Sights, Smells and Sounds

I was riding home from a friend's tonight after a rather commendable session of acro-yoga (commendable because all three of us were 'wrecked', which is Irish for the Canadian 'bagged' or simply put: tired and creaky), and suddenly the city was on fire with sights and smells. The moon was full, and so I howled, honoring the hunky new werewolf guy on True Blood, who my friend Paul and I were lasciviously ogling on IMDB this morning as we Skyped. And when I reached the Liffey I could smell - I think for the first time -- the scent of the sea coming off the river. I forget that I live right by the sea - it's only a 30-minute walk from my front door - but the industry around the centre of the bay makes it less appealing. Sure, I see and smell the sea when I go to Howth or Dun Laoghaire or Greystones, but it is absent on my daily strolls about town.

But tonight, with the balmy breeze blowing, the stars just beginning to come out, and moon full, that gorgeous salty air was all around me. As I pulled into my courtyard, I saw a wee wee mouse scuttle under the gate. This surprised me, because I think it's the first rodent I've seen in Dublin - no kidding! The gulls are building some kind of uber-colony on the roof of my building, I am sure of it from the cacophony of wails that wake me up in the wee hours, but the four-legged wanderers are less in view.

Last weekend I biked to Dun Laoghaire, and was amazed at all the cute pubs and shops and parkettes along the way. I spend a lot of time in very few areas of Dublin. It's under 12km from my door to the DL pier, which is about the distance it took me to travel from the Berkeley St. Theatre to my home the last year I lived in Toronto. Peanuts. But in Dublin terms, it's a hike, and it hadn't occurred to me to do it until my friend suggested it. The purpose of the trip was to do yoga on the pier as part of the Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures, but it was raining, so the yoga teacher took the lot of us back to her studio, and ran a lovely gentle hatha class that contained a fair degree of challenge. I chatted to her afterwards, trying to place the accent, and found out she is a New Yorker who has been living in Ireland for 7 years. It's funny, because some people, like my friend Aoife, pick up the accent very lightly and evenly, with all words being inflected just slightly. Others, like this yoga teacher, have some words that sound very clearly Irish in pronunciation (usually 'but' is one of them), and others that still sound quite North American... Anyway, her studio was lovely, and she says that she does authentic hot yoga - not the lukewarm kind that I encountered way back when I arrived in the fall. I'll be biking back to Dun Laoghaire for fresh sea air and hot yoga sometime in the next couple of weeks...

PS I know I haven't written a single entry in 3 months. Oh well.

Christmas Lights about town

They sure do know how to do Christmas lights in Dublin. Here are a few pics I snapped when I happened to have my camera in tow. I will try to take more this week - Grafton street, for example, is just beautiful. The first few pics are of my street.  Dec 16 Update: Ok- the last three are from Grafton St. area. Took them last night.

Liffey Bridges in Images - updated

About a month ago I posted a slideshow of Liffey Bridges, moving eastward from Heuston station. I got about half way to Dublin Bay at that point. Today I decided to talk a walk to the sea in the blustery weather, and capture the other half. So now this slideshow has all the bridges from Heuston Station to the point where I couldn't go any further along the southside quays. Didn't get to see the open sea - have to find a different route next time.

Excursion: Puerto Rico

So, I've been a bit slack with the postings, but I've been busy! I know that most people's year-in-Dublin does not include a week in Puerto Rico, but mine did. I was there for the annual ASTR conference, and actually managed to hit the waves a few times. I was being extra careful, of course, because I didn't have health insurance. This is something one should know about, so I'll explain the difficulty. Basically, you have to purchase your travel insurance from your place of residence before you embark on the trip. When I was getting ready to leave Canada, I bought insurance for my time in Ireland. The insurance companies don't care where you are traveling to, unless your destinations include the US. Not thinking about Puerto Rico, which was many months away at that point, I purchased the 'anywhere in the world but the US' package. Then, leading up to the conference, I thought, oh no, Puerto Rico is the US. Kind of. I mean, when given an option of states to choose from on any online drop-down menu, PR is never there, but they are technically a protectorate. So... I thought, no bother, I will just purchase Irish insurance. Well, to do that, I need to be an Irish resident for at least 6 months, and I only just passed the 3 month mark a couple of days ago. SOL - better not let a surfboard hit me in the head. Stay away from fluey looking people. Don't let the water get too far into my ears... I was fine, but as I said, cautious when it came to one of my most favourite activities: jumping in the waves.

