers a month’s unlimited travel, if you put on 90, that covers 7 days, etc. Or, you can just put on however much you want that gets deducted as you take various journeys. In theory, you pass your Touch N’ Go over the reader at the station and it lets you through. I bought mine, and by about the second station, had successfully slammed full force into a barrier by passing it over the reader (while walking), only for it not to read properly and keep the gates shut. It kept doing this – over and over, so many times, that eventually, as I kept trying the card at different gates repeatedly, it was blocked and ‘blacklisted’. Great. So yesterday, I ended up making a trip to the office down in KL Sentral, which was another ticketed affair and thankfully all was finally right with the world once again, at least temporarily. The problem, it would appear, is that the monorail’s ticket machines use some sort of different system to everything else, hence the issue with it blocking me so quickly. Not that it really bothers me, the monorail’s exceptionally small given its seeming importance in the transport system of KL, so its best avoided whenever possible anyway given the sheer cramming which I’ve found myself caught in on a few occasions – yesterday morning being one that springs to mind, where the monorail pulled up and the first thing I saw was just a sweaty hand pressed up against the door amidst a load of bodies. So, overall, getting a phone and getting a transit pass has been relatively successful. Now, onto the other issue – accommodation.
A few of the local downtown eateries...
This morning, as I write, we’re having to pack our stuff and leave the hotel. With nowhere sorted. Well, that’s a lie, I relented last night and booked a stay at ‘Tune Hotels’ for a couple of nights while we keep looking. Here’s a brief summary of how it’s gone so far – first place we saw was absolutely disgusting, no doubt about it. The occupants were filthy (with whom we’d be sharing) and the place stank of old cigarettes. There was internet – at the pool (who uses their laptop in or right next to a pool?), and the place, even though it was new, had been kept in a terrible state. Next place, the woman sort of doubled the price as soon as we arrived, which I don’t understand because her place was barely worth the original asking price, let alone the next price she gave us. Anyway, I could’ve just left straight away to be honest, but we ended up walking around with her and pretending to be interested, even though we weren’t, seeing the kitchen, the hallway (that had a bunch of mattresses just lying in it) and the bedrooms. Ours wasn’t the worst I suppose, but it wasn’t the best either – next! The next place we saw, well Anna went and saw by herself and I joined the fun later, was palatial to say the least – it was large, spacious, clean and quiet; in a word everything the others weren’t. The only problem was the rent was a little on the high side for us so alas, we’ve kept up our search. The next place we saw had two very friendly girls living in it, but it was also the best part of an hour and a half out of town, which is a bit unrealistic to be honest, even when the rent is nearly absolutely nothing. I could go on and on – but I’m sure you get the idea by now. So we’re still looking – the area where we’ve been staying, Bukit Bintang, is ideal to be honest and probably the place we’d both ideally like to end up staying in. Here’s to finding somewhere…
At KLCC Aquarium...
In the meantime, I’ve started work, which is interesting, and busy, so that’s something, although obviously I could still do with time to look at more places, and we’ve been trying our best to see bits of Kuala Lumpur whenever we can – to date, I haven’t reneged to a steakhouse for a meal, and have opted for local choices pretty consistently. Although we have more or less confirmed that ‘Little Wok’ is our favourite eatery in the city at the moment, and only €1.50 or so a dish – great! We went to see the aquarium last week, which set us back near-Irish prices at around €20 or so, and to be honest, I was through it in what felt like about half an hour, even though the part that took up the half an hour was excellent. Assuming we can have some sort of a breakthrough on the accommodation front today, then we may be able to take a train out to an island I was at before, Pulau Ketam, for a little nose around tomorrow, and we’re hoping to maybe try and get a trip in already next week perhaps to Penang – suggestions on a postcard please – depending on how money works out and our long-lasting accommodation search. In the meantime though, I’ve got to get packing to move once again and try and get out of here before check-out time so until the next time,
Talk to you soon!
Last time I left off, I was sitting in Abu Dhabi’s less-than-riveting Terminal 1, waiting to get out as quickly as possible. From there, I wandered down to the toilets, which it turned out require delicate care to actually find – care that I didn’t employ first time round and subsequently found my way into the ‘prayer room’, where everyone was mid-prayer. Not to worry. Thankfully, my time finally came and before long, I was listening to the Arabic prayer being read aloud to images of a fading sun (slightly eerie, if you happen not to understand Arabic) as we taxied out of Abu Dhabi – the quicker the better. This time round, fortunately, when I nipped to the back to use the facilities I found a number of empty seats – rows, in fact – and went back to my own seat, gathered my belongings and made for the back, finally securing two seats together, which I promptly turned into a miniature bed. So, to be honest, I could say nothing of the whole journey to Kuala Lumpur, other than that the sun came up extremely early and that’s all I remember, otherwise I literally slept right until we landed. Landing in Kuala Lumpur, the first thing for tourists and visitors to be greeted with was ‘Now we must make a special announcement – possession of, or trafficking of drugs is a very serious offence in Malaysia, which carries a mandatory death sentence’. Welcome, indeed. The airport in Kuala Lumpur is one of the most impressive, and yet strangely comical buildings anyone’s ever likely to pass through – to begin with, the airport is absolutely huge and it requires no end of walking and following signs to find your way around. But secondly, and this is the slightly comical part, in an effort (I suppose) to ‘blend’ nature into it, the satellite terminal essentially encases a miniature rainforest in its centre.
Rainforest everywhere you look...until the shanties...
Let’s get this straight, it’s been a while since I’ve been in KL, and when I came here last, I came from the (sometimes sheer) awfulness of a variety of other Asian countries. It looked absolutely pristine, but comparison is a great tool of the mind – comparison from another Asian country makes for pleasant thoughts, comparison from Dublin, particularly along certain stretches of the KLIA Ekspres track where shanties huddle up alongside the tracks and people randomly stand staring at the train like they’ve never seen it pass before, may not be the most impressive way to arrive. On the bright side, the train journey is quick, taking just 28 minutes to make the 70-odd kilometre journey. From there, I hopped out into KL Sentral and into the crowds, making it to the front door just in time for the monsoon rains to begin teeming down from the heavens. Now, here’s the interesting part – although it was designed long after KL Sentral was up and running and only required the partial demolition of a few car spaces (when it was a car park and not a construction site as it is now), the KL Monorail doesn’t quite make it to KL Sentral; in other words, what it calls KL Sentral is actually about 200 metres from the front door of KL Sentral, as the crow flies. The problem there is that, the crow flies, I don’t, and there’s a construction site between the front door and the KL Monorail meaning a ‘connection’ requires a walk out into the monsoon rains, down the road, around the perimeter of the construction site, and then back along the opposite road again. With a suitcase that the ‘airline’ had very kindly attached a ‘HEAVY’ luggage tag to, reminding me that it wasn’t going to be light as I struggled to lift it up and over the turnstile in the monorail station.
