Ireland Take 2 - random thoughts

I'm in Galway now, in the west of the country. Just drove 3 hours from Dublin on the wrong side of the road. Fortunately everyone else was doing the same thing. Galway's an impressive city, laid out much like it was in medieval times. We visited a church where Christopher Columbus reportedly prayed before setting off for the New World. We don't have that kind of history in Los Angeles. In LA, history is "You see that parking garage? Mickey Rourke had sex in it one time!"

Here are some random thoughts:

-Aer Lingus was a disappointment as an airline. I felt transported into the early 80s, with tiny seats, the same basic chicken dishes for food, and old British programs from that time on a completely washed-out little screen. You had to pay for the Irish Independent. The country is awesome, but not represented well by the airline. I hear Ryanair (which often has flights to cities in Europe for $1) is much better.
-Ireland just won the "Triple Crown" in rugby, beating England, Scotland and Wales, and the series was on everybody's lips.
-The Spire of Dublin, a tall metallic piece of metal that shoots up out of the landscape like a Brancusi sculpture, looks like an institution, but it's only 3 years old.
-In fact, everything is changing in Dublin. I heard a report on the news that they expect the economy to grow by 15% by 2020, with an additional population of 1 million (20% more than now), 1 in 5 foreign-born. This puts Ireland in contrast with almost the entire rest of Europe, which is losing population. I was talking to an advertising exec in a pub called Mulligan's, and he warned against the sunny outlook, however. "It's the same old thing. The economy is blazing by accident. When it falls, it will be catastrophic."
-He described the same kind of housing bubble we have in the US: home prices doubling in 10 years, people taking out 100% mortgages, etc. We've sure exported the American value of living outside your means!
-They just installed a light rail system that services Dublin called the LUAS and it was great. You buy tickets on the honor system. There was an amusing discussion amongst a few schoolchildren who clearly did not have the money. One wanted to risk it, and the other two warned against it. A neat little morality play. The cheat would've been caught; there was a conductor checking tickets.
-What you see on the news in Europe is SO different. In addition to the Irish channels, TV carries the British news services. Their coverage is in depth and unsparing. Of particular note was a story on the bombing and shooting by US forces in Haditha last November. I don't remember ever seeing blood and guts on video from the war zone in Iraq on US television. Later there was a story of a Kurdish man and his struggle for survival. Maybe it's that Europe has experienced war on their own soil in their more recent past (though it's been 60 years); they don't feel the need to sugarcoat it or hide it in any way.
-The other big story was Tony Blair's Labour Party, and the "loans for peerages" scandal, which as near as I can tell concerns the party securing loans from wealthy contributors, possibly for government posts, possibly because the contributors wanted to see Labour win. Seemed like a bit of naivete; you mean there's big money in politics? Shocking! (One funny thing was this broll shot during the story of the cameraman running around the House of Lords like he was drunk).
-There was an ad for Miller Genuine Draft in front of our hotel that said "One Life, One Beer." I think the "one" refers to how many bottles of MGD they've sold in Dublin this year. Please, it's a Guinness town (by the way the Guinness Brewery tour was excellent).
-I was surprised by the frequency of Gaelic. It's as official a language as English, and while I haven't seen too many people speaking it, it's on every road sign, most business signs... and there's even a Gaelic radio station we listened to for about a half-hour in the car. Thankfully we had iTrip and moved on. Seeing Gaelic makes me feel like less of a wuss for traveling to an English-speaking nation.
-The roadways are in really good condition. In particular the N4 west out of Dublin looked like it had been paved moments before we reached it.

That's all for now. I'll try to check in again before coming home.