Patrick in Spain

Posts Tagged ‘Food’

We got to Dublin early this morning around 7AM. Unfortunately, this was a little too early to check into our room, so we had to do something to kill the time. Even though we couldn’t officially check in yet, they let us eat the complimentary breakfast, which was nice. I wasn’t too tired, but after breakfast, most everyone else took a nap on some couches in the lounge. I guess I mostly just checked email and wrote the Liverpool post. Speaking of the Internet, there was free wifi in the building and the rooms, so big score there.

I finally woke everyone up from their nap around 10:30 AM when it was time to go on this free walking tour thing they had. We followed this redheaded Irish guy around for 15 minutes where he mostly just talked to one person. It was kind of terrible. Then, we actually arrived into a big crowd only to realize that what we just experienced wasn’t part of the tour, he was just getting us to the beginning of the tour. So, we adjusted our disappointment meters back down and gave him a second chance. Fortunately for us, it was awesome from that point on. The guy was really entertaining and shared a lot of facts about Irish history. He made some jokes about the Irish not being very good at naming things or planning, but all of his stories were really good.

Apparently in Ireland, they don’t say “What’s up?” or “What’s going on?”, they say “What’s the crack?” While crack does also refer to crack cocaine there, unless you’re using it in a drug related context, crack typically refers to fun or a good time. In many of his stories, Ireland “called” some other nation (obviously a jest in some cases since they wouldn’t have had phones at the time). Every time he did that, it was “Hey Spain, what’s the crack? What do you think of the English?” or “Hey Germany, what’s the crack? We think we could use your help.” So, we all found that pretty entertaining.

The tour ended up being rather long and afterward we went back to Jacob’s Inn, checked in, and took a nap. The room was a 10 person room, but our remaining two roommates wouldn’t be checking in till later that night. There was one bathroom + shower in the room, and there were couple community bathrooms + showers  in the hall, which was rather convenient. By the time we got out again, we were really hungry. We stopped at this Georgian (as in the country) restaurant where they had a student discount and had all you can eat. It was totally delicious, and we certainly ate our fill.

I was starting to get a little burnt out on people after spending the past week in close proximity to 8 individuals, a couple of which I found that I didn’t quite see eye to eye with, and I needed to call Wachovia one more time about a fee that seemed incorrect, so I went to the lounge downstairs, which was quiet at the time. After I got all set up, I made my call. It turns out that the fee was supposed to be there, unfortunately.

I chilled out in the lounge for a while and played couple games from Kongregate.com, which is a pretty easy way to waste time when you’re feeling a bit brain dead. I might’ve watched something from Hulu or the major network channels, but those don’t work over here. Bleh, stupid licensing. Anyway, I was enjoying the quiet when a lady lead  herd of children in to watch a movie on the big projector screen. I still wasn’t quite in the mood to head back yet, so as I played my game, I watched most of Johnny English. I’m not really sure how those children choked it down, but it seems that they actually enjoyed it. It’s a spy movie parody starring Rowan Atkinson of Mr. Bean fame. The movie was dreadful to say the least, and I don’t know that I’d even consider exposing children to it. IMDB’s rating of 5.7/10 is generous, and I think it deserves closer to a 4.7/10.

On our last day in London today, we went back out to Westminster and saw the Westminster Abby. It was really nice from the outside, but because we had limited time and it was a bit more costly than I expected, we didn’t go in.

We went to a local restaurant just down the street from the abby. The other guys had more generic stuff, but I got the shepherd’s pie, and it was pretty awesome. I guess I should’ve taken a picture of how awesome it was, but I ate it too quickly and we were trying to beat the train strike.

I’m going to come back to the strike, but before we headed to our final stop, we visited the train station where part of the Harry Potter movies was filmed. They have a little thing set up for Platform 9 3/4, and Jason, Ben, Conrad, and I took some pictures looking pretty dumb.

So, on to the strike at the Metro. This story is pretty crazy, in my opinion. The workers of the London metro are pretty much all union members. They decided they weren’t getting enough pay, holidays, etc., so they informed the city that they would be striking today (June 9, 2009). The city and the union started having talks beginning, if I recall correctly, last week. Until yesterday, everything was going fine, and London was meeting pretty much all of their demands for increased pay and all that. What happened yesterday is that the union demanded that two fired employees be reinstated. Not such an unusual union request, you might think, but you’d reconsider if you heard why they were fired.