I could talk about the conference, but as I said in the beginning, the remit of this blog is entirely unrelated to my job. So, instead, I'll post some pictures of San Juan. The Old City is the place with all of the interesting architecture: like a mix between Spain and San Francisco. The first slide-show contains streetscapes, because they were so darn pretty! I wandered around on a few occasions with friends old and new from the conference, but most of these were taken on the afternoon I spent roaming with one of my best buds/academic partners-in-crime, Alvarez (we like to use each other's last names). Take a look at the paint jobs! I want a house with bright colours like this! And sun all day!



I was taking photos and at one point realized that the light was really curious - fantastic shadows being cast on the ground that were shaped by palm fronds. Somehow A and I decided to make a series of Nouvelle Vague inspired snaps. Here are a few, as well as some silly ones. She's giggling at my instructions to remove all expressions from her face in the last one...



I'll put a more complete series of pics on Facebook, where I feel freer, somehow, to look sillier. 'Cause A and I probably had heatstroke, and were feeling kind of silly.

To soothe the Tiger King's weather-beaten skin

This one is for Brian, Charlie, and all of my past Celtic Cinema students (one of whom I bumped into on the street yesterday!)

I was visiting a small farmer's market a few weekends ago, and came upon a great find: Man of Aran beauty products! Aran, of course, refers to the islands off the coast of Galway. They are known for their dramatic cliffs, windswept vistas, and proliferation of Aran sweater shops. When I visited years ago, Inishmore (made famous more recently by Martin McDonagh's macabre The Lieutenant of Inishmore) seemed to be populated by artists, innkeepers, and tourists. So that's Aran.  

Man of Aran is something else - a film released in 1934 about the poor and rugged but romantic Irish folks who 'scratched out a meagre existence' on the islands alongtimeago, digging dirt from between rock crevices in order to plant gardens, and fishing for sharks to obtain oil to light their lamps. The film was marketed as a documentary, but came under significant criticism when it became clear that many elements of the film were anachronistic, or fabricated for effect. Anyway, that's enough of a lesson for now. It just completely cracked me up when I saw Man of Aran beauty products at the local/organic market. The irony of branding luxury items on a film about the decidedly beauty-product-free characters in the film was too much. I expect several folks were wondering why I was crouching down in front of  a serviceable metal shelf to take photos of shampoo and body lotion.

Speaking about the shelves, the market had one stand that served a fabulous lentil soup (they only had half a bowl left, so I was charged half the price, and went around that afternoon half-full), and the most reasonably priced natural soap that I've seen in Dublin. Many bars are 7-8 Euros (ahhhhh, don't convert!), but this place had some for 2.50. Small pleasures...

 

The SuperNatural Food Market operates indoors at the St. Andrews Resource Centre on Pearse Street, and is open until the mid-afternoon on Saturdays. If you walk along Pearse St. past Trinity College in the direction of Dublin Bay (notice I refrained from saying 'east', 'cause Dubliners don't use compass directions), you'll find it on the right (south) side of the street, across from Pearse Square. If you reach the bridge over the Grand Canal/docks, you've gone too far.

The Economy of My Street

They're filming right outside my building. For the last two evenings, I've had to wait for the director to yell "cut" before I can cross Cow's Lane, and make my way along Essex Street. This is a minor inconvenience, and of course it's always fun when a film crew sets up in your hood - especially if you're not a driver, and the diversion causes few hassles. When I realized that there was a film crew in place, I was actually quite relieved, because the afternoon before the filming began, I came home to find crews stringing Christmas lights across the lane, a Christmas tree vendor in place in the alcove at the end of Cow's lane, and fairly elaborate Christmas decoration displays in all the shops on the corner. I was feeling really cynical about it - I mean, cripes, it's not even NOVEMBER and "they" are pushing Christmas on us already? What happened to Hallowe'en? The city crew decorators had skipped right over Samhain, and were in full ho-ho-ho mode. But of course they weren't city crews - they were film crews decorating the 'set' that is my neighbourhood.

