What a relief! Exams are done and I can stop studying!

Exams in Ireland

Exams in Ireland, and I think in most European institutions for that matter, constitute the bulk of your grade for a course. In most cases, the 2 or 3 hour exam accounts for 100% of your marks! Talk about pressure… I had four exams in the past week, two of them counted for 100%, one was for 70% and the other for 60% of my course grades. Needless to say, I think I got a few more gray hairs and a few more wrinkles around my eyes from studying, on top of my research.

It’s been a huge challenge for us this year: moving the entire family to a foreign country, selling our home in St. Louis, taking out student loans to pay for 100% of our expenses, moving to a new apartment after the first 3 months of living in overpriced hell (make sure you do not agree to lease a place without physically examining it first like we did!), managing a three year old that gets sick all the time because of the Galway water problem that was only announced about 1 month ago but was apparently kept secret for most of the time we’ve lived here. This certainly has make it difficult for me to boycott bottled water lately…

Great Craic

Sorry for the rant, but not all was bad about our first several months here. We’ve had some great craic in the Galway pubs. And, we’ve met some fabulous people from all over the world right here in little old Galway City. I had to say goodbye today to a German girl that shared the same passion, perhaps even more so, for economics as me. Best of luck Fran! I’m also going to have many more goodbyes in the coming days as many of us will part ways. So tonight, I will celebrate with some great craic, pints, and a football match at The King’s Head tonight.

Thanks for your patience during my blackout on this blog for the past several days.

Slainte!

I’ve been up to my ears in alligators lately but I decided to take a bit of a break from my research to meet up with a fellow video blogger from Philadelphia last week and have some great craic . We had fun geeking out about Macs, blogs, and politics.

John Coffey, aka Jimmy CraicHead, and his girlfriend Samantha, aka Demanda Diamond, came to Ireland during Easter and visited Galway and the surrounding area for a few days to experience the real Ireland. John rang me when they got into town and we met at my favorite pub, The King’s Head. Jimmy and Samantha interviewed me about living in Galway and produced a wonderful segment titled Galway Craic and Guinness Beer.

This and Jimmy CraicHead’s other videos are professionally produced and edited and look great for a part time blogger. Galway Craic and Guinness Beer features some great shots of the River Corrib, Galway City, Clifden, and Connemara with Irish trad music in the background. Jimmy and Demanda Diamond (a play on Amanda Congdon) are a perfect video blogging duo, traveling the US and the rest of the world in search of interesting people.

JCHTV is not your average video travel blog and Jimmy and Demanda have put together some great segments. I’ve got loads of video footage from my travels here in Ireland as well, but as Jimmy and I discussed it’s difficult to produce a polished segment. JCHTV makes it look easy! Just don’t laugh at my terrible interview skills. Let me know what you think of the video and check out the others at JCHTV.

Here’s to John and Samantha…may your travels take you far. It was great to meet you and the hangover was worth it. Slainte!

This is so cool! You probably read my post about Jessica Hagy’s Indexed blog, if not you must check it out. Well, if you’re a Mac user, you can now have her index cards on your Dashboard. How cool is that? One of her generous fans wrote a Dashboard Widget that displays her latest graphs and diagrams. So click here to download the widget automatically.

By the way, I love the new sentence diagram layout she’s been using lately!

I saw this great leprechaun on a poster on NUIG campus today that caught my attention. So, I thought I would give you a taste of St. Paddy’s Day events coming up in and around Galway with some fun facts about the holiday in general.

The leprechaun was advertising the Voluntary Services Abroad Céilí which takes place tomorrow at Cuba on Eyre Square. What’s a céilí, you ask? Well, it’s a Gaelic social dance that is popular especially around St. Paddy’s Day. The céilí is usually accompanied by a fiddle, flute, tin whistle, accordion, and bodhrán. The VSA céilí is on at Cuba Thursday, 15 March in Cuba at 8 pm for €5 with free admission to the nightclub after. Proceeds to benefit VSA in their mission of medical students that bring supplies to developing countries around the world. I plan to go because it supports a wonderful cause and sounds like great craic!

