patrick.net

Blurtman says

Patrick, post some interesting food photos, please.

"This is Cabbage a la Potato."

I have no car here, which is fine. I'm now in my Irish Gaelic class on Inis Oírr, a little island off the west coast. Don't need a car here anyway.

Have to say the food in Ireland is excellent in its raw state (great milk, butter, fish, etc) but they don't generally prepare things all that well.

There's a joke that Irish food is just like English food, but not so spicy.

BayArea says

Ah, being in-between jobs makes for the best vacations doesn't it?

Yes, I just don't care or think about work at all at the moment.

What started out as peasant food can be well regarded. Not sure about Ireland. Good bacon? Any decent local cheese? I want to eat my way through Eastern Europe.

I've had the "full Irish" breakfast several times, and can't say the ham or bacon was any different. Didn't run across local cheese yet.

The one very well-reviewed restaurant I tried to go to was closed, no explanation, in contradiction of the stated opening days and hours.

Did have one excellent culinary experience: the seafood chowder at the place I'm staying on Inis Oírr was amazing. Maybe best I ever had. But then it was cream and seafood, stuff from right here.

I had already read that the police can be called in via boat (half hour from the mainland) to force the bars to close, but I didn't realize that it was the locals keeping them open and not the tourists!

So who turns them in? Turns out that it's a favorite hobby of the old ladies in town to call the police to force the bars to close at 1am, to make their families come home, or just to be contrary if they don't have families. Police have to get a boat and come all the way out, lol.

Hey Patrick, did you kiss the blarney stone? FYI, the locals pee on it.

rando says

I have no car here, which is fine. I'm now in my Irish Gaelic class on Inis Oírr, a little island off the west coast. Don't need a car here anyway.

Yeah, my idea of a vacation doesn't include driving much or at all. That's why I like going places like Atlantic City, where you don't need a car.

www.youtube.com/embed/4xVOw_FRPlo

Had a wonderful tour of Inis Meán today with my class, and could understand almost all of what the tour guide was saying in Irish. I know she was speaking slowly and simply for us, but still, it's a great feeling to start to get the hang of this very weird old language.

Photo I took there today:

Are you going to see the island from the Star Wars movie? The first Jedi temple I believe.

No, not this time. Sounds interesting, but it's pretty far south, and I'm planning on going north.

If you go to Dublin, I'd be curious what locals think about FB exposing the identities of 40 employees to Islamic terrorists, and about Islam generally.

Those are the edges of the fields on the island. The place is so rocky that it was necessary to move stones to the edges and build walls out of them to have anywhere at all to raise cattle. The whole island is pretty much just composed of those walled enclosures. Supposedly there are 3,000 miles of walls on the one small island of Inis Meán. I'll post a photo below.

Even worse, after moving out all the stones and building the walls, there was still not enough soil to grow anything, so the locals hauled up seaweed, dried it, and burned it, over and over for millennia (literally thousands of years) to make enough soil to grow grass to feed cows.

There's not enough grass in any one of them to support a cow, so they moved the cows around from enclosure to enclosure to eat the grass there was.

We will let you enjoy you time off & give you hell when you return.
Gird your loins!

Had an excellent lunch of local lobster, brown bread, and salad for 30 Euros with two of the guys from my class:

rando says

It does sound like fun to live somewhere really different while we're young enough though.

@Patrick - if you don't mind me asking, how old are you? You can give an approximation and not your actual age if you don't feel comfortable doing so.

https://www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/the-tragic-reality-of-deaths-at-the-cliffs-of-moher

Arrived in Belfast. This should be interesting. Going to check out Shankill and Falls Roads.

There is evidence of division all over, like Sinn Fein posters in Irish, or British flags and murals.

I happened to end up at a clearly Irish hotel, where being named Patrick is a good thing.

Couple of clearly sectarian postings I ran across:

Poster from Sinn Fein party (assoc with the IRA) that demands that Irish be recognized as an official language in the north, I think. And it's in Irish! Says "Respect for all! (Pass the) Irish act now!"

And you know which side these guys are on.

Amazing seafood restaurant called Mourne on Bank Square in Belfast.

We'll see if Patrick can take a hint.

My last picture was a comment on how you should have rotated the picture before posting it.

Oh right, my mistake.

Back in Dublin now. Compared to Belfast, Dublin is much more touristy and expensive, but there is also a happiness and lack of sectarian tension here, which is nice.

Diversity is not necessarily a good thing. Diversity harms social trust and cohesion.

If you want a change of food and are in the central Dublin area, this place was good(though I was there in 2012..five years is a long time)

https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-cedar-tree-dublin-3?osq=lebanese

One of the "peace walls" in Belfast. Tour guide said they have been effective in greatly reducing violence in areas where Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods border each other. You can go around them if you're willing to go out of your way. The locals on both sides still want to keep them because there is still tension and fear of renewed violence.

So walls can work.

Arrived in Norway. Oslo has the most beautiful airport I have ever seen.

And I'm not all that into tall blonde women, but damn.

First impression is that the country is extremely clean and orderly. No graffiti or trash that I can see yet.

Most people look pretty Nordic, like the nazis wished that they looked. A few Somali-looking men really stand out.

rando says

So walls can work.

Don't be ignorant. It's not like walls keep out bank robbers, murderers and pedophiles, so why use walls to keep out illegal aliens. In fact, houses, banks and prisons shouldn't have walls because they don't do any good, and we can use that wall money to treat victims of robbery, murder and molestation.

rando says

First impression....

In some ways, Mrs. Patrick might have advantages in learning what's hidden. For example, I heard Oslo females don't want to call taxis at night, because the male Muslim drivers rape female passengers. Oslo is now 10% Muslim, and the most common baby name is Mohamed. The government has recently reduced immigration, but even among Norwegians who might have objected in the past, Anders Breivik and Donald Trump have caused a reaction in favor of Muslims. Most Norwegians feel good about helping, and that has been hijacked to serve hijrah in the guise of multiculturalism, and the oil money has enabled indulging that. If you, as a male, say something that reminds Norwegians of either Breivik or Trump, then Norwegians might mentally assign you to the same category. If Mrs. Patrick, as a mother with daughters, were to ask the same questions and use the same words, she might get more candid answers.

Patrick,
You better focus on this site & forget the partying & playing
before these assholes destroy Patrick .net.

Not sure what this bygg fag is selling.

(OK, Translates as "building subject" and clearly just some kind of construction company.)

On a boat in the fjords now. It's an ad on the boat's TV.

You still giggled when you saw the ad.

rando says

Not sure what this bygg fag is selling.

Obviously industrial lubricant.

If anyone goes to Balestrand in the fjords of Norway, you must eat at the Ciderhuset and try this cider too:

Both the food and the cider were really top-notch, and the restaurant itself is pleasantly informal and airy, with stunning views.

No, the northern lights seem to be something that happens only in winter.

There is an excess of light though, with it never really getting dark at all. It's kind of nighttime between about midnight and 4am, but still not really dark. Makes it hard to sleep. The places I have been in don't have good enough shades to keep out the light. So that's somewhat disorienting.

rando says

Not sure what this bygg fag is

You live near San Francisco, and you don't know what a big fag is?

Found the website for the Ciderhuset mentioned above:

http://www.ciderhuset.no/home