Madhu K R's Weblog

First day experience in Ireland

Ireland Trip   
    Sun and EMC was having a mutual training program on each others product.
SUN was giving talks on Solaris 10 features and EMC were training us on SRDF and powerpaths.
As a part of this exchange of information, I got an opportunity to visit EMC's Ireland campus.
I generally do lot of reserach about any place and do some preperation for any of my trips.
I didn't have much time to do any of  them for this trip because I just came back to bangalore on 30th July  from my 10 days long Valley of flowers trek
and had to leave to Ireland on 1st Aug 2006 at 6 am. Little time in Bangalore went in preparing slides for my talk at EMC.

So started this trip with my passport and tickets. I didn't even buy Euro currency. I thought I could live with my credit card.
I was accompanied by my colleague Sanjeev. We had to travel to Cork via London. We took a direct flight to London from British Airways.
The flight journey was good. As usual I slept thru most of the journey.

We landed Cork at 3.30 pm local time. we came to know that there was a 24 hour taxi strike as soon as we came out of the airport.
We checked at the information centre in the airport. They told us that there are some local bus available which will take us to Cork city centre.
Both of us didn't have any Euro currency. Sanjeev had some US dollars and wanted to convert them to Euros. We check in the airport.
There was neither a bank nor a travel agent to convert our currency in that terminal. We again went back to Information centre for the help.
The lady told that this terminal was inagurated on the same day and they don't have any banks here. We had to walk down to old terminal (which is about 10 minutes walk) to get currency. Sanjeev went to the other terminal and got the curreny changed.

Luckily we got a Skylink Bus which had a board saying "City Centre and Hotels Directs". We thought that this bus would drop us to our hotel "Oriel House Hotel" and boarded the bus. Driver told that this bus will not go upto Ballincollig and will drop on the way which is closer to the hotel.

The Bus got of Airport and was about to enter City when we met an accident. I am not sure whose fault it was.
Our Bus was on the left lane was going straight. A Ford Mondeo from the right lane came and hit our Bus. Both the vehicles were at very low speed.
There was a "Dhud" sound and a stop. Driver got down to see the damage. No passangers were hurt.
 We waited for about 30 minutes before Police (Gardai)  turned up. The first thing the police office did as soon as he came to the venue was to come into the bus and check if everybody is OK.
I was impressed by the police. This is very unlike of India. I don't know what agreement happened between them, after 10 minutes our bus left from that place.

Now we got into a bad Traffic Jam. It took more than 1 hour to move 1 mile.
The driver dropped us at a bus-stop (just after city centre) and told us that we could get busses to Ballincollig from that stop.
We waited for 30 minutes. We saw 2 Bus went past us without stopping. Later we checked with another localite. He told us that this stop is for local bus and we had to board an intercity bus to travel to Ballincolig.
He told us to walk back to City centre and board a bus from there.

It was another 10 minutes walk from there to city centre. We again waited at another bus stop in  Washington Street. But no bus this time.
Finally  called up the hotel tocheck if they can help us in some way. Receptionist of the hotel told us that she will arrange for a taxi. We were relieved then.
A  cab came for us after 10 minutes and by the time we reached Hotel it was 7.30 pm.

Certainly it was not the kind of First day we wanted in Ireland. I hope our next few days will be good here.

Posted at 09:50AM Aug 03, 2006 by madhu in travel  |  Comments[1]