An evening sight...
My station however, was only as far as ‘Imbi’, the first of the major downtown stations. However, most unfortunately, it was already 4pm and the Malay people had, seemingly, largely downed tools for the day, because at the first stop, there was a complete pile-on to the little two-car train. Next stop, a pile more people, almost to the point that my suitcase was now facilitating not just my seating, but for at least two other people as well. By the time we reached Imbi, the only option was to use up all my strength and toss the case out onto the platform first and go straight after it. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Not only that, but the walk to the hotel wasn’t quite what it looked on Google Maps – it was in fact, a considerably greater distance and by the time I made it to the hotel, I was a tired, hot, sweaty mess. But wait, there’s more; as it turned out, the air conditioning controls in my room are almost sort of hidden, such that you don’t see them unless you happen to be in bed so while I contented myself that it was ‘cooling down’, it later turned out that this was no more than wishful thinking on my part and the air conditioning wasn’t even turned on. Hmm. One shower later, and I headed out to see what was going on in town and if all was even vaguely as I remembered it; first things first, I’m staying extremely close to where I stayed last time, so close in fact that when I said last time (August 5th, 2009) that getting to my hostel required far greater energy than I’d wished to expend, it was because I ended up getting slightly lost in a car park. Well the hostel ended up being the far side of said car park, while my hotel this time is the other side. All very handy. We have free internet (although, it looks like there’ll be no video for you tonight, even though I have one ready, since while it’s free internet, it’s not necessarily speedy), and a little pool that’s best swum in circles, and overall I’m very content with my temporary holiday before I get looking for a place to live.
Here we have some upmarket eateries...
The first night, to return to the story, eventually found me standing on the motorway that splits my hotel from the aforementioned car park. The middle of the motorway that is – eventually, whatever Asian street-smarts I’d picked up were slowly coming back to me, and memories of pedestrian lights that never worked and of having to just casually and smartly walk right out into moving traffic and hope that it’ll stop for you or slow down enough for you to get across, came flooding back. From there, I walked up to Bukit Bintang, a large shopping area, through the ‘Pavilion’, a gigantic shopping centre that could easily trump Dundrum a few times over, but more importantly, has air conditioning like nothing else. From there, I walked out towards the Petronas Towers, through the Suria KLCC shopping centre, before returning back to the Pavilion in a sort of loop. Undoubtedly, the temptation on the first was to eat at McDonald’s or KFC – especially with them being all over the place here – but it seemed only right to dive straight in and try some of the local cuisine, and I did, eating Chicken fried rice, chicken satay and sampling a bottle of the local ‘Jaz’, which I suppose wasn’t too bad, tasting a little like a hearty mixture of Heineken and Calpol. Walked back (walking around the car park rather than through it, since there seemed to be some sort of food stall erected in the middle of it, around which sat some shady characters to say the very least) and into the bed, after a very long day, and a very long journey.
Today, I endeavoured to get my phone sorted out and buy a transit pass – I was successful in one…actually more like half-successful with one of those aims, and next time I’ll cover that in Part 3, until then, talk to you soon!
Finally, after a couple of incredibly short weeks of preparation, I’m on my way to Malaysia. For my very first magic trick, I pulled an incredible stunt, along with my friends at the ‘airline’ let’s say for now, of turning 3 kilos of excess luggage into an €80 charge for my darling mother – a farewell gift that’ll last so to speak. Considering ‘airline’ wasn’t the absolute cheapest option out there and were picked purely on their ‘luxury’ credentials, I can’t say I’m terribly impressed – the woman who checked in, in Dublin, while belonging to one of the ground handling companies, was the most surly thing I’ve come across in a public-facing job in some time – the words desk, office and no communication spring to mind when I consider her ideal career. Anyway, moving along. For my second magic trick, I managed to make ‘a bit of time to do some shopping’ turn into ‘running to the sounds of “final call” to make the flight’. I’m not too sure how it happened, but somehow I passed the little time I had between security and boarding by a country mile and ended up strolling right up to the gate, no queue, and walking on to a full plane. Not that I was late – a chubby American who would proceed to spend the following 7 hours tap-tap-tapping the screen on the back of my seat took that one for the team, by getting on in a complete sweat at exactly the prescribed departure time. So with that, off we went.
Meal...& Eventual Bottle of Wine...
So, we took off, bound for one of the few Middle-East airports I haven’t transited (yet seen nothing of) through yet. Drinks service first, and I know this sounds a bit stupid since I’ve supposedly travelled around the world before, but nobody ordered a Coca-Cola; at one point, I looked around and the only drinks seemed to be either water or orange juice. The guy beside me was Irish so I was hoping he’d finally break the trend; ‘Orange juice please’ – crap! So I ended up just taking a water and hoping the drinks cart proper would be along sometime soon. It wasn’t – instead, food came next and I finally had to bite the bullet and ask for them to produce the white wine that I’d definitely seen listed down the menu – and of course, no sooner did I demand to see some wine, than the guy next to me suddenly piped up as soon he eye-spied my bottle, and before long all was right with the world again. The meal wasn’t bad and they have those unusual ‘ambient’ lights that slowly dim the cabin by switching to pink, purple and then out – basically, trying to replicate sunset I suppose. Instead though, it always sort of makes me feel like we’re sitting in some sort of most unusual brothel. The flight passed quickly enough though, and the first time I finally started to feel bored was when we were close enough anyway (see video underneath, click on it to play).
Round and Round The Carousel of Two Colours...