The film crew - which is making an ad for Meteor that features carolers - (watch for it on tv to see my hood) got me thinking about the economy of my street. I think I've mentioned before that I often come home at night to people sleeping in the alcove in front of the door to my apartment building. They are not bothersome to me, and have never seemed aggressive - they're cold, homeless, and trying to find somewhere safe to sleep. One night I came back around 10pm and found a lit cigarette burning on top of one guy's sleeping bag. I said quite loudly "Um, there is a cigarette burning on top of you - did you mean to leave that there?" He looked up, in a bit of a daze, grabbed the butt and took a haul, then tossed it into the street and tucked his head back into the sleeping bag. I do admit that a wee "thank you" would have been nice :) A few days ago, there was blood all over the tiles of the alcove. I'm not sure what's going on, but it can't be very good. Still, I've never felt nervous or put upon.

And then yesterday - the day the filming began - I was leaving the building, and found my building manager and a few workers taking out the perfectly nice dark grey tiles that made up the floor of the alcove. "What are you guys up to?" I inquired, thinking that the tiles had seemed more than adequate for my standards of apartment-building external decor. "We're moving the door out to the street," my manager said. "So when you come in, you'll just walk right in off the street." They were making the door flush with the building. How do you stop homeless people from seeking shelter in the alcove of your building? Remove the alcove! I was really taken aback. I mean, if you asked me if I would prefer to pass homeless people sleeping in my doorway at night or NOT pass people sleeping in my doorway at night, I guess I would have to choose the latter. But this is for complex reasons. The construction seems so extreme! My friend Sophie reminded me that Toronto planners did something similar in the past to benches in street-side bus shelters - they made them all twisty and weird with lots of armrests bisecting the benches, so no one could stretch out on them. And presumably, they're not worried about middle-class commuters taking a little nap while waiting for the next bus. What do you think about all of this? I am curious, because it just feels really wrong to me to move a whole frigging doorway to keep away the odd body in a sleeping bag. But you can't be filming Christmas ads for Meteor with homeless folks in the background...

Liffey Bridges in Images

I love bridges, so I've decided to make a slideshow of the Liffey Bridges from Phoenix Park eastward, taken from the south bank of the river. This is just the first installment -- I will add the rest later. They start off quite interestingly, but as you can see, they become architecturally a bit more...er...pedestrian as the set goes on...

See my updated post on this for the full slideshow.

Phoenix Park

I've been fever-free for a few days, and I even left the house a couple of times this weekend, so today I took a longer walk to Phoenix Park. I think I am almost over the nasty flubug that wiped me out for the week, however, that little bug appears to have left me with a parting gift: the spins. Or to be more specific, I think that I have labyrinthitis, which is a kind of vertigo.

Now, I am not a doctor (well, not that kind of doctor at least), so I only have the internet to go on for self-diagnosis, but I don't think that the physician's diagnosis on Friday was accurate. When I visited the little clinic, still in the throws of fever and weakness, she told me that I was likely suffering from a well known condition that affects people in Ireland: Nightnursitis. Nightnursitis is caused by taking the over-the-counter medicine Night Nurse, which contains the mind-alerting antitussive DM. I felt like that diagnosis may have been accurate, because DM is pretty crazy stuff, but I was a little puzzled by the fact that I was still feeling the symptoms later the next day, when I hadn't ingested any Night Nurse for almost 24 hours. When I woke up dizzy again on Saturday and then again on Sunday, I figured that I couldn't possibly still have significant amounts of DM swimming around in my system. So this is what brings me to determine that I have labyrinthitis, which, according to emedicinehealth.com, often follows a viral illness such as the flu. According to the same website, labyrinthitis can also be caused by tumors at the base of the brain, but I am going to go with common sense on this one, and just assume that my brain base is fine, and the flu is the culprit.

Anyhow, I digress. I was feeling a little less spinny this morning, so I decided to take a walk to Phoenix Park. The sun was shining for the first five minutes of my walk, and then, phew, it returned to normal. It took me about 25 minutes to get to the entrance, but I was keeping the pace relatively slow, just in case the labyrinthitis decided to act up again, and I accidentally strayed into the Liffey. (I did notice, by the way, that ladders have kindly been placed at regular intervals along the inner concrete walls of the Liffey in anticipation of such a thing occurring).

The flotation device I would have used, had I fallen into the river

The park emerges right out of the cityscape, like an oasis beckoning tree-deprived Dubliners. If you follow the quays on the north side of the Liffey past Heuston station, it's hard to miss:

Phoenix Park is the rough equivalent of Toronto's High Park, or New York's Central Park. Dublin Tourism boasts that it is the largest enclosed urban park in Europe, and at over 1,700 acres, it does have a lot of space to offer. I only walked through about a third of the park this visit, and most of what I saw was well manicured and shaped by pathways.