The first guy the union wanted to reinstate was fired for opening the doors on the wrong side of the train, as well as lying about having performed safety checks on the train. The second guy was fired for suspected theft from the Metro, and he will be on trial for said theft at some point this month. So, London, of course, couldn’t agree to that, so they didn’t. Thus, tonight at 7PM, they struck (or is it striked for this type of strike?). There were all kinds of advisory warnings to be off the metro by 7, so we made it to our last metro stop by 6:30. By that point, the trains had already been getting a bit packed. Our train to Liverpool wasn’t scheduled to be there until 8, so chilling out in the lounge was in order until it our train go to the platform.

Another story in the paper that I found amusing was one about the Obama family sans President Barack. Apparently Michelle and the kids visited London some time recently. The British paper that I was reading had a nearly half page article abot the Obama ladies eating a local pub. The paper, hiliariously, took an offended tone that the First Family ate at a local pub rather than at some high class restaurant. It even went as far as to make drinking puns such as “Mich-ale” and “O-bar-ma”.

We spent most of the day today in the Natural History, and we managed to still not see the whole thing. It’s really, really awesome and has a ton of exhibits. I can’t even imagine how many square feet the place must be. I took a ton of pictures, so check them out when I get them uploaded. I got a couple gifts for people that hopefully I’ll be able to mail back. If I can’t, then I’ll just deliver them when I get home.

After we got back, we eventually settled on Indian food at a restaurant called Raj of India. I had a spicy chicken dish, and we split some pita bread and different curries.

It’s getting a little too close to time to leave for me to do a whole post, I think, but I did want to put out my travel details so that people would know where I am when, so here goes.

Itinerary:

Bus:
Barcelona to Girona Airport
Departs at 8:30am – Arrives at 10:00am

Flight:
Girona (GRO) to London Luton (LTN)
Flight FR3769 – Sat, June 06 – Departs at 11:55am – Arrives at 1:15pm

Hostel:
St. Christopher’s Inn – Hammersmith
Check in: Sat, June 06 – Check out: Tues, June 09

Train:
London Euston Station to Liverpool Lime Street Station
Tues, June 09 – Departs at 8:07pm – Arrives at 10:20pm

Hostel:
Hatter’s Liverpool
Check in: Tues, June 09 – Check out: Thurs, June 11

Flight:
Liverpool (LPL) to Dublin (DUB)
Flight FR443 – Thurs, June 11 – Departs at 6:30am – Arrives at 7:20am

Hostel:
Jacob’s Inn
Check in: Thurs, June 11 – Check out: Sun, June 14

Flight:
Dublin (DUB) to Reus (REU)
Flight FR1116 – Sun, June 14 – Departs at 12:15pm – Arrives at 3:45pm

So, I’ve been making a lot of chocolate milk this week. I got a bottle of the Cacaolat brand chocolate milk, and I really enjoyed it. It’s more chocolatey than typical U.S. brands, but kind of expensive for the amount of it you got. So, instead, I’ve started getting UHT white milk, which isn’t initially chilled, can sit on a shelf for up to a few weeks, and is cheaper, and I got a kilo (2.2lbs) of chocolate Cacaolat brand powder. The milk is just as good as the bottled chocolate milk, and I get a lot more of it for significantly less money. Unfortunately, the chocolate milk is so delicious that I went through a liter of it in two days, so I’ll probably have to back down on that a bit.

We went to McDonald’s this week, too. It was interesting. I’ve since seen a few more McDonald’s (though still only eaten there the once), and they’re actually nice on the inside, about on par with typical American Starbucks. We walked by the National Theater on the way back. I’d definitely be interested in seeing something there. It’s a very nice, elegant building.

My entrepreneurship class is going pretty well at the moment. I hope we work on some more of our companies and products stuff over the break, but I have some guess that we probably won’t. It’s really excited me to want to start my own company after I graduate, so I suppose I’ll have to take that option into account once I get back home.

We started covering the Fourier Transform in algorithms, and it looks pretty neat and relatively useful. I couldn’t quite execute the algorithm after just the lecture so far, but I’m looking forward to forward to hearing some more about it and how it works. The gist is, as we’ve covered it, that you can somewhat easily go from a set of points to a polynomial and back. I probably won’t go into it in the kind of detail that I covered some of the other algorithms because it’s so prolific, you could probably understand enough of it from a source like Wikipedia.

