Romabout

The Roma have all left the roundabout (albeit at the behest of the authorities). I'd better call my architects and tell them to stop drawing up those plans, it was clearly just a fad.

Housing Development Gone Mad

Unintentionally funny story on the RTÉ website. It's not the content of the article itself, but rather its RSS feed description that tickles my funny bone

A family of Romas [sic] who are living on the M50 roundabout in Ballymun have been subjected to racist attacks and slurs.

Imagine:
John Tinsley
12 Red Cow Roundabout Close,
Dublin 22.

It'd be awful trouble trying to back out of your drive-in...

Tourists? Here? Nahhhh

I was in Valencia for a little while over the last week, and on the Saturday my girlfriend and I decided to take a day trip to Castellón, a small city about an hours train journey north. I had a mini-itinerary which basically consistited of the names of a few places to visit which I would locate upon obtaining a map at the tourist office and possibly asking a few questions of them. I itended to find my way to the tourist office by means of a photo of a map of the city I took at the train station (I already knew the address). So we trundled off and arrived at the office 20 minutes later at approx. 14:10 and alas it was shut. I'd half expected this as it was siesta time and the city was practically deserted on the walk there. So we looked for a timetable in the window to see what time it would reopen and were horrified to find that it wasn't to reopen again until 10am Monday morning!!

Ok, I understand that many public services only operate in the morning in Spain during August, but this was mid-July. Surely close to, if not the high-season for tourism in the area, especially considering the massive Festival Internacional de Benicàssim was just around the corner and takes place a tiny bit further up the road. Regardless of this, when are tourists most likely to visit this place? Especially on day trips? Tuesday at 21:30 when the tourist office is open? Monday at 10am? No, I'd say it's probably Saturdays and Sundays...when the bloody tourist office is shut!!!

Maybe it's my own fault for not knowing that it would be shut at this time and not getting there earlier, but in my defence, I found the address of the office on the official site for tourism in the Comunitat Valenciana. And is it such a wild notion that I expected it to be open at some stage in the day? But anyways, we ended up navigating the city by way of the photo of the map on my camera and found it quite an agreeable place. It was just a bit irksome trying to figure out which of the bell towers was the bell tower I had intended to check out!

(P.S. I suspect this post has been in some way influenced by the fact that I've been reading a lot of Bill Bryson recently :-)

Appendage to my first ever second post

My brother received the following recommendation from Amazon:

Amazon recommends "Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution" by Stephen Cosgrave
We recommend the items above because you purchased or rated: Barrys Irish Gold Blend tea bags 80ct

Firstly, yes my brother did buy tea bags from Amazon. Apparently 5 minutes is too long to have to walk to Tesco ;-)

But seriously, Amazon needs to fix the algorithm that finds relations between these items. Or at least the metadata they're using to describe them. If you yourself, dear reader, have received such emails, do let me know.