We hit Abu Dhabi a couple of short hours ago – trust me, I’m doing everything in my power to kill time here – and so far, here’s a few of the exciting activities I’ve gotten up to; walking from the nice, brand new Terminal, to the dilapidated old one that has so much blue and green on the walls, and is so circular (see picture), that I feel like I’m in some sort of sick fun fair ride, or torture device, one or the other. On the bright side, there’s free internet and the place is steadily emptying out – I’m sure Kuala Lumpur must be one of the last flights out until morning. The major downside is, there’s really not a lot of proper ‘eateries’ in this prehistoric terminal that we’ve somehow ended up in – looking around (and I can, due to the carousel-like nature of the building) there’s a ‘Relay’ newsagent, a ‘Cinnamon City’ and some sort of Costa Coffee, except with the name written in Arabic so I can’t be 100% sure that it is indeed Costa Coffee – only that if it’s not, it’s majorly infringing on Costa’s trademarks. Who knows, if I get the energy later on, I’ll take a picture and put it up here, and leave it to the popular vote. Aside from that, I’ve been doing ‘duty free…duty’ by wandering around and inspecting the various shops (which make up most of this circular palace) and seeing what I think of them. Anything to pass the time. From here, it’s another 7.5 hours to KL, and then finally to a proper bed for the rest of the day, night…and day! In the meantime, my battery’s going downhill so I’m going to call it a day…or a night depending what way you want to look at it and take another wander – until next time…
It’s actually been so long since I’ve written that I’ve almost forgotten how to write things properly – I haven’t had time to keep the blog going much over summer to be honest, and a lot of that comes down to my ‘post-education status’, which has entirely consisted of trying desperately to find some sort of gainful, yet enjoyable employment, away from the usual thing of working for absolute peanuts and getting no satisfaction of any sort in return. I won’t lie; I like to think of myself as a pretty intelligent guy, and someone who’s pretty up there when it comes to knowing about the myriad grad programs and internships out there (which realistically seem to be the only way one can begin to climb the employment ladder) and being perfectly honest, nothing here had really appealed to me. And even when something does appeal to you, you still have to go and compete with the other half a million people who all always seem to want to do the exact same job. Ah, the recession. So when something else finally came up for me, I grabbed it with both arms and lovingly embraced it – anything that involves doing something it seems I might enjoy, especially in a country with no particular winter and all-year round sunshine (and the occasional monsoon, just to remind me of home) is an opportunity not to be passed up. And, like I say, while that’s all been going on in the background, the blog’s gone very obviously dead over summer.
You won't see a 'big freeze' here...
And what is this ‘big opportunity’ that’s been keeping me quiet (unusually) all summer, as I’ve tried to co-ordinate a number of things – well, the truth is, I’m moving to Malaysia to work for an organisation (who shall remain nameless) on a number of projects for the next 6 months. Anyone who remembers back when You Love Thatsh was all about me travelling the world might remember that Malaysia was one of the few places that I ranted and raved about it (in a positive way, also unusually). So, I’m delighted to have finally found something that ticks all the boxes in terms of getting me into something interesting and new, and more importantly extricates me from another horrible Irish winter. So it’s happy days.
Pulau Ketam...
For the blog, I’ve been making subtle changes to it throughout the summer (believe it or not) and I’ve been improving other things on my end to make it better – I have a new camera for example that should allow me to start introducing HD video onto the site in the coming weeks, and higher resolution pictures, along with a number of other improvements. Even though I’ll be moving, I’m still as committed as ever to getting back to regular updates, improving the site as much as I can, and taking all the pictures used on the site myself. If there’s any changes coming, it might be that the blog will be more about my travelling again – with the occasional rant about things back in Dublin whenever I can – along with my thoughts and opinions on my new surrounds. In the meantime, probably best not to expect to see anything on here for the next few days while I finish my packing, get everything organised and fly over – but I promise things are going to get better again quite soon, so hang in there, and I’ll try do the same!
Throughout my working life to date, it would appear, without an explanation being given at least, that I’ve managed to leave a trail of devastation wherever I’ve gone. First of all, I worked at a local petrol station in Shankill for a number of years, before it could survive no longer and was sold off to the highest bidder. After that, I took a few months off before landing a job as a sales assistant in one of the largest video rental chains. I won’t say which one exactly, but you can work it out for yourself given the whole ‘trail of devastation’ thing and which of the two Irish video rental chains is currently and quite publicly having a bit of trouble at the moment. While I can’t accept responsibility for this, I do have a couple of theories as to how this could possibly have happened, that I’d like to share. The first and most obvious being, the lack of embracing any way that video rental could be furthered. When I worked there, one of the most common things I heard from people who were using the computers or sunning themselves in our tanning salon, was that they no longer had need to come and visit the shop for DVD rental, since either Sky Digital or else Netflix (or whatever any of the many online movie rental sites are called) did exactly what they needed without the hassle of having to come and see our ugly faces, and more than likely be made to pay late fees. In response, we kept fighting the good fight. I always reckoned, although admittedly I never shared this idea with anyone of importance since I assumed the chances of it being taken seriously were scarce, that were we to have set up some sort of online rental system, and co-ordinated it with our own physical shops, it could have been something of a success.
Screenclick rightly proclaims it as time to 'Ditch the High Street'...
My idea was simple, implement a system like Netflix or Love Movies or whatever they’re called where people pay a monthly fee to get X amount of DVD’s, and let them pick the ones they want to see that month. It could work a couple of ways – either let them use it exactly like the online system where they get the DVD posted to them, they return it and the next one’s posted out. Or, using the benefit of the physical stores, this is where it gets really clever (or so I think). They could then have had their DVD posted out to them, they could then return it, if they wanted the next DVD quicker, to an actual store and being able to look at their account, we could then have given them out the next DVD they wanted to see, or another one on their list if the next choice wasn’t available. Then, quite simply, we just post their internet rental back to wherever and they return their DVD back to us a few days later – scrapping the whole late fees system, which was either strictly enforced (by people like myself) or on some occasions, ignored altogether, depending on the confidence of both customer and sales assistant. Then, it’s a case of either simply returning an internet rental to anywhere, and returning a shop rental back to the shop – simple as. Of course, the major issue I can see with this whole thing is the need for the place to have actually implemented some sort of meaningful customer account system that would allow us to see what customers had selected online and be able to process their accounts from the shop. Anyway, regardless of the complexities, I’m pretty sure such a thing is possible. Aside from that, it also gives anyone who’s still cautious about the internet and customer service working together a reason not to be so cautious – if something does go wrong, or they want to cancel their account, or upgrade, or whatever, then there’d still be an actual shop there with real people to talk to.
