Irish stew 2007/12/29

Before I forget, some rather scattered mental notes from last week in Ireland.

1. Airbus' 330 is the nicest plane I've ever been on.
2. The Irish are much less savagely capitalistic than Americans.  Case in point, everything was closed on December 26th for St. Steven's Day.  Me, I've never heard of it.
3. The food is amazing.  Stews, gravies, lamb and all came with the typical "Irish flag" plate of carrots, multiple varieties of potatoes and green beans or broccoli.
4. Ford Motor Company, for all its shortcomings, is doing surprisingly well in Ireland.  Nearly every delivery van, all of the police cars (Garda!  and a healthy portion of the citizen cars were Fords.
5. Continuing the automotive train of thought, Ford, Mazda, Toyota and Honda all had almost completely different product lines than in the US.  I can understand skipping out on the big trucks but they all make some reasonable cars that I can't understand reinventing for Ireland/UK drivers.
6. The roads are laid out terribly.  They use a white line for both the center divider and lane dividers.  Sometimes they're all a single dotted line, meaning you need God, the Pope, Jesus, your navigator and your mother all working together to stay in the right place.
7. The speed limit on barely-wide-enough-to-fit-2-cars roads is 100 km/hr.  WTF?
8. Irish cigarettes bear warnings that do not mess around.  The best one: "Smoking kills." I know, pics-or-it-didn't-happen -- coming soon to a Flickr near you.
9. The Irish accent is substantially different than the English accent.  (Of course I can't provide an example in text.)
10. Roundabouts are far more efficient than stoplights.
11. It is odd and comforting at the same time to see whole families together in the pub.
12. You can always find live music in Temple Bar, Dublin.