The park also houses the Dublin Zoo, which I was too cheap and tired to visit this time around, and the mowed fields were full of soccer games that looked both planned (some coordination to shirt colours) and impromptu (five players ranging from 6 years old to 60, with skinny tree branches sticking out of the ground as goalposts).

I ended the exploratory part of my visit in the Tearooms, situated adjacent to the Zoo. For 5 Euros I had a machine-brewed hot chocolate and a very nice raisin scone with butter and jam. It's still pleasant enough to sit outside (actually, I think the temperature has been exactly the same every day for two months), so I parked myself on a bench, and listened to an American woman exchanging language lessons with a Spanish woman at the next table. The Spanish woman was trying to get the pronunciation of the English word for "Camión" right, and she kept saying "Lorr-a"? "Lorr-ee"? "Lorry"?, looking for guidance, but the American woman just kept throwing out other terms, convinced that the Spanish woman was totally off track: "Cam-ee-own, right? Um, truck? Van? Bus? A large vehicle, right? Truck." No lorries in Dublin.

Here's a pic of the Tearooms, and a bandshell-type thingy, and some holly. The holly is clearly just the height of all marketing ploys to get us thinking about Christmas -- it's not even Hallowe'en yet!

 

 

Yoga Studio 1: The Elbow Room

Since I arrived in Dublin almost a month ago, I’ve been keeping up an (almost) daily practice in my living room, which is much nicer now that I have wooden floors, and not the industrial carpet of the residence room I was staying in at the beginning. I’ve been surviving on audio podcasts that you can download for free through iTunes – check it out, there are tonnes of yoga podcasts to satisfy every kind of practice. My favourite hour-long ones are Greg’s from Yoga to the People – a New York based studio that wants to, well, bring yoga to the people. At their live classes, they charge very little, and pack everyone in like happy little yogi-sardines. There are nine classes currently available from YTP through iTunes, but I find they can really handle repeat playings.

I’ve also done podcasts by Wade Zinter, Kinndli McCollum (who does a Baptiste-style power class), Eoin Finn, and the super-hot Seane Corn, whose grace and core strength I long to achieve (see her Body Prayer on YouTube for an idea of what I mean – watch those feet float back into Chattarunga like someone had rigged her up à la Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon!)

As a quick fix, Yogadownload.com offers 20-minute classes that target a specific area, such as “Shoulder Opener,” “Hip Opener,” and “Yoga for Buns.” The cool thing about these 20-minute podcasts are that they offer a pick-and-mix approach: you can choose a couple, fire them up on your iPod or through your computer speakers, and have a longer class tailored to what your body and mind need that day. They also come with PDFs of pose guides, so you can consult the visual if you’re not sure about a particular pose. You can download these directly from their site, but if you download them through iTunes then they go directly into your Podcast folder, which I think is preferable to having them show up under Music.

As much as I find yoga to be a deeply personal practice, I’ve been starting to feel that it is way more satisfying to practice it with other humans. For one, I’ve been concentrating on my alignment in some of the central asanas, but without having a teacher around to guide me, I might be on the path to perfecting an incorrect alignment without knowing it. And I somewhat begrudgingly admit that I like chanting Om with other people at the end of class. So with this in mind, and my chest cold/sore throat on its way out, I decided to hit a studio last night. And I decided that I wanted Hot Yoga.

I don’t think hot yoga has caught on in Dublin the way it has at home, but there are a couple of studios in Dublin that do some version of it. Dublin has at least a couple of Bikram studios, and if you're interested, here are the links: Bikram Yoga, Bikram Yoga Fairview. However, I’m not a big fan of Bikram yoga – it just seems too militaristic, and frankly, at odds in practice with the spirit of yoga – so I had to seek out a place that uses heat with non-Bikram classes. I wanted the heat because I had been sitting in my cold, draughty, office all day, my fingers were turning blue, and I needed to finally stop wearing my coat and scarf. I quickly found The Elbow Room on the internet. It’s located in an area called Stoneybatter, which is just above Smithfield, which is less than a 15 minute walk from my flat.


View Larger Map

As an aside – Dublin has names for many of its areas, and it always makes me think that I will have to travel to a suburb to get there. Then I find out it’s a stone’s throw from … well, wherever I happen to be at that moment. Dublin is really not that big.