Meanwhile...
And to be quite honest, it makes the whole DVD rental, in my head anyway, seem like a much more feasible option if you’re going to take it seriously, which neither chain seems to really have done. The one I didn’t work for shall we say, went on some sort of all-out binge of trying to sell mobile phones, sound systems and in at least one store I was in, flatscreen TV’s. Having known a few of the employees from the other chain, they informed me that they regularly maintained a copy of the Argos catalogue in their store so that they could at least have some vague details about the hi-tech products they were supposed to be pushing. Where I worked on the other hand, we did a lot of things not at all related to video rental, such as tanning salons, work-out machines and internet stations. All of which had their moments – internet actually does (or did) get incredibly busy during summer when Spanish students from the neighbouring housing estates would flock down to scream and shout at each other online exactly as they do in person. Likewise, sunbeds also get incredibly busy during summer too (trust me, between sunbeds running back-to-back, and about 24 computers being run all at the same time, plus around 30 people in a shop, the heat during summer could become absolutely unbearable) when hordes of people flock in to try and somehow get a tan before they actually leave the country for a sun holiday. I have memories in fact of sunbed queues stretching right through the middle of the store. Has anyone spotted the potential problem here yet though? The answer: Winter. In winter time, the place was literally on its knees. I remember one evening I sat on the counter for so long (simply because there was nobody there and the place couldn’t have looked any better, given all the time we’d had to do it) that I actually got a call from the heavies giving me a warning for being seated for so long.
...and who really wants to go and get a DVD in the middle of this? No thanks...
Anyway back to the main point, maybe it’s just me but in Ireland at least, DVD rental is pretty much on its deathbed – think about it. But is it really dying or is there just no imagination in how to push it anymore? We used to do great deals on rentals, but the first time I ever had to make myself properly familiar with the concepts of ‘Up Selling’ or ‘Link Selling’ was only when I entered the job I’m in now – and it really is unbelievable how much more than they planned to, people will buy, if you literally list off every special deal there is. So where to go now? Well, like I say, where I used to work anyway is in pretty major trouble it’d seem – there was a petition to wind them up last year or the year before, and now there’s another. So what to do? Drop this whole thing of doing everything and nothing and focus back on what the business is really about – renting out DVD’s to people for money. The only way I can see anyone being able to reasonably compete alongside Sky and the online movie rental providers is to join them – then beat them, by keeping the physical stores open for people to go to for proper human advice, support and service. There’s no reason why DVD rental shops have to die out completely, they just (badly) need to find a good reason why they’re still there…
The 'main stage' just prior to Khaled's takeover...
Ok, I know I said the next thrilling instalment of my pretending to be an outsider in my own city series was coming along next, but I’ve already written it so it’s not like there’ll be a big delay posting it…much. Since this is more recent, I reckoned I’d post about this past weekend’s festivals instead for today – which by all accounts, made it look like festivals in Ireland come along in roughly the same order as Dublin Buses, i.e. a number of them all turn up at once, after you’ve waited ages. Bray, which is only down the road for me, put on their annual ‘summerfest’, which used to consist of the ‘Miss Face of Bray’ competition (I know, I know – it sounds funny, but I’ve known at least one entrant in it every year so I actually can’t really publicly deride it as much as I’d ordinarily like to), elements of Funderland scattered along the coast, and the big wheel somehow awkwardly set up halfway up Bray Head, which I could never quite figure out and never took a go on for fear the whole assembly would blow clean off into the sea as soon my gondola had reached the top of the wheel, prompting me to take an impromptu summer ‘dip’. Anyway, what was I saying? Back on-topic – so this weekend, we were spoilt for choice, between the Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures, or the Bray Summerfest, which decided to put on its annual ‘airshow’ this Sunday – the decision was a tough one, but in the end we decided to try the Festival of World Cultures on Saturday and hit Bray on Sunday.
Big wheels all over Dublin...
I suppose the reasoning behind us not doing festivals on a large scale such as this too often are that most people here take it as a great opportunity to get ‘legitimately’ legless and that most of the time it’s sloshing rain. So by that token, by running a number of events around the same time, if the weather’s rubbish well then people can just choose which event they genuinely want to go to and there can only be so many people wasted at the one location. Either way, it’s a terrible shame because other countries, notably Germany is what springs to mind here, run some sort of festival (yeah ok, not really a good time to mention Germany and festivals, but you get what I mean) nearly every weekend in the bigger cities and they’re usually well-attended and great fun. Perhaps we’d all get bored if we had something to do every weekend and stop going? Who knows, it doesn’t look like we’ll ever find out. The Dun Laoghaire festival was, to put it mildly, absolutely jam-packed – completely and utterly packed. We cycled down from Shankill, locked our bikes (after I’d had a temporary and quite intense ‘stare-off’ with some car driver around Monkstown who felt that his pathetically small vehicle couldn’t possibly co-incide side by side, nor overtake my equally narrow bicycle, which ended with him trying to beep me off the road and me stopping and commencing the aforementioned ‘stare-off’ like all good city cyclists) and tried to move along through the crowds, but were instead more or less carried along. No doubt the sights and smells of the food up opposite the DART station and along towards the metals were crazy delicious, but we unfortunately couldn’t stop and were carried along to some sort of ‘tents from around the world section’.
One of many camouflaged shots from the day...
