School Sports Day and Lidl

On Tuesday, we took our older daughter to her new school to meet her teacher and see her classroom, etc.  Her first “real” day is tomorrow.  They had a “sports day” today, with kids doing all sorts of games / sports like basketball, badminton, etc.  Despite my research suggesting no gains to Catholic school on many dimensions, my daughter is enrolled in one.  They are hard to avoid in Ireland, and they are subsidized.  Ireland has a voucher-like system that many of my right-leaning former colleagues in Kentucky want.  It was amusing to see a bunch of small children running around trying to do sports in their school uniforms, which for 4 and 5 year olds is a polo shirt and track pants.  The uniforms get worse as the kids get older.

After that, we went shopping for food at Lidl.  Lidl and Aldi are owned by the same parent company as Trader Joe’s.  So the store has many of the same fine qualities as TJs: good food at low prices largely due to a lack of name brands.  However, the décor of Lidl is pretty much nonexistent.  It’s an ugly store, and employees are endangered species.  But, again, the food is good and the prices are really cheap.  I’m looking forward to trying all the obscure beers I’ve never heard of, many from Poland in honor of its role as co-host of the Euro 2012 soccer championships.  I guess Ukrainian beers aren’t as popular.

My only accomplishment of the afternoon was to find a place to send a fax so I get the Irish equivalent of a social security number.  And I registered my Leap card, which provides access to various forms of public transit in Dublin (bus, light rail, commuter rail).  It’s like the Oyster card in London or the Clipper card in SF or whatever it’s called in Hong Kong.  In fact, my trip to a Centra convenience store to “top up” my card reminded me of stopping in 7-Eleven in Hong Kong.