By Jason
I recently spent two weeks in Dublin, Ireland working with our team there. After work and on weekends I had time to explore the city, alone and with friends, and later Ann joined me for a little bit of traveling through the countryside too. I didn’t have time during the trip to send out an update but I wanted to share some photos and impressions of the country. This may be the first in a series of posts (depending on how long Athena is napping).
Between cramming as much into my two weeks at work as possible and the time zone mismatch with the Mountain View office, I found myself at work pretty late most days. I know this sounds completely unreasonable, but we don’t have dinner service at this office. All jokes aside I was really surprised – dinner is one perk that Google definitely gets its money’s worth out of. It’s much easier to stick around and finish a project when you know you can just grab dinner in the cafe – I wonder if anyone has ever calculated the total value in extra working hours this generates?
In any event, this was good because it meant I had to wander around and try lots of different restaurants. Being tied up during the day also meant I ended up taking a lot of long-exposure photos at night, which was fun. Here’s a picture of the new Samuel Beckett bridge, designed by Santiago Calatrava:
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Here’s a view down the River Liffey toward the city center:
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Brick streets and low bridges near the Google office:
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For more photos of the bridge check out this album:
Unfortunately for my cholesterol level, most food I encountered in Dublin was either red meat, fried, or covered in cheese (or all three). It was also very hard to find a sandwich that did not have mayonnaise on it. When I ordered a sandwich and asked for no mayo they looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. Luckily my friend Elif knew of a healthy vegetarian restaurant, Cornucopia and I went with her, Manuel and Juan:
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The area around the Google office, the Docklands, is a good introduction to the city – there’s a dynamic mix of old and new, with new glass buildings wrapped around rehabbed brick warehouses next to rows of small working-class Georgian houses. This area used to be a pretty rough part of town but was hit big by the building boom of the last decade. One of my favorite juxtapositions was the curving steel-and-glass backdrop of the new rugby stadium, Aviva Stadium:
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Another fascinating nearby building is the Gasworks Apartments – in this case, the building itself is a mix of old a new, apartments built within the red steel frame of an old gasometer. You can see it in these photos, peeking behind the “hobbit houses” and partially silhouetted by the evening sky:
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I stayed at the Grand Canal Hotel, just a short walk from the office. More about the Grand Canal (the waterway) in a later post. I had to include this photo of Matthew and Mariya laughing as Marcel relates the greatest story of the triumph of capitalism of all time. It involves long-lost relatives, record players that automatically change disks, Skippy Peanut Butter, and, I kid you not, Chuck Norris.
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My first weekend I spent Saturday wandering around the city center with Chris. By the way, you should check out his photos of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland – amazing. My favorite spot was the Chester Beatty Library, located on the grounds of Dublin Castle. It’s not a huge museum, but the collections and the exhibit of Chinese painting and drawing were fascinating.
Dublin Castle itself isn’t very exciting. Additions have been added over time – there’s a medieval tower, wrapped in a gothic chapel, connected to neoclassical buildings and a large, primary-colored section that I can only assume is in the Playmobil school of design. Altogether it doesn’t quite work. We didn’t spend much time there, instead wandering through the city over to the City Center and back through Temple Bar.
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More photos around Dublin, including some shots of the city from the 7th floor balconies at work:
This was a tough trip in some ways because I had never been away from Athena for so long before. Thank goodness for things like Skype and Google Video Chat.
More coming soon.