Incidentally, they hadn’t been placed there with any semblance of geographical identity – Ireland stood proud on either side of Kenya for example, while France cropped up in a number of places, interrupted only once by the presence of Northern Thailand; that’s right, Northern Thailand explicitly, not inclusive of the South. Moving along from there, it turned out there was a much larger ‘Global Village’ that had all sorts of other countries present, like Singapore, India (who also seem to have largely colonized the People’s Park, with whole entertainment tents, food stands aplenty and all sorts of other things), Germany and whole parts of Thailand. Altogether, the whole area around the Carlisle Pier was more like a Model United Nations than anything else, and was actually pretty cool, even if I could have stayed there just eating from one stand to the next all day long. Moving along down the coast, people were busy getting in touch with other cultures by standing in queues upwards of 20 minutes for an ice cream from Teddy’s, followed by which there were even more food stands, a big wheel and the ‘main stage’ if that’s what you want to call it. As it happened, the world-famous superstar, Khaled was to play at 6pm and we stayed to hear the beginning of his performance but unfortunately decided the music wasn’t really for us – even though there were a number of slightly inebriated middle-agers dancing around by themselves and reliving their hippy days – and also, we had no idea who he was or what the ‘King of Rai’ possibly meant. What I did know though, was what a Bacardi meant so we hit the bar and called it a day.
Like a scene from Glastonbury...
Day 2 of our hardcore festival attendance and we took our chances and went to Bray to see the airshow. As it happened, we were extremely late leaving the house and we were actually only locking our bikes at 3.30. Just as well too – they were closer to 4 by the time anything happened, it actually coincided more or less perfectly with precisely when the clouds went grey, rendering any sort of spectacular photography on my part more or less impossible. It was a good airshow, don’t get me wrong, but sitting on the beach for so long eventually necessitated a sneaky break – only for us to find out that in the middle of the beach (where the majority of people were), there was actually commentary being broadcast that we were completely missing out on, which was unfortunate and came a little too late, as we watched the last of the show. Anyone who read the earlier paragraph on the Bray Summerfest will however be happy to know that even though the wheel being halfway up Bray Head made little to no sense, it continues its nonsensical placement by being right on the pebbles of the beach this time round, propped up by bits of wood. As for Miss Face of Bray – I’m not sure there is one this year, and if there is, I take comfort in saying I definitely don’t know any of the entrants anymore. So after that, it’s back to work for the week and then we’ll see what next weekend brings…
Did anyone make it out to any of the events around Dublin this weekend? Any thoughts on them? I’d love to hear them…
If you're lucky, you might even see this little guy downtown...
Aside from my natural curiosity about why we seem to do so well attracting tourists over here (or at least, used to do so well, before we had to start offering ‘Irish citizenship’ discount cards to attract people over), my friend Fintan bought me a book some years ago for Christmas that offered up various ways to ‘travel’ that made little to no sense – it offered up such suggestions as going for an ‘adventure’ by leaving your house and taking say, a left, and walking as far as you could, then a right, then a left again, and so on for as long as you could until you could walk/cycle/drive no further, and see where you ended up and if you arrived somewhere new – as it happens, I actually took up this suggestion mentally and drove my imaginary vehicle out of my house, left up the road, right onto the main estate road, left through Shankill, right out towards the N11 roundabout…anyway, you get the idea, on and on and finally, in my head (and with a little help from Google maps), the furthest I could reasonably make was about as far as Stepaside. Or the book might suggest something along the lines of using mobile phones to play a game of monopoly across an entire region, where you all had to drive around various towns and pretend to own or buy them – that kind of time-taking, expensive lunacy. But another, slightly more logical, suggestion the book offered, was to abandon normality for a weekend, book a hostel, and spend a weekend ‘visiting’ your own city, exactly as you would anywhere else. The whole thing sounds like complete lunacy, but amid people telling me how lucky I am to live here, it began to sound a little less crazy. So much less crazy in fact, that I decided to do it, so here’s how it’ll work.
No postcards I'm afraid...just pictures instead...
First of all, by the time I get round to writing all of this, it’ll already have been done – so don’t expect any postcards. Second of all, in order to save money and whatnot, I’m going to stay in my house and not sample the unquestioned delights of Dublin hostels. Finally, I’m going to do my ‘time’ in Dublin exactly as I would if I was visiting another place – say for example, when I went to Oslo back in February. What that usually means is being as absolutely tight-fisted as I can be, seeing as many of the ‘free’ attractions as I can and trying to get out of the city itself for at least a day to see something that’s not just a pile of buildings. So, here we go – first stop, that sum of all human knowledge, Wikipedia, to see what there is to do in Dublin for my fictitious weekend away. In terms of pictures, which is what I tend to spend most of my time on a Wikipedia article looking at since they can’t really be made up like the rest of the article, it shows Christchurch, O’Connell St., the GPO, Temple Bar (which it does say is ‘best left to tourists’, so we’ll more than likely skip that), the Liffey and Grafton Street. It also directs to pictures of Dalkey and Killiney, which by anyone’s standards looks ideal and might be a place to go to get out of the city. Needless to say, it’s very difficult to pretend you don’t know a place and start from scratch, but let’s give it a try. The hardest initial thing about visiting any new place, for me at least, is simply getting downtown – I remember myself and another Irish lad willing a taxi driver to hurry along the crowded motorways of Kuala Lumpur to get us back to the airport on time (in fact, we weren’t looking to get to the airport with him, we were looking to just get to the train station for the ‘KLIA Ekspres’, which is probably why he took the slow motorways in the first place). But the difficulty is I’d know exactly how to get downtown from pretty much anywhere that tourists arrive, unless I arrived into Shannon, so we’ll skip this bit and that’ll allow me just take the DART into Connolly from home instead.
The GPO - probably O'Connell St.'s best thing to see?
We move along slowly stop by stop, with the weather for any trip I’m on being typically unpleasant. Generally, how I do ‘short weekend breaks’ where possible, is try and fly out either Friday afternoon or early Saturday morning and stay a minimum amount of nights, generally aiming to arrive early/depart late over a normal weekend or worst case scenario (and in the case of Oslo, it really was the ‘worst case’, depart on the Monday as soon as there’s a cheap flight. In the meantime, the DART pulls into Connolly, and as it does, I pull out my map of Dublin, try hard to erase any knowledge I have of the place and start wandering along – ending up in the main part of the station a few minutes later, feeling satisfied that I could still be so confused trying to get out of a train station I actually should know. Out onto O’Connell Street then for our first look at Dublin as an outsider and being honest, trying to see it from a complete outsider’s point of view, it’s very hard to know what to make of it – there’s not really actually a lot on it. It’s extremely widely spaced, incredibly busy, one end seems to just taper off abruptly, the other crossing the river and more than anything, it just comes across as void of any major excitement, bar maybe the GPO, which by anyone’s standards is an amazing building, and something that holds my attention long enough for me to wander inside and out of it, stopping and reading anything of interest. The major axis, around which the street seems to centre though, is undoubtedly the spire and this is one thing that looks well sitting right in the middle of the street, almost commanding order. That said, it can hold my attention for no more than a few minutes, and once I begin to feel dizzy looking up at how it seems to actually be swaying, it’s time to move on up the road, and onto the famed Liffey that appears so frequently on Wikipedia. I make a mental note, standing on the bridge of the Liffey, to come back later and get a picture of the river and the lights, and in the meantime continue my journey on up the street, following my map towards my next stop – Grafton Street.
