A Wee Little Difference

It turns out that Ireland isn't the same as the U.S.A!

I (Michael) have been mentally cataloging the everyday differences; here are a few:

Check out the line of grocery carts to the left. The little doohickey on the top of each one is a coin deposit! You have to put a 1-pound coin into the slot and then the cart will detach from its neighbors. To get your pound back, you have to reattach the cart to its neighbors.

What you need to do in this situation is wait four hours for the last cart in a line. Then no deposit needed because your cart is just standing there all by itself! Ha ha, that would outwit those tricky Irish.

It's nice having a different accent for situations like these. When I asked a woman going into the store how to work the carts, she could immediately tell I was just an ignorant American and was happy to explain. She told me about another grocery store which has some electronics built into each cart. If the cart goes beyond the parking lot of that store, its wheels freeze up!

One of my favorite Irish (or at least non-American) ideas is how they work their stoplights. At an American red light, I'm one of those people who crane over to see when the cross-traffic light turns yellow so I know when to go. No need to do that here because of this photo on the right. That's what lights up when the cross-traffic is getting their yellow.

Another idea, relevant to power savings: they have an on-off switch for just about every electrical outlet we've seen. If you want the outlet to work, just flip the switch. Now you don't have to worry about your various cable boxes draining power during the 20 hours per day you're not even using them.

I often hear that Europeans are shocked at how overweight we Americans can be, but it doesn't seem like the Irish are some kind of fit and trim super-species. They're a potato eating people just like us. Nevertheless, they do tend to package things in smaller quantities than us. That's the largest peanut butter jar you can buy, above. And you can't get anything larger than a liter of milk here. For crying out loud, we Americans buy and sell soft drinks that are twice the size! Also, their eggs come ten to a box! It never occurred to me that this would be possible. Come on - a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs - I thought it was written into human DNA that eggs were twelve to a package. The only problem with all these wee little jars and packages is that they only make wee little meals, as you can see below:

Oooh boy, those girls are ticked! At least, that's what I told them to act like when I posed the photo. Tess has got looking mad down a bit better than Kaia. This doesn't come as a surprise to me.

Michael