Anyway, off I trotted to Stoneybatter, yoga mat and hot-yoga mat-towel under arm, and my bag full of yoga clothes, new underwear, another towel for the shower, and face cream (the only product I feel I really must have after a shower). For anyone who has never done a hot yoga class, it’s really really sweaty. You basically come out looking like you went for a swim in your clothes, and dropped your towel in the water to boot.

The Elbow Room is easy to miss if you’re not paying attention, because it’s in a little courtyard on the north side of Brunswick St. North, just east of Blackhall. The sign is inside the walls of the courtyard, so you have to go right up to it to see it. The reception area is very nice, and there are magazines and cushioned benches to sit on while you wait for the previous class to empty. It also has change rooms and a couple of showers with free toiletries. And you can book and pay for your class online, which means you don’t have to bring your wallet. So far, so good.

I went into the room to get set up, but it wasn’t very warm. I thought perhaps I was in the wrong room (they have two). I went out to ask the guy at reception, and he told me that indeed I was in the right room, but it’s hard to get it very hot, you know, depending on how cold it is outside (it was probably about 15 degrees outside at that point, which is really not far from the warmest temperature that Dublin reaches). So I went back inside, wishing I had worn yoga pants and not my favourite blue Lululemon hot yoga shorts. I think the temperature reached, maximum, about 25 degrees, which is considerably cooler than the high 30s or even 40s that I’ve had in places at home. In fact, one day at my sister’s studio in Mississauga, Leewi Yoga, the instructor confessed after the class that it had accidentally reached 50 degrees! It’s not that I needed to be baked like a little Irish potato, it’s just that, as I said, I had been freezing all day and was hoping for something to replicate the tropics. I almost wanted to ask for a blankey.

However, the class was good, and the slower pace of it helped to bring me back to some of the basics. I’ve been pretty addicted to the power side of things for the last couple of months, but not every class needs to test the outer limits of one’s breath and physical stamina. As I suspected, my alignment was off in a few cases, and Aidan helped to correct an errant butt here, a lose leg there, and a tight shoulder…everywhere. And this is totally silly and immature to say, but it was kind of funny listening to someone say all the yoga words with an Irish accent. Maybe it’s because I find many Irish accents have an earthy quality to them, and yoga language is a bit more on the airy side. Anyhow, I’d like to go back, but I was really disappointed by the lukewarm temperature. I don’t think I will practice hot yoga all the time, but when I crave it, then I want it to be actually hot, because the heat helps to bring about a very deep peaceful (read: exhausted and perhaps delirious) feeling by the end of class. Yoga is also very expensive (like everything!) here, and that might be prohibitive. This class was 17 Euros, which, if you do the conversion, is about $27 CDN. I keep telling myself to STOP CONVERTING.

From one green place to another

I'm off to the Inishowen Peninsula on a short research trip, so more beautiful photos of green places will be arriving on the blog next week. But it's been a busy week getting down to work and planning out what I will see at the Dublin Theatre Festival, which starts next week, and coincidentally (for me) boasts Quebec's Robert Lepage as one of the big-name headliners...

But I realise I haven't posted on the blog in a while. I have so many quirky things to report, but they are going to have to wait. Until I return, here are some more photos of the hike at Howth - I went again last weekend, and had a beautiful sunny day, so I decided to do the longer walk, which should have been a 10km loop. But I got a bit lost on the way, and didn't loop back towards Howth when I should have, so I ended up at Sutton Cross, which is the town one DART stop closer to Dublin. It was a really long hike, and while I think the cliff walk before you get to the lighthouse is more awe-inspiring, the part after the lighthouse has its own charm.

Here's another, clearer pic of the walk up to the lighthouse. But the time you see this, you're most of the way there:

And here is a view once you've come around Howth head. Not as stunning, right?

My favourite part about the backend of the hike is that it brings you to this beach, which includes a rather treacherous set of stairs/rocky path combo to bring you down. I saw a family there with kids and a stroller, and I have no idea how they got it down... 

And here is what the rock formations look like at beach level. I stepped into the water, and it was surprisingly mild - I expected to get the freezing-pain feeling in my feet that I first experienced as a child at Cape Cod, but I was able to stay in it for a while. On a warmer day (haha, as if), I might even attempt a swim.

I paused for a little camera-timer action because I love this heather-strewn landscape. A friend pointed out that this is my 'Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man' pose, which wasn't the intention. It was actually a test shot to see if I was standing in the frame...

