Flour Power

What happens when you wake up and realise it’s a great sun outside?

If you live in Portugal, you close the drapes and stay inside because it’s probably too hot outside.

If you live in Ireland, you get dressed immediately and go outside to be a “human sunflower” and do the monthly photosynthesis… And that’s exactly what I “had to do” today…

Because, the weather is not always bad (just 90% of the time…):

Looking forward for the rain to come back tomorrow…

I guess this explains why I keep complaining about the weather here in Galway, when compared to Lisbon, my hometown…

Morning: Nice temperature and sunny. When I woke up at noon the sunlight was peeking into my room and the weather looked really nice.

Afternoon: In an attempt to enjoy the nice weather, I went out for a stroll and a visit to the farmer’s market. It’s there every Saturday and I had never checked it out, for a multitude of reasons (read: hangover). The weather quickly turned into something gray, with some wind to make things worse.

Night: Rain. It’s not pouring, it’s just that annoying rain, but it’s rain nonetheless. It makes you wet. And if you wear glasses, you won’t be able to see a thing after a couple of minutes.

Just goes to prove that you can’t plan your day according to the weather conditions in the morning…

Yesterday was the end of my first week here in Galway, and I think a brief summary is in order. I’ll jump to the fun part in a moment because I don’t want to bore you with the work details. I just want to mention that I’ve been very well received by my boss and all the co-workers, and that the work is running smoothly.

Now for the fun part, some numbers:

• 10+ street musicians, including: a saxophone player, a guy playing acoustic guitar under a shop’s door frame, a guy playing Green Day’s “Basket Case” on an electric guitar (with some kind of portable amplifier), and some blokes with a drumset!
• 6 pints of Guinness (I plan on keeping a counter on these);
• 6 pubs visited;
• 0 zebra crossings spoted;
• 100+ girls with short skirts spoted, even though it’s always about 5ºC and raining most of the time;
• 5 minutes of sun exposure;
• (X – 5) * 0,9 minutes of rain exposure (approximately), where X is the total number of minutes I spent on the street;
• 0 square centimeters of dry asphalt seen;
• 6 Portuguese people met;
• 6 trips to the supermarket (that’s what happens when you don’t have a car to carry everything in one go).

And since I like statistics, I started using Buxfer to register all the money I spend and get reports that will help me understand where all the money is going, because otherwise I may go bankrupt from all the money spent on vegetables and fruit… I’ll post some results of this experiment when I have some more data.

I’m also promising to share some of the hundreds of short skirts with you all, as a special “gift” to those living in countries much warmer than Ireland and still the girls have more clothes on than an Eskimo (yes, Portugal is in that group).

Over and out!