Panorama of O'Connell St. - take it in...(click to enlarge)
Dublin's most generic shopping street...
Finding Grafton Street, from crossing the Liffey is actually slightly more complicated when you’re working off a map and street signs, for the reason that every other street seems to sort of disguise it. Along the way though, I pass a number of closed shops, buildings to let, a tacky arcade – it seems at least, that the stretch between O’Connell Street and Grafton Street is a bit of a no-mans land, but nonetheless, I follow my map and go up and around the front of Trinity College and onto the bottom of Grafton Street. While I can appreciate the relative niceness of the street, there’s no denying that it looks just about the same as any other major shopping street in any worldwide city, and I walk the length of it, ending up at St. Stephen’s Green, before cutting across to see the Dáil further down the street. Again, you don’t notice it so much when you’re used to it, but there’s a high proportion of homeless people lined up along the street by St. Stephen’s Green and it doesn’t make for a pleasant welcome. The dáil, for such a supposedly major institution, is sort of hidden far back from the street and seems pretty unaccessible, so I decide to cut my losses and, all of which will be covered next time, head for the rest of the ‘free sights’ of the city before finishing up the day somewhere with a pint and decide what to do on Day 2 of my ‘visit’ to Dublin City, all as I say, coming up in Part 2!
Where would you recommend people go and visit in Dublin? Or what would you want to see if you’d never been here before? Is there any Dublin attraction you’d force anyone visiting to go to?
A couple of years ago, I begun learning how to drive. The first step was to try and get what was then a provisional license (now a learners permit, or some such junk) and then try and organise a few lessons, even though an amount of my friends had taken literally one or two lessons and had since been driving everywhere unaccompanied (with no real problem, due to Ireland’s arcane licensing laws, which more or less provided no punishment of any severity for ignoring the rules), awaiting their test date off in the future. As luck had it, I knew a driving instructor at the time from where I was working who was doing ‘discounts’ for people working there (all 5 of us), and so I begun my lessons with this individual. While I’ve no doubt that he was a fine instructor, the other ridiculous part of Ireland’s pointless (if you’ll pardon the pun) licensing laws is that at the time at least, anyone with a licence could just set up their own driving school and get going – in fact, up to a year ago, a friend of mine was considering doing just that. So, as a result, while he himself was fine, this instructor’s car (and before someone leaves a comment saying ‘bad workman blames his tools’ and all that, another friend of mine also took lessons from the same guy and we’ve both come to the conclusion that it wasn’t just us) seems to have been completely overworked over the years pretty much to the point of no return. The first and most troubling sign of this was in the clutch and its ‘bite’. Now listen, I’ve driven a couple of different cars since this particular vehicle, and I can assure you that none were as cantankerous as this car. The clutch didn’t have so much a ‘bite’, as requiring near-pinpoint accuracy to depress the clutch pedal only to the precise space required; too much and the car would cut out, start jumping around the place, or otherwise make you look like an idiot if you were within sight of anyone other than the instructor.
This time, I'll be trying my hardest not to ever be at the helm of a Micra...
Put it this way, it was so exact, that when I got into our Citroen C4 at home and tried driving that, the act of giving up on the clutch and pressing down on the accelerator was more like driving a go-kart than driving the same sort of temperamental beast as the instructor’s ageing Micra. Even uphill starts proved to be no problem at all, requiring only the mildest concentration to taking my foot off the clutch and the other onto the accelerator, before the car nearly overcame the handbrake by itself and roared up the rest of the hill. By contrast, I had an incredibly embarrassing incident once whilst attempting to ascend a hill in Bray in the argumentative Micra. Suffice to say that what happened was that I attempted to scale this particular hillock in far higher a gear than it was possible to do, and stalled as a result – mea culpa, my fault – so I then attempted to ‘relight the engines’ as it were, and this is when the fun began. Engine on, foot down on clutch, hand on handbrake ready for the off and steadily, as a queue of Bray locals gathered behind me in their cars, I applied gentle force on the accelerator pedal, while very gently releasing the clutch, knowing fine well that the ‘bite’ would take some amount of work. It did – a lot of work, in fact. By the time I finally felt the car want to move forward under its own power, my foot was about ¾ down on the accelerator – enough that we were almost certainly going to be propelled forward with the force of an F16 wanting to depart from an aircraft carrier in the gulf, while I was still holding tightly on the clutch for fear the car would give up again at any moment. Finally, with the little engine of the Micra putting out more noise than a departing Space Shuttle, I let the handbrake slowly go, much to the joy (no doubt) of those now trapped behind me for the guts of two minutes. The weird thing about the car as well was that, even once the car begun forward motion, it was necessary to continue ‘holding’ the clutch, lest the car give up the ghost again. And with that, we were literally catapulted up the remainder of the hill like a pair of unassuming rally participants.
I love the smell of Shannon before a driving test; the morning of...
