Thoughts and memories of living abroad and improving myself while at it
Don’t know what you’re thinking, but I’m talking about the City of Amsterdam Coat of Arms!
Apparently the three X’s on the shield in the city’s coat of arms are Saint Andrew’s crosses.
Still, as Amsterdam is very famous for things less than saintly, one cannot help but wonder if there is any connection whatsoever between the identifier for pornography and the coat of arms. Which came first? The souvenir shops seem to take a particular liking in the coincidence anyway! 
When I returned from my recent trip to Germany, I was brutally reminded of one of the things I really found hard to get used to in Ireland: separate taps for hot and cold water!
A minor thing you’d say, and the Irish don’t seem to mind it at all. However, for somebody used to fine adjust the warmth level of water when washing hands, it is very annoying to get burnt on the left hand and have the right hand turned into a popsicle every morning!
For some reason, even in the recently built apartments/houses, and definitely in the older ones, the hot/cold water taps are always separated in the bathroom. In my apartment, the kitchen sink tap is designed the good old “normal” way, i.e. having hot and cold water coming out the same tap. Same for the bathtub tap. The hotels and corporate offices have as well broken with the seemingly “traditional” Irish way, and provide the two knobs linking to the single tap, or even better the ultra-modern twist’n'turn single knob 
Nothing one can’t live with, still it’s one of the little details, country specific things - that I like to keep track of. Does anyone know of any other country in the world which has this?
Recently been on a short trip to Germany, and I still miss the Gemütlichkeit of it all!
Germans really know how to turn cosiness into an art. Last year in Vienna it was Café Schwarzenberg I fell in love with. This year, in the more modest Kempen town, near Düsseldorf, it was Burg cafe (photo). A little gem of a place, with mouth watering cakes and friendly staff (it probably helped that we were speaking the language)
For those who cannot be bothered to read the wikipedia article, the odd german word I used stands for something more than cosiness (as in a not too large place, well-heated and nicely furnished) connoting the notion of belonging, social acceptance, cheerfulness, and the opportunity to spend quality time.
I have about 3 kilos to remind me of the quality time spent in Germany. But hey, it’s the Christmas season! Ho-ho-hooo!…
I found out a very interesting website today - www.entrepreneur.com
Its name (very apropriately and conveniently chosen) made me think about how good domain names are chosen.
I’ve had my share of domain name hunting, and I know that by now all english words in the dictionary are already out there with a .com tail!
Anyone who’s tried to register a domain recently knows what I’m talking about
Then I found out about the concept of “domain hack“, and immediately thought of some very cool ones (cyb.org, profit.net, anic.org, inter.com, ze.ro) Obviously, all taken!!
I started playing a bit with perl scripts and word lists, trying to find a real good one, that was still free. Then I found something better:
www.domainsbot.com and www.morewords.com Using these two nifty little sites it bound to make your domain name search a lot easier, albeit probably not much less frustrating…:D
If by this point you haven’t started wondering what the deal with my domain name is, no worries - I’ll tell you anyway!
Torego is a six letter word, made up of 3 sillables, each sillable being a consonant-vowel pair. DUH!
It’s also easy to remember, easy to pronounce in most languages, sounds cool (to my ears at least - being modest again) and might I state this again: only six letters…
That’s it.
Oh, and apparently there is an extraordinary market for good domain names out there, with some selling in the ranges of 6 zeros and 9 digit numbers…
The 6th of December 2003 was a very good day for me.
Today there are exactly 4 years since.
This is just a reminder.
May many follow!
If you set foot in Ireland as anything more than a tourist, you will sooner or later (rather sooner) find out about one of the central elements in Irish life: the Post Office!
Everything happens because of the Post Office: from applying for the PPS and tax certificate, to applying for the University, receiving your bills, paying your bills (if you want to do it this way), receiving coupons from the grocery store, receiving spam from the super-market - the Post is omnipresent. These may all seem like normal things to people used to the Post being a common part of their lives. To me however, it sounded a bit strange in my early Dublin days that the words “It’ll come in the post” or “you can send it by post” came so casually in people’s everyday conversations. And then of course is the apparently unbreakable catch 22 of relocating to Ireland for the first time:
Of course, there are ways to get out of this circular logic - I won’t dive into them here, they’re part of the whole relocating “fun”. The main point is that what links all of these together, the underlying platform that provides the subtle cohesiveness is… you guessed it: the Post Office!
All communication with Government bodies, or institutions of any kind is done through the post. You can’t escape it. There is a slim chance that the Internet will help a bit, but guess how you’ll find out about your Internet bill…
Anyway, I would have no problem with the post if it were not for a minor detail: time! You might know already that time is perceived differently in different cultures of the world. For the Irish, time is there o’plenty: No rush. It will come in the post. Give it 3 or 4 days for delivery. And so on.
I gave it. Sometimes 3 days, sometimes 3 weeks. It happens. This actually reminds me of an anecdote I read somewhere about the time in Ireland, which goes like this:
A Spanish backpacker winds up in a pub in Connemara (on the west coast of Ireland). Somehow the conversation leads to the gaelic language and yer man¹ asks one of the locals “How do you say mañana in Gaelic?”
“Oh, we don’t have a word for something describing such a rush around here…” came the answer
All jokes aside though, I think the Post office does a pretty good job overall (think of the HUGE volume of information these guys are shifting everyday - after all, they handle everything). And when you think that the General Post Office is the most central building in Dublin (ground zero right next to the more modern and recent landmark the Spire), one can begin to understand how it came to pass that the post is so omnipresent in Irish life.
¹ - “yer man” Irish slang for “that guy”
The 1st of December is Romania’s National Holiday (apart from being World AIDS day and Australia’s first day of summer, of course…). Below is a pretty old video, which I thought appropriate to embed on this day, showing several of the merits of Romania, which many may not know of:
The initial actual purpose of the video is not a particularly noble one, it’s a good laugh though, won’t spoil it for you - watch until the end 
No, I’m actually not kidding! The title is not as ironic as one might think - the truth is I was very well impressed by the Irish Revenue Commissioners Office.
The quality of service they provide makes paying tax (and especially claiming relief on it ) seem a bliss compared to other systems in other countries I’ve been to. From the very polite, patient and efficient personnel at the Department of Social Welfare, down to the automated voice recognition on their help line, I found it a very painless experience. To me, as an expat living here, the whole system seems very well organized, and the user experience while dealing with the tax office was such that the taxpayer is being treated truly like a customer. You get the feeling of getting “your money’s worth”, instead of feeling ripped-off.
If this sounds a bit like over-praising to you, or you had a different experience, do let me know your opinion. It should be added here that Ireland has a two tier tax system: 20% up to ~34K/year income, and 41% on everything above that (as of 2007 - this can vary slightly every year). A tax calculator (useful if you’re planning to get a job here) can be found here.
The tax level is thus pretty dear, so that the least the government can do is provide seamless service to the taxpayer. I don’t think anybody is enthusiastic about paying tax - however, the Irish seem to have managed to make the process more bearable!
What about them?
Well, I just thought this is one of the things I like about Ireland. A small detail, however the car registration plates here give you a very good idea about the age of the car. Their format is ). [YY] are the last two digits of the manufacture year of the car - for example even if a 1998 car was imported to Ireland only in 2005, it will still have a “98″ stamp on the plates.
