Dublin
This week I went to Ireland for the first time, and it was quite a great experience. For one, I found a country more expensive than the UK. I mean, £4.20 a pint?! However, interesting place in so far as it’s not really all that different to here give or take the use of kilometres and the wonderful accents.
I was over there giving a talk for a conference (t44u) which I was rather flattered to be asked to speak at and that was a great event and really learnt some cool things and it was a very good experience, met lots of fellow users of the CMS and got to talk to lots of wonderful people.
On the Thursday night the drinking soon started (well, it was Ireland!) and I didn’t get back to the hotel room until 4am! I’m not sure how much I had drunk but it was certainly somewhere in the region of 6 pints and 4 double Baileys. Not exactly something to tell the grandchildren.
I felt fine until 7am when my alarm went off. Suffice to say when I rolled into the conference bang on 9.30am when it kicked off for the Friday session I was not exactly wide awake. It was good though.
However the only shame was that I didn’t get much time if any to explore the city, looks as though there would have been a lot of photographic opportunity. I will definitely return early next year to have a break there, looks very interesting.
I do have some photos but I’m not sure how they will turn out as they weren’t taken when I was completely umm, aware of things like shutter speed…. 
Well you don’t tend to be at 3am…
Oh and get this, we went to some swanky bar which was supposedly where all the famous rich types go (not my usual haunt, I like a place with low beams and things floating in the beer…well you get the idea, something a bit more down to earth) but the DJ was shockingly bad. Couldn’t put together a smooth mix to save his life. Like listening to horses galloping through well to use Alan Partridge’s xenophobia:
“Yeah. I think the Irish are going through a major image change. I mean, the old image of Leprechauns, shamrock, Guinness, horses running through council estates, toothless simpletons…”
It was poor. But the place was nice enough otherwise. I would have just thought such a place would have employed a decent DJ. In fact it’d been better if they didn’t as I spent the whole night shouting over the ‘music’ and barely had a voice come the morning.
Anyway, good times.
Just noticed I’ve not written here for over a month, that’s quite a long time!
