A Saturday in Dublin

I've got to say, it's good to be back home. Traveling is exciting but it's also tiring and unfamiliar. Adam and I spent our second week in Dublin in nearly back-to-back trainings, meetings and conferences. We'd originally planned to take Friday off and do a long weekend in Galway, but we ended up staying in the office on Friday just to unwind and have informal chats and follow-up with all the folks we'd been training and talking with all week. Also to raise a pint with a friend to celebrate his imminent return to the US of A. As much fun as it sounds to go traipsing around Ireland, I think the Friday was well-spent, since one of the biggest benefits I got out of this trip was getting to know the Dublin-based Googlers better which has heightened my sense of commitment to them.

I did get to spend Saturday being a tourist, however, before flying back to the US on Sunday. Adam took the train up to Howth, and I stayed in Dublin and just spent the day walking around, mostly in the Temple Bar area. Being in Seville had reminded me that I'm a somewhat abnormal tourist: rather than rushing around to see all "The Sights," I'd rather take my time, check out some places that real people (dare I say locals?) might actually frequent, stop when I want, and just savor the time.

It was in this sort of spirit that I spent an hour sitting on a street corner listening to this Dublin cowboy playing some of the best slide guitar I've heard in I-don't-know-how-long. I have to admit that the Josh Bell experiment crossed my mind; who cares if I have no idea who the hell he is, if the music is so good it makes me want to stay until my butt's fallen asleep? I also went to an open-air book market, a "fashion" market (clothing and jewelery), and a really fantastic farmer's market in this hidden little square that I just happened to stumble across.

After wandering for awhile, I walked back out toward the river (like most significant European cities, Dublin has a river running through it) and saw crowds of people lined up along the river and on the bridges. One of the onlookers told me that it was the Liffey Swim; apparently once a year hundreds of people jump into the River Liffey and swim a couple miles downstream. It's one of the big events of the outdoor swimming season. And I happened to arrive just a couple minutes before people started launching themselves from the starting line:

The swimmers had to go through a decontamination shower when they got out of the river (yum). More photos from the day available in my Picasa web album.

Two weeks in Europe

I just flew in from Dublin, and boy are my arms tired!

Adam and I just got back from two weeks in Europe, most of which was spent in the Google office in Dublin. The Dublin office is completely fascinating (for a language geek like me) because it's very international and anywhere you wander in the office you can hear people speaking to each other in French, German, Turkish, Swedish (often at the same time!)... We've been taking advantage of their international expertise and spent the last couple weeks working to improve our webmaster communication efforts outside the sphere of just the USA or the English-speaking market.

So the single biggest thing that struck me upon arrival in Dublin was (and you're gonna laugh): there are no bugs! I'd forgotten from my time in England that there are no screens on the doors or windows there. You can leave them all open—even when it's dark out, and the lights are on inside—and no bugs come in! It's amazing! I have no idea why this is the case, but it's so.

Actually Ireland reminded me a lot of England in some ways. The driving on the left, of course; but also the styling of their street signs, the storefronts, the architecture of their houses. I was trying to describe what makes the buildings different from in the US, and the best I could come up with (aside from all that classic red-orange brick) is that the building-fronts are very flat.

The neighborhood in which the Google office is located used to be not-so-desirable, but is undergoing a rejuvenation (at least, according to my cab driver). Observe all the cranes:

I did do a day of touristing around Dublin [edit: details here], but most of my time was spent in the office at breakneck pace: back-to-back meetings most days, giving presentations, talking one-on-one with people, even answering Q&A on a panel at a conference. It was a fairly overwhelming couple weeks, but definitely worth it. Meeting all of the international Googlers who were there was not only a pleasure (one of them is a fellow Rubik's Cube enthusiast!), but gave me a new perspective on the importance (for Google) of building our international presence. Now my challenge is to synthesize all the information I whirlwinded through and to bring it back in a useful form to my colleagues stateside.