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Notes -
Notes on Europe (Dublin, Northern Ireland, Marseille, Paris, Edinburgh). I was recently in Europe for two weeks, mostly in Marseille. It was my first time in six years and my first time in these particular countries. The most notable thing is how thin everyone was. I rarely saw a fat person. The contrast with the US is incredibly stark.
Dublin and Marseille are very dirty with lots of garbage everywhere. Marseille in particular has a lot of garbage and grafitti. Belfast is much cleaner than Dublin. Paris is very clean. So is Edinburgh, though I was there only very briefly.
Most things in all these places are very expensive. Gas is double what it is in Canada. Food in restaurants is extremely expensive, especially in Dublin and Edinburgh. Hostels were surprisingly cheap, but regular hotels were very expensive.
Scottish people are really nice, even (maybe especially?) airport staff. Irish bus drivers are some of the rudest people I've ever met.
With the exception of Paris, I found the transit systems in all these places hard to figure out.
French restaurants are staffed very inefficiently, with a lot of staff just standing around doing nothing much of the time. This is in stark contrast with Canadian restaurant staff who always seem to be rushing, probably busier than is optimal since it's always hard to get the bill.
The price being the price in restaurants and stores was really nice. I loved not having to worry about the sales tax and the tip and usually not having to round $x.99 up to $(x+1).
The Irish countryside with its huge green hills is incredibly beautiful. I've never seen so many cows in my life.
Marseille is chaotic. Cars are parked all over the sidewalk. The level of disregard for the rules of the road was almost third world. Mopeds are very popular. The streets are narrow. France, in general, is really bad at signage. They somehow manage to screw up basics like arrows pointing where you need to go.
In Marseille, a lot of people just sit around on the front steps of buildings they don't live in. They didn't look homeless. Lots of French people sit around in cafés with cigarettes in the most stereotypically French pose imaginable.
The local Marseillaise accent is very strange, though many people didn't have it. People were quicker to assume I didn't speak French than in Quebec, but not likely to deal with this by switching to English. They usually didn't speak English unless they were in a very touristy area, in which case their English was often excellent.
The majority of the population in Marseille seemed to be North African or Middle Eastern.
There were some nice places to hike or swim just outside the city, but most of the beaches were not very nice. They were small and crowded with pieces of wood and seaweed everywhere.
People in Europe are much better dressed than in Canada, especially Parisian women. I found it notable that it rained in Paris and almost every single person was carrying an umbrella (which they don't seem to know how to avoid whacking people in the face with). I'm from a rainy place where most people don't bother with them.
Unfortunately, lip injections are very popular with British women. Don't they know how awful they look?
People seem to love drinking in Dublin. The area around Temple Bar is crazy on a Saturday night. The bars were packed, the streets were full of people, and unlike back home, most people are visibly drunk. There were a lot of signs in the city informing you where alcohol wasn't allowed. There were a lot of methheads in Dublin walking around like zombies in the middle of the day.
Finally, I suspect the Irish wouldn't like to hear this, but Ireland seemed very British to me. It felt like I was on a BBC TV show. I haven't been to England, but I got the impression Ireland and the UK are much more similar to each other than either is to any other anglophone country (though I've only been to Canada and the US), at least on the surface.
There is a lot more I could say, but I think that's it for the less expected observations.
P.S. Since I was on dating apps the whole time, maybe I should comment on that. I usually get a lot of good matches at first when I go to a new place. This was very much the case in Dublin and Paris where I matched a lot of beautiful women right away. I had a much harder time in Marseille, and Edinburgh just doesn't seem to have very many good looking women, though I did eventually match some beautiful women in all these places.
I love uncensored travelogues like this. Just random observations, like who is getting abnormal amounts of cosmetic procedures, who is engaging in petty theft by not tapping on when boarding public transport. I made that last one up, but you get my meaning. Otherwise you get boring Youtube clips that focus on politically correct, sanitised observations.
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This was also my impression of the country when I've visited it (both Dublin and Belfast. I was too polite to mention it to my Irish (often very republican) hosts, mostly. However, it's very hard to encounter, say, the two faucets and not immediately think "Oh, so English".
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