St. Paddy’s Day is celebrated all over the the world with parades, céilís, festivals, and drink. Here’s a sampling of what’s going on this week. Dublin will host over 200,000 people for it’s parade on Saturday but that’s only the icing on the cake. The official St. Patrick’s Day Festival in Dublin actually starts Thursday and will continue until the bank holiday on Monday the 19th. So much for St. Paddy’s Day, now it’s basically a week! Meanwhile, New York City lays claim to the largest St. Paddy’s Day parade in the world, which boasts 2 million spectators. To put that into perspective, that’s about twice the population of Dublin! I guess it makes sense considering so many Irish emigrated to NYC in the 19th and 20th centuries.

As for St. Patrick’s Day in Galway, there’s plenty in store. Some of my German friends are planning a pre-drinking brunch Saturday morning that “should soak up some of the booze 2 come” as one of them said in a text to me earlier today. Then, we’ll head into town for the parade which starts on the west side of the River Corrib and makes its way up Dominic St to Bridge St, up Mainguard then Shop St before finishing around Eyre Square. This parade is pretty impressive for a small city such as Galway, as it will attract over 50,000 spectators. That’s about 3/4 of the population of the city. The route will pass within one block of my apartment so I won’t need to go very far to be part of the action. Finally, the Town Hall Theatre Galway Céilí is on at 9 pm which will feature Breton and Irish Dancing.

So while you other Americans are pretending to claim Irish heritage on Saturday and think celebrating St. Paddy’s means turning Budweiser piss water green, I’ll be having a proper pint (pints) of Guinness and listening to some authentic Irish tunes.

As many of you know, I am a postgrad in economics and appreciate charts and graphs. So, I’ve been chuckling at Jessica Hagy’s, Indexed for a few weeks now thanks to a friend’s suggestion. Jessica has a simple, brilliant concept: take line graphs and Venn diagrams, throw in a bit of controversial social topics, mix together on a lined index card, and you have a new breed of daily web comic. Today’s Indexed takes on the meaty issues of global warming, abortion, taxes, gay marriage, health care, and Iraq. If you ask me, Jessica’s index cards a loads funnier that most newspaper political cartoons.

Not all of her cards are serious or political in nature. This one about high school reunions hits the nail on the head and got me to snicker since I recently went to my own 10 year reunion. There are loads of other great index cards and it’s definitely a blog I read regularly. Her site could use some tweaking and it’s really frustrating that she has urls in the the header that are not linked, but its easy to look past all that with the great content.

Finally, Indexed just got a book deal with Penguin Viking, so I can’t wait to see what else is in store for Jessica Hagy. Congratulations!

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Cead mile failte! One hundred thousand welcomes… With St. Patrick’s Day (actually it’s 5 days of partying) right around the corner on 17 March, I have been thinking a good deal about Irish culture lately. It’s also been awhile sense my last Irish culture post, so I’m long overdue.

I must say I’ve really been noticing the different accents lately. I’ve been in Ireland long enough to pick up some of the regional slang and such. For example, a friend from Dublin says he’s “going to get a bit ‘a kip,” meaning he’s going to go take a rest or nap at home. The Irish from Cork certainly sound different than the Galway Irish or those in Sligo or Donegal. Not all Irish drop the ‘h’ (or hay-ch, as they say) from ‘th’ words, as in “Tirty Tree Catedrals” or “Tirty Tree and a Tird.” Then there’s the insistence, usually by older ladies, as in “ahh, go on now,” when offering up some tea or biscuits. The extreme exaggeration of this can be found on any episode of Father Ted:

Mrs Doyle: “Would ya like more tea, Faaather?”
Fr Ted: “No thank you, Mrs Doyle”
Mrs Doyle: “Ahhh go on now.”
Fr Ted: “I reeeally shouldn’t Mrs Doyle, I’ve had 5 cups already.”
Mrs Doyle: “Ahh ya will Faaather.”
Fr Ted (giving up): “Ah, now that you mention it, I will have a bit of tea.”

Swearing

The Irish have a few tricks up their sleeves when it comes to swearing but still saying the actual curse word. Here’s one: “Jaysus! did you see that three-legged dog?!” Notice, it’s not really blasphemy since technically the word “Jesus” was not used. One of my favorite’s is feck. This is a word they can use on TV, or the telly if you prefer. Can you believe that a word only one vowel away for the king mother of all words is used on prime time television? It even sounds like the actual word if you’re not paying close attention in a passing conversation. It certainly caused my head to turn when I was walking along one day and one sweet old lady turns to another and when referring to a third woman they had been gossiping about says, “aw…she can just feck off!”