See you shortly. And don't be afraid to use the comment function below - I have no idea if anyone is actually reading this thing.

Observation #1 : Church and Economy

I was walking around the north side after having visited the new art cinema in Smithfield with my dear friend Sophie -- who brilliantly hopped on a plane from London to help me flat hunt earlier this week -- and we paused to look at this beautiful church, which is certainly a landmark of an older Dublin:

 

We gazed up to look at the shiny brass plaque:

"Is that an @ sign?" Sophie said, with disbelief in her voice.

"Well, yes, I think it is," I responded, equally surprised.

Now that's the New Ireland.

Incidentally, the Lighthouse Cinema is a gorgeous space, with lots of crazy levels and interesting nooks and crannies. Sophie was drooling at the layout, thinking of all the arty events she could host there. I haven't seen a film there yet, because at last check, they were playing almost all the same films currently in rep at the Irish Film Institute on Eustace Street, which is just about my favourite place in town. I'm hoping the Lighthouse will diversify their offerings once we're out of the dreadful summer film season, because the IFI plays the same few films for over a week at a time, and I need more than that.

Dogs are meant to poop outside

I was meeting a new friend for dinner tonight in the Temple Bar area (I know I know it is touristy, give me a break, I've only been here for a few days!), and decided to go for a little walk first. My intention is to walk around as much as I can, so if I find a great flat, I can confidently decide in an instant whether or not I would like living in that neighbourhood. Dublin's not really that big, if you plan to stay within 2km of the absolute centre (which I guess I would poinpoint as the O'Connell Bridge, but maybe living here will change that attitude).

My mission was to find some soap - just a nice bar of soap made from, you know, pure ingredients, essential oils - the usual. It takes a while to find a Kensington Market-like space when you are in a new city, but I hold out no hopes for finding anything as cheap and down-home as Sugar and Spice.

I found a great bar of lemongrass soap at Down to Earth on South Great Georges Street, and decided that was my new scent. Bright, lively, ready-for-anything. It was 4 Euros, and seeing this kind of soap at home is often 4 dollars, I figured this place was on the mark. I've decided not to convert currencies anymore - it's too painful. The numbers stay the same, even if the conversion speaks of highway robbery.

I left the chipper guy at the counter of the store, and continued walking south. Oddly, Dubliners call this 'walking UP the street,' which is confusing, seeing I have always associated 'UP' with walking north. But maybe I am too attached to maps, which place the north arrow at the top...

I had a few minutes before I had to turn around and head back to Temple Bar for my dinner date, so I popped into Penny Farthing Cycles Shop, thinking I might find out if they had any second hand bikes that were suitable. Air Canada was going to charge me $275 to bring the bike over - $225 for an extra 'bag', and $50 for the that 'bag' being sports equipment -- and I figured that it would cost the same to bring it back, which just made it not worth it.

So there I am in this (admittedly kind of grotty - I should have known) cycle shop. The fellow said they had very few used bikes, but then a woman on the phone placed her hand over the mouthpiece, and said "How 'bout that silver-and-grey Ladies' that just came in? It's not serviced yet, but it's a 16."

Well, I am short, so 16" would be perfect. I proceeded to the back of the shop to inspect the bike. There was a very large boxer moving around, but he seemed friendly enough, and didn't jump on my head (dogs for some reason like to come up and lick me on the face, no matter how far my face is from the ground). He pointed out the bike, but it was in a big stack, so I moved around back to inspect it. I was talking about derailleurs and the like - making myself out to be the knowledgeable cyclist that I am (or pretend to be), and I noticed this...smell.  I was thinking, phew, that doggy sure does smell! Then I realised, um, that is the smell of...poop. Dog poop. And yes, I was standing in it. Great big fluffy piles of it.

On the concrete floor of the shop.

INdoors.

The guy was like "oh no, I hope you didn't step in it." I looked down, and there were, like, TEN PILES of poop at my feet. Under my feet, actually. That is WAY MORE than a day's worth. WTF? Who DOES that? I mean, a warning would have been nice.

Let's just say that several toilet paper rolls and visits to a grotty bike-grease covered bathroom later, I was in St. Stephen's Green, not paying homage to Joyce and Bloom, but wiping my soles for dear life. I was a little late to meet my friend at Temple Bar, but... I had a pretty good excuse. And oh ya, the bike sucked.