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Sobo my arse — 9 Comments

    • Heh!  That is weird but strangely compelling.  The perfect illustration of twenty-first century yoof.

  1. I can see where you're coming from. These large developments always end up as soulless places.

     

    Nostalgia for cobblestones is mental though. They may look nice and olde worlde but they are a terrible paving solution. They are expensive to put in, expensive to maintain (read: are not maintained properly, resulting in gaping holes in the road), are uneven under foot at the best of times and slippery when it rains. Not to mention that riding a bike on cobblestones is a nightmare.

     

    Oh and you don't roast hops, what you smelled was either roasting barley (unlikely as I think Guinness stopped malting their own grain even before your time) or the wonderful malty, roasty smell of a massive batch of stout in the offing.

    • My memory of cobbled streets was mainly of the back streets in the old part of the city.  Of course they replaced them all with glass like surfaces and then had to put speed restrictions in place because people drove faster.  If you want to know what was far more irritating than cobbles, it was the tram-lines.  I was forever falling off my bike while crossing those.  The Luas lines are probably as bad but I haven't tried cycling on them!

      Whatever the smell was, you couldn't miss it.  Depending on the breeze you could smell it from many miles away.  It was an integral part of the city, and usually managed to smother the smell from the Liffey!

  2. Yea, I too did one of those google nostalgia visits to my home turf, and like you,was met with a sterilized parks and garden area, full of signs saying "you will NOT do anything here except walk". Gone are all the back streets I grew up in, apparently bulldozed and the people moved out to new builds dotted around the town,it seems the best way to rid an area of a bad reputation,is to knock it down,plant grass,rename it, and spread the folks around the town. The only place left now is "memory lane". Very sad.

    • Welcome, Elwyn.  Indeed, they call it progress but there are times when I wonder.  And as you say, everywhere you look there are signs screaming "must do" or "must not" everywhere.  No parking, no drinking, no smoking [naturally], turn left, turn right, no entry – the list is endless, and very confusing.  The one thing all these refurbishments lack is character.

  3. While you are on this topic, look at pedestrianization. Firstly, business owners hate it but have you ever noticed that all the tiles are the same? I wonder who won the tender to provide all the tiles for the pedestrianized walk ways in the country? I was actually in Ennis last week and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they still had the bricks down. 

    • I don't know what it is about them but those pedestrianised areas aren't to my taste.  I suppose it's just a belief that a street should be a street and not acres of paving. 

      They have a great system in France where they pave the lot but put a smoother strip down the middle.  Cars can drive through [on the smooth bit] and pedestrians have right of way.  It works very well, as cars [and buses] travel through at a snails-pace.  Because the road and pavement are all one, there is less of a feeling of "them" and "us", and an air of mutual respect.

  4. I took a look at the SOBO site you mentioned and caught sight of what looked like the leaning tower of Dublin. "The Convention Centre Dublin" they call it. I searched out and found the site for then place and good god! Talk about skewing one's perspective.

    It's probably a good thing that I'm rather far away from my old stomping grounds as I'd hate to see the changes since I'd been there last. Google Earth show me enough. It's also good that my stomping grounds cover more than one single place, much of which took place under the ocean.

     

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