In Computational Photography, we covered High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging. First, some examples. The idea here is that there is a lot of color lost in images, especially outdoor ones. Regions of an image come out too bright (super white) or too dark (super black) because of various reasons involving your lighting. If you want to get all the color in all the regions, then, you have to take multiple images (unless you have a very, very nice camera) at different exposures. After that, you take the pixels from each image that aren’t over or under exposed, and you generate a new set of pixels from them. That new set is your new image with color in all the right spots.

Lastly, I tried to make lemon chicken the other night. It went over pretty well, but I didn’t have any white wine. I think that would’ve added a lot to the flavor. There’s some good and cheap white wine sold down at the Mercadona, I just have to remember to pick it up before the next time I attempt to make the dish.

It’s hard to know where to begin speaking of the events of yesterday, but I guess the beginning is the place they usually suggest, so here goes.

I can’t say we quite scrambled, but there were a number of things I needed to get that I still had not gotten. So, we went to Dillard’s and got some Ecco slip-on leather shoes and a sport coat, then to Best Buy to grab an electrical converter/adapter (Onix, my hotel, uses outlets that look like this, type F plugs. Much of Barcelona appears to use these as well.) since they also use 220 Volts instead of the 110 that we use. I also bought a Canon Powershot SD790 IS. So far the camera is great, the software it comes with is great, and the photos come out really nicely. It autocorrects for motion, so I was able to take photos just fine even on a moving bus.

Speaking of photos, I’ll be posting them as soon as I’ve configured some kind of photo gallery software. I looked at 4Images, Coppermine, and Gallery, and I’m sure Chris would be strongly recommending Gallery, but I’m just not feeling it. So, since this is WordPress, I looked for a plugin, and I think I’m going to settle on PhotoQ. (Edit: See End of First Week)

Anyway, after I gathered my stuff, it was a little later than I wanted it to be, but we made it to Hartsfield pretty quickly. I breezed through security without any trouble and headed up to Gate E7 to wait. Brian and I talked for a second while I checked in, then we headed for pizza at one of the airport shops. We made it back just after Zones 1-6 had loaded, which was great timing since Brian was Zone 7. I waited another 10 minutes and Zone 9 loaded.

The plane ride was rather long at 9 hours, but I was able to keep myself more or less entertained. Each seat had a screen in the back of the headrest that was a touchscreen and there was a headphone jack in the armrest. It was all On-Demand style, so I watched an episode of Law and Order, one of Law and Order: SVU, one of Family Guy, the movie Taken, and the movie Quantum of Solace. (Taken was good if you like that sort of action movie. Quantum of Solace was not nearly as good.)I read Physics for Future Presidents for the remaining couple of hours, but I was feeling more motion sick from reading than I normally do.

We landed around 8:15AM Barcelona time (Barcelona is GMT + 1, and Georgia is typicaly GMT – 5, so 6 hour difference). The plane unloaded on the tarmac and we were bussed back to the terminal. We were escorted to the busses from the plane by 8 people with breathing masks on, which was kind of odd. We got into the terminal and went through security which just took the H1N1 influenza forms and stamped our passports.

From the airport, we got on charter buses and rode to Onix, our residence for the time we’re in Barcelona. The room is nice, and I’ve been describing it as the room you would get if a small condo and a freshman dorm had kids. There’s a market just around the corner with set up like an open air market on the first floor of the building (not actually open air since it’s inside the building) and a regular grocery store on a lower floor.

Brian, Ben, and I spent most of the rest of the day wandering the city looking for places to buy phone plans, electrical adapters, and food. We had little success in the directions we were given and probably walked quite a few miles before eating back near Onix. I eventually learned from Eric and Katie that there was a store called El Corte Inglés that has pretty much everything. It has 12 floors and contains a restaurant, a grocery floor, an electronics and toys floor, kid’s clothing floor, men’s clothing floor, women’s clothing floor, youth clothing floor, accessories floor, appliances and hardware floor, and enough other stuff to fill any floors I couldn’t remember. There, I slightly overpaid 13 euros ($19 US) for an extra adapter. I was told by and English-speaking employee when Ben was looking for one that voltage converters are illegal to sell in the European Union, but I can’t seem to find any mention of this online. For the record then, El Corte Inglés does not sell volatage converters.

The day was about 36 hours long because of the time change on the flight, so I crashed pretty hard and started writing this the next day.