Mostly Fun Irish Facts

Here are some mainly fun facts we learnt in Ireland. Let's start with sheep: they are colour coded! 

The codes are for many secret things, but mainly ownership, since these dashing muttons are fleeing! Also, this is how wide the roads are, but luckily we didn't make any grave driving errors.

We learned many facts about Guiness, such as the proper two-step pouring rule, for proper bubbling. Also, throughout a whole week, Mark only split the G once:

A snug was where you hide women in a pub, and then give them half pints of Guiness so that they can be discrete and virtuous. Nowadays this is quaint, because no one oppresses women at all anywhere.

Many pubs have traditional music, or trad music, not to be confused with trad wives. This involves fiddles, flutes, the mystical uilleann pipes which seem better than bagpipes, and my favourite, the squeezy box (mini accordion). We were too shy to take pictures, but we did get a free traditional tuna sandwich.

Arguably less fun fact: this is the former security around a pub in Belfast. They only de-caged you once you're proven to be safe, somehow.

Speaking of safe, the Europa hotel is the most bombed hotel in Europe. What about, say, London in WW2, you may ask? Well, once buildings were bombed, they didn't get re-bombed as much, says my fact checking.

Back to funner facts. Here is Irish curry! It comes in slimmers and squeezy!

Irish candy is fantastic! They like the sugars, and in flavours of clove and cinnamon.

This is my candy face.

This is an Irish breakfast, and it is very brown. But for diversity, they have a black and a white pudding. We had lots of delicious food, but my favourite was Guiness bread, which I photographed zero times.

I've saved the funnest facts for last!

We visited the illustrious town of Muff, but unfortunately Muff Liquor was closed.

And finally, this is Irish Jesus. He is very fair, his anatomically questionable (sacred) heart is on gory display, and he sometimes has a light to prevent sinning. This is why children are afraid.

Sometimes he is surrounded by floating baby heads.

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Happy Singapore National Day!

Today is Sinagpore's 61st birthday and we were lucky enough to get tickets for the National Day Parade (NDP)!

This is what it looks like!

There are over 2600 performers (which I calculated with math while Barry did not)!

If you're an outstanding citizen, you get to stand on these really cool floats, so I have a new life goal now.

I have a few partners in the cat rescue world who are worthy, I think.

My favourite was the dugong because dugons are fabulous.

As a systems person, I also loved the crowd management. Thank you, volunteers, look at that crowd all fitting nicely into the subway!

Happy Birthday, Singapore, and thank you for welcoming us and being our home for 19 years!

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Polish Art Trolling

We went to Wroclav, Poland to see the trolls. Turns out that they prefer to be called dwarfs.

There are over 1000 in Wroclav, which is not pronounced as something that sounds to us chumps like "Crashclash".

Anyway, some look quite wise, others not so much.

They have their own homes and everything.

And hang around the city doing various activities.

The dwarfs seems to suffer from the same gender imbalance issues that the smurfs and Paw Patrol do, so the ladies are treated extra well.

It is a nice break from the religious art, which often seems disturbing, like this.

It is a very sculptury town!

Perhaps you are wondering what else there is to do? Well, we ate all of the pierogies, which were amazeballs.

But all I only took pictures of this guy and of the sauerkraut being sold by the bucket, which seems optimal.The town also features a video game museum, so I reminisced about Little Professor.

And Barry tried to look cool while hunting ducks.

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Centaurs, Communism and Skating at Easter

A late update, but we went to Prague in March. This is great timing because they had Easter markets, and here we are trying the local delicacies.

We were there for the figure skating word championships.

It was fantastic, but our pictures look mostly like this.

So let's focus on more fun stuff! We went to the Museum of Communism and here is Barry with Marx.

I think you have to be serious in the Museum of Communism, like this.

Communists made mosaics, which in this case resemble some pandemic paint by numbers.

In addition to communism, the statues (Atlantes) seemed to suffer many burdens.

There was a lot of sculptural suffering.

This guy is trying to feed a pill to a cat, and I know how he feels.

Here are Barry and Andrew posting in a fancy doorway, as you do.

We went to the library, and it was beauteous.

But the only book we were allowed to see was this one? It seems to be labelling the anatomical and other parts of a rather short centaur.

Here are some pictures of Czech historic figures, many of whom supported their pious celibacy with bad haircuts.

To take a break from the heavy culture and history, I took Barry and Andrew to a miniatures museum.

This is what they thought of that.

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