Would you believe it, but in spite of my complete and utter lack of success with driving to date at that time, I pressed ahead and registered to do my driving test (this was back at a time when the waiting lists were an absolute national scandal) – and not just did I register to do it, I registered to do it in Athlone, where the waiting time was minimal. So minimal in fact, that I was actually (and rather unfortunately) called for an appointment much earlier than I could have possibly wanted or was ready for, but decided to try it anyway, having successfully since dispensed with the services of my driving instructor and his Micra. So, down we went, the day before I was due to be doing my test to have a ‘practice’ run with a local instructor – my first time dealing with another instructor since the former experience. This, like the previous driving lessons, was to prove to be another hilarious episode in my driving career. The man firstly did not appreciate my style of driving, which in Dublin placed an emphasis on minding my speed, slowing down in advance of a potential obstacle and minding your position on the road, in order to safely compete with the cyclists, buses, other cars, etc that we have using roads in Dublin. To begin with, I had pulled the car in so tightly (and I don’t mind saying it) to the kerb that on our departure, the back wheel scrubbed the kerb slightly, and this elicited a shock from our man, who declared that I should’ve seen it a mile away – of course I did, but how else was I to turn the car out into the traffic, without reversing and moving forward over and over, moving slightly further out into the road each time? Then we came across a dog on the road and I instinctively begun to slow down – apparently though, that was wrong, the correct procedure for such a situation in fact is to increase your speed, preferably as much as possible and expect that the animal will have the good sense and predictability (as they always do) to move out of your way.
Oops...
Likewise, our (unimaginable, but present) cultural differences added to the problem – with potholes being relabelled as ‘dug-outs’, me not knowing what that was supposed to be, subsequently knocking the car through it with sufficient force to throw our man out of his seat and make contact with the roof – all in all, it didn’t bode well. The final piece of damning news came the morning of the test when it turned out that they had a ‘visiting inspector’ who apparently was notorious for not liking people from the ‘city’, which one exactly, I didn’t dare ask, they all have their charms. Anyway, whether or not I got that particular inspector, we’ll never know; I thought it best not to inquire if it was himself who hated people from the city, or was that someone else. Either way, the differences between the roads in Dublin and Athlone made my shoddy driving magnify itself splendidly at the time of the exam – although I managed the hill-start with the skill of a hardened veteran after my practice in the Micra, managed the whole positioning on the road thing with perfect accuracy and was able to get the car moving from a standing start almost to an unnoticeable glide, the width of the roads meant that a ‘3-point turn’ wasn’t possible anywhere in Athlone and instead required a ‘7-point, but some people do it in 5-point turn’, followed on quickly by a series of very confusing roundabouts that were the smallest, painted on efforts I’ve ever seen and something I’d surely have driven clean over back in Dublin. In the end, it was a valiant effort but put it this way, by 7pm that evening, I was in a big sulk and was putting on a helmet to go for a cycle, not a drive. Unfortunately though, time moves along and there’s only so much longer I can get away with ignoring the vagaries of the Irish driver licensing laws – even if I still don’t think there’s any consistency to the instructors, the tests or the waiting times.
I came back home this weekend from a long week at work to find that after years of avoiding like the plague for the very simple reason of just avoiding it for fun more than anything else, we’d finally caved, and got digital TV. I wasn’t at all surprised – the letters from UPC and enclosed leaflets have been increasingly forceful about the need to change; initially, it would give us so many more channels that we didn’t currently have (not that we cared – Anna had UPC Digital in her last place and by no means was the extra selection any more helpful in finding a decent programme at certain times than our own 15-channel mix), then there was the whole issue of now being able to record onto the special digital recorder box – again, not a problem, since our antiquated set-up nicely facilitated the use of VHS video tape to record anything you may want to see again, or have to miss out on the first time. They even tried us with making digital TV cheaper than our current situation – although they failed to mention whether their ‘cheaper’ price was inclusive of the other TV’s in our house, which I suspect it wasn’t.
And before anyone asks, we were using dial-up to just a year or two ago...
The only reason we got digital in the end, was actually because MTV suddenly disappeared and we were left instead with the useless Channel 6, or whatever it’s called. Then, after that, in their most recent round of engineering works on our road in the middle of the afternoon when I’m trying to sleep, they somehow managed to see off Channel 4, E4 and Discovery Channel from our collection. The extra channels – who cares, the less money but without clarifying if it was multi-room – too much hassle, but slowly cutting down our channels one by one – that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Incidentally, Eircom Phonewatch have been at us over the same thing for donkey’s years to ‘change up’ to a new alarm system, even though the old one seems to be working perfectly fine – initially, they told us that our own system, which had to be ‘at least 15 years old’ was obsolete. Then, we figured out it was only 9 years old, so apparently then it was ‘becoming obsolete’ and must have been ‘one of the last installed’. So, then we pointed out that our neighbours up the road hadn’t upgraded theirs, which was even older still, and the best they could come up was just that it might work out cheaper for us in the long run and we should still just think about it anyway. In fact, the digital ‘episode’ pretty much sums up years of being run off our outdated-yet-still-loved systems by various companies. In one particularly funny incident, Eircom called us once and informed us that as we were paying phone rental (even though in fact, we shouldn’t have been since we owned all the phones in our house outright, so a hefty refund should have been due), we were entitled to a new cordless phone, for them to rent to us, which would be entirely free. Except when we went to order it, it was entirely free, barring an administration, postage and packing charge. Forget it.
Alas, we eventually caved with the bins...
More recently still, a couple of years ago, our local council, Dun-Laoghaire Rathdown, decided that they no longer wanted (or so it seemed) to run waste collection services in our area and slowly but surely, all these private companies started offering way better deals, better collection times, all that good stuff. Although we thought about changing, we somehow ended up with a stash of ‘credit’ on our waste bill – in other words, I don’t know how exactly, but they actually ended up owing us money, no matter how many collections we seemed to be getting. And this wasn’t just a case of a few weeks, it literally went on for months on end. In fact, it got so bad that the salespeople from the other companies seemed to be arriving on a pretty much weekly basis with new offers to try and get us over, while the DLR bin truck just came down our road to collect our bin on its own, and that was the sum total of the collections they were having to make in our estate; it quickly became a pretty laughable situation. Anyway, like with the UPC/Eircom examples, there was just no good reason to change – nobody was saying they actually didn’t want to serve us anymore (even though that was obviously the intention), and the others didn’t have that much else going for them – our collection times didn’t matter, we put the bin out the night before anyway, no amount of ‘cheaper prices’ made any difference since it was pretty much free for us to have our bin lifted as it was, and who cares about the better service – it’s not like they’re picking us up and tipping us into a truck?! In the end, the only reason we eventually left was first of all, out of embarrassment at having to watch the truck drive down our road, which is too tight to turn so if you happen to be driving a truck you have to reverse, just to collect our bin and then have to try reverse all the way back up. And second, Greenstar actually said they’d honour the rest of our credit with DLR – obviously some other lucky winners had been doing the same thing.
