I should have brought my playstation and my Dance Dance Revolution pads; I ended up in a ground-floor flat, and so if I decided to 'stomp it to my beat', as one of the songs proclaims, I wouldn't have bothered anyone. That would probably end soon, though, since I will get a roommate in a couple of weeks, and not everyone is particularly indulgent towards ridiculous techno music combined with bizarre imported videogames.
While I still have not gone more than two blocks from my apartment, I can already list some ups and downs (or checks and x;s, if you will):
check: the snack rooms at the office have real mugs for tea, so that you can have a civilized cuppa instead of slurping your tea out of a paper cup like those barbaric colonials in the States.
x: the snack rooms at the office seem to specialize in a strange flavor of yogurt: rhubarb. I've never seen rhubarb yogurt before, and I think there's a good reason for that. Sometimes the colonials do get something right; but I guess a country that was ravaged by famine will eat anything. Which leads me to...
x: flavored potato chips. Whether you call them chips or crisps, sometimes you just want a nice, salty, otherwise-unflavored potato. The anonymous (but guessable) commenter about this issue a few posts ago was right that it's difficult to find unflavored chips anywhere. The office had a couple of bags of sour cream and onion, (which I got used to in India, where the only other alternatives were 'Spanish Style Tomato Tango', 'Caribbean Style Chili', 'Indian Style Magic Masala', and a v. infrequent plain chip that usually made my day when I found it); but, the sour cream and onion ran out today. I tried the salt and vinegar, which was mostly okay, but when they're too vinegary, they make me want to cry. We'll see how this works out, but given that my expat diet typically consists of sandwiches (thank you, Earl of Sandwich! and also, thank you Sri for enjoying sandwiches as much as I do) and chips, this could be v. sad.
check: Irish accents. They're all lilting and beautiful, even when I can't understand them. They make you want to turn off the laptop, throw it out the nearest window, and head down to the pub for a nice pint or three. This is problematic, since the laptop probably won't be turned off at all for the next six months.
Okay, I have tons to do tomorrow and I intended to be in bed ages ago. But, considering that I had to a) unpack my clothes so that I could stop looking like a wrinkled mess, b) prep for some meetings tomorrow, and c) write in my blog so that people wouldn't immediately leap to the conclusion that I had died in some particularly-gruesome leprechaun-related stabbing, I didn't get to bed as early as I should have. I am going to immediately rectify that unfortunate situation--goodnight!
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