A few more examples…

When getting change at the corner shop, the woman gives you the change, smiles and says, “Now…” I guess this one is an affectionate, almost motherly goodbye, as if to say, “now…run along and play and play and be back in time for dinner.”

When someone is telling a story and they can’t think of the subject’s name as in: “I was talkin’ to yer man yesterday…”

Then there’s will I… as in “Will I get you a coffee?” and “Will I meet you for tea at 2 then?”

One of my favorites is the use of like. Americans do this all the time but the Irish have a bit of a different take by using it only at the end of a sentence. We might say, “then she was like ‘you did what?’ and he was all like ’sure did!’ Here’s the Irish version: “I live across from the college, like.” Or, my ultimate favorite: “It was great craic last night. Ya knooow, like?” I’m not sure this is just a Galway thing or a West Ireland thing, does anyone know? Leave your comments below, I’m dyin’ to knooow, like.

I hope you’re ready for St. Paddy’s Day!

I found this video courtesy of Greg Mankiw, one of my favorite blogging economists. I apologize in advance for the nerdy humor, but anyone connected to economics will appreciate the jabs at Mankiw’s 10 Principles of Economics.

No, it’s not an illicit substance glamourized in the movies, craic is the Irish term for fun or good times. As promised this post is the first in what will be a weekly, possibly even more frequent, post about Irish culture. Craic in a sentence or phrase might be “What’s the craic?” or “How’s the craic?” when you want to ask someone if they’re having a good or how the pub scene is tonight. The Irish may also say things like “We had a crackin’ time last night” or “It was great craic.” I thought I would post about craic since I have been referring to it so much in my posts lately. So I have to keep this post short since it’s Friday and I need to find the craic. Cheers!

What do you get when you cross Miss Marple, Bad Boys II and Shaun of the Dead? A brilliant side-splitting comedy starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Hot Fuzz is the latest project from Pegg and Edgar Wright with a big cast, loads of great one-liners and non-stop craic.

For the first time since last August I got to see a movie before anyone in the US! Usually big blockbuster films are not released until a few months after the US opening date. Hot Fuzz was released last week on February 14 and will not make it to US cineplexes until April 20 and the Aussies will be able to catch it on March 15. You must see this movie opening night so mark you calendars! If you saw Shaun of the Dead then you’ll love Hot Fuzz. Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is a highly regarded police officer in London that is transferred to a small village in the English country for making all the other cops in The City look bad. He is made sergeant of the local police service and his law enforcement expertise is seemingly wasted on this safe, quiet little community. Danny Butterman (Frost) is the lumpy son of the police inspector that followed his father into a life of police work and who’s idea of crime fighting comes from his favorite cop movies, Bad Boys II and Point Break. The most action Danny has seen is sitting on a stool at the local pub. You can only imagine what happens from here when you put these two unlikely characters together. Hot Fuzz has a great cast with some big, and unlikely, stars such as Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent and Timothy Dalton.

I went to the cinema on student night with a big group of friends for only €4 and it was easily worth the admission. We were certainly the loudest with our gut-busting laughter and this one is a must see with the craziest of your mates. You can’t help but love the slapstick gore and violence for which Pegg and Frost are known. I give Hot Fuzz 4.5 out of 5 stars. So if you’re in Ireland or the UK check it out this weekend, otherwise here’s a quick trailer for the rest of you. Enjoy!

Team America World Police Just Added - Download Now on iTunes

I am surprising my wife with a gourmet dinner this evening

• Syrah for starters
• Fresh Irish Goat Cheese and Kalamata Olives from Sheridan’s Cheesemongers
• Fresh Baguette from Griffin’s Bakery
• Tomato, Basil, Fresh Buffalo Mozarella Salad
• Scallops from Galway Bay Seafood @ the docks in Irish Butter and Garlic Sauce served with Pasta
• Fancy Chocolate Cake with Glazed Strawberries, Kiwi and Lemon Slice served with Riesling from The Gourmet Tart Co. on Lower Abbeygate Street, Galway

The display was too good to pass up…Happy Valentine’s Day and sleep tight tonight!