Wow, there's even a Sky 3...
So, how do you get people to change something when they don’t want to? In college we used to have this lecturer who taught us organisational change and had the catchphrase (if you like) of ‘I love change’ and used to tell us about how he didn’t run a consultancy, he ran a ‘resultancy’. Which is grand, but that doesn’t mean anyone else particularly likes change, particularly when they don’t see it as being in their favour. For example, I used to work in the airport on 8-hour shifts and much better money than I do now, doing 9-hour shifts – how could I love that change? Likewise, when we had a load of credit on our waste colection, why would we change – and what difference does it really make overall, when you don’t even really think about whether you’re happy or not with the current service? Likewise, with digital TV, we never really cared for it – more crappy channels for more money is hardly a deal worth shouting about from the rooftops, is it? Simply, we were never offered anything that made a difference really, or that we especially wanted; it might have been different if they said they were going to come in and collect the waste from the bin in my room, or that the new TV channels would be purely news, cycling and music – but they weren’t. Also, if you’re going to try and make people change something, don’t confuse them – we have three TV’s in our house and we could never figure out if the ‘cheaper’ price UPC were quoting us included the other TV’s in our place or not, and if it did, then why were they also offering ‘multi-room viewing’ as an added extra. And finally, if you’re going to offer something, make it genuine – a free phone for example, isn’t free if you have to pay well over €10 for some charges.
In the meantime, I’m going to get back down to the TV…
Here we have the only part that's been completed it would seem...
Exactly two years ago, I used to get the Aircoach across the Liffey every morning and evening (or evening and morning, depending which way my shifts worked out…or which pub I’d stopped into on the way home) en-route to work, and took in the sights of ‘The Point Village’. Two years on, and I’m doing the same thing all over again, except earlier and later than ever, such that I don’t really notice exactly what’s different about it. Today, cycling home from Clontarf, I got a puncture more or less outside The O2’s front door and as a result, I had more than enough time to figure out for myself what’s different – the answer, nothing. A couple of years ago, when I was first passing it on a daily basis, there was all this talk of The Point Village being – you know, the usual things that property marketers seem to trot out rather repetitively – innovative, regenerating, invigorating, giving a new lease of life; basically all the things you normally might use to describe a bar of new soap, and not necessarily another block of quickly thrown-together flats, a hotel and a few shops that can be seen just about anywhere – Dunnes Stores, incidentally, being the anchor tenant from what I read. Quite how that could be described as invigorating or refreshing, or whatever precise term they used to describe the place I don’t know, but the point is, two years on and still looks almost the exact same. In fact, the only thing different about the place now that I look at it closely, is that the old Stena Line ferry is no longer tied up outside the front of The O2.
The breathtaking Dublin wheel...
Oh, and they have a big wheel sitting there on the back of trucks that doesn’t appear to be getting assembled anytime soon. Likewise, there was supposed to be a ‘Point Village Market’ of some description getting cracking around mid-April (I know, because I was planning on going along to it and taking some pictures and trying to scrape together an article for the site actually) and last I heard, it’s only really getting going now. So basically everything’s just running extremely late – when I was crossing the Liffey in 2008, most of the buildings seemed to be already completed and just in need of being fitted out. Do you know what they look like these days? Well they seem to be already completed and just in need of being fitted out. Amazing how you can throw away two years like that. Wikipedia, the source of all credible knowledge meanwhile, reckons that as of mid-2009 the timetable for completion of the village is in ‘doubt’. Well if that was mid-2009, then it must be even more in doubt in mid-2010. But seriously, with the exception of a massive big car park and the Luas stop down at The O2, and of course the redo of The O2 in the first place (and its subsequent commercial renaming from its original The Point Depot to The O2, which would suggest then that the whole village should be renamed to ‘The O2 Village’), you have to wonder is it really necessary to even build all that junk in the first place? Or rather, was it really necessary, even in 2007 or whenever they begun (although given the speed they’re working at, it could also have been around 523 BC)?
Office to rent, anyone? Anyone?
I can just about see the point of the hotel (which I applied for a job in actually, as it happens), since they could expect to do a roaring trade whenever The O2’s putting on something half-decent – although depending on what it is they put on, the hotel could also be trashed, but they must have figured that possibility out for themselves. But what about the apartments – the Luas line to The O2 only opened late last year so before that, presuming things had been completed on time, where would you go to from your apartment? You’d have to trek some distance for something as trivial as a carton of milk – in fact, the only thing easy to get hold of would be a pint out of a plastic cup and a gig guide from across the road. And then there’s the shopping centre – given the size of the area, it’s hardly going to be the next Dundrum so unless it’s designed to service only the people living in the area, who else would go along? I mean, can you really see yourself saying to your friends; ‘I hear there’s a crack-a-lacking shopping centre down by The O2, anyone want to come and join me and drive sort of into town but without actually getting to see any shops other than what’s in this centre?’ – I can’t see the response being great. Same with the cinema – fine for people living in the area, which is pretty much whoever rents or buys those apartments since the only other occupants are ducks and port workers. But if you happen to live in the city centre for example, you’re hardly going to go out of your way to hit The O2 just for a film. And anyone living further south than about Ringsend probably already either goes to Stillorgan, Dun Laoghaire or Dundrum.
The Luas waits...and waits...for passengers...
So that brings us all back to the expansion of The O2, which was always going to be the quickest to make money and as a result seems to be just about the only thing that happened on-time and has been doing just fine ever since. I’d love to know what Veolia think of having to run a Luas service down there when there’s absolutely nothing happening most of the time. Anyway, for the moment, the rest of the development (as pictured), just sticks out like another sore thumb, begging to be taken into Nama as quickly as possible . In the meantime, I’ll keep on wondering as I pass by everyday whether someday I’ll be able to get off there, for no good reason, and watch a film or wander through a shopping centre that’s clearly not in a great location. Considering what passes right outside the front doorstep of the place, a truck stop would probably have been a much more profitable (and more easily do-able) venture. But I guess it’s been said that spending money can be invigorating…
…and I wonder can it also be refreshing and innovative, just like fictitious villages?
