After a couple of days in Dublin I moved to Ballina a small village on the Shanon River, placed oposite to Killaloe. In fact both town and village form a one body joined together by old stone bridge. The valley of the river and hills above it are very beautiful, but… this town is at the end of the world.
Internet access is almost unavailable for somebody who stays here only temporary. There is no Internet Café. There is no public HOT SPOT in any place. It is strange because Killaloe/Ballina Marina is full of expensive yachts, and sailors have their laptops on boards.
The same strange experience I got on Huston Station, where I found O2 Wi-Fi zone, unfortunately, I couldn’t buy a special access vouchers, so the access remained denied.
I have a GPRS card in my laptop, but unfortunately Irish Mobile Networks haven’t known that it is profitable to assure to their customers pre paid GPRS access – sim data cards. It seems that Poland is far far further than Ireland in developing internet and communication technologies, because I have a unlimited GPRS internet access in every place of Poland for only 15 Euro / month.
Internet Access in Poland is really much more simple and easy than in Ireland.
Here is some pictures of Killaloe and Ballina, and some views from my new excavation site.
Marina in Ballina
Marina in Ballina
Marina in Ballina
Shanon River
Bridge that links together Killaloe and Ballina
Ballina, houses on the hill - the place I am living at the moment.
Old channel in Killaloe
Streets of Killaloe
Shanon River
View from excavation site
For the last couple of months on Polish internet forums a question of Irish thieves has been discussed. The most often reported thievery is a couple of Irish guys in the car trying to sell on the street expensive notebook Sony Vaio for only 400 Euro, or other electronic equipment like digital cameras or mobile phones. Those guys in a car are operating mostly in Dublin and surroundings, and the procedure is very simply. They stop the car aside of you, and they are trying to sell expensive notebook. You can touch it, you can even check it how it works, then they are put it into the notebook case/bag and when you are counting the money they change the bags and you get a notebook bag with Argos catalogue or 2 cardboard boxes of milk for 400 Euro.
They have been seen and reported by many Polish people, and luckily only a few of them have been fooled. Of course those who wanted to buy stolen goods have been taught a lesson, but it seems that some Irish try to make easy money and they asume that Poles are completely naïve.
Published at September 20, 2006
in blog.
After 3 hours of flight from my home city Lodz I have arrived in Dublin.
Everything seems unchanged, but there is no more road works at O’Connell Street at last!
For a last couple of years, in Poland we have been watching appearance of beer brands inspired by Irish stouts and titled after Irish cities. Thus some of the smaller breweries produce beer called Cork (made by Lodz brewery), Dublin and Belfast. They are not like real stout, in fact they have nothing similar to Guinness, Beamish or Murphy’s Stout. They are dark beers but they are much more like strong lagers.
They taste quite good but they taste heavy and for sure they are not so refreshing like good Polish lager or pint of Guinness.
Anyway, it is a very good example of Irish influences in Poland and how magical is Ireland in many Polish minds. As I wrote long time ago (2nd post on that blog), Ireland have been very popular and famous in Poland due to its music, legends and beer of course.
It seems that due to a number of articles desribing the scale of the emigration, Polish goverment is going to answer the needs of the citizens and to solve the problem of decreasing and growing old population.
They have realized that our emigration to the West has both good and bad sides. The good one is deceasing unemployment rate, but the bad one is the lack of specialized professionals here in Poland, and possible problem and inefficiency of Polish pension system.
In the opinion of Polish government the first attempt to keep people in Poland is to offer better salaries so as it is not profitable to emigrate. Thus they increased the minimal legal salary to 936 PLN (zlotys) per month, which is… about 235 Euro per month. It is still less than a minimal legal weekly wage in Ireland.
The ideas of our government are simply ridiculous and there is still no even glimpse of ideas how to decrease expenses of our bureaucracy. It is clearly visible that our government is not really interested in real solutions but only in pretending they are taking care about us.
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