Another Sunny Day in Ireland

We sure can't complain about the weather.  Yesterday was lovely - mostly sunny and "no jacket" weather.  Today it is more like we expected - misty and overcast, but not unpleasant.

We thought that we should practice our driving skills a bit before people come to visit us on Friday.  As Larry put it, we want the people screaming in the car to not be us!  So we picked a nearby shopping mall to visit - not a tourist destination, just a regular mall.  It was very impressive and modern, quite up-scale, 5 stories with the supermarket on the 3rd floor.  They have long slanted escalators which allow you to go up and down with your grocery cart through the mall to the underground parking.  We checked out some of the shops (some US brands but not all), grabbed a quick lunch and did some grocery shopping.
The thing that really caught our imagination was the Sushi Restaurant on the bottom floor.  We first spied it from 3 floors above and had to take a minute to figure out what it was.   There was a long conveyor belt carrying along small red and blue plates with plastic bubble lids on them.  Patrons simply took what they wanted to eat off the belt and paid according to how many plates of each color they accumulated.  The prices seem to be around 3 euros per plate (roughly $4.50).  There were lots of Japanese people at the restaurant, so we are guessing that the food was good.

In the evening we decided to once again head out - this time to the theatre.  We picked a place about 17 km from us, not in the heart of the Dublin but out in the suburbs, so that we could once again practice our driving skills. As we venture further afield in the car, we are finding navigation to be more difficult.  We have a GPS but it has let us down a couple times - couldn't seem to even find the town we wanted to go to last night.  We also have a great set of detailed maps of the Dublin area but they are a few years old and there have been major highway improvements recently that the maps don't show.   We eventually got to the theatre after almost an hour of what should have been a 20 minute trip.  Not bad, I guess, considering.  The theatre was across from a mall, where we figured we could grab a quick bite.  Well, that part of the plan didn't work out too well.  What wasn't closed already when we got there at ten of 7, closed at 7.  Our only choices were McDonald's and KFC.  We did the honorable thing and ate at KFC.

The show we saw was a wonderful farce, "Don't Dress for Dinner".  We had seen it many, many years ago, but didn't really remember it.  It was in a what looked like a brand new theatre.  The cast did a great job - Irish accents were very convincing!  A very enjoyable evening.  The theatre crowd was predictably an older crowd, like in the US, despite the fact that the Irish population is heavily weighted with younger people (more than 35% are under 25).

One thing that is hard to get used to is the length of the day.  The sun comes up around 5:00 in the morning and sets around 10 pm.  It was strange to come out of the theatre and have it still be quite light.  I had been worried about having to drive home in the dark (Larry had driven over), but that wasn't a problem, obviously.  I think perhaps we are finally on Irish time now - eating and sleeping at normal times.  It took about two days.