Where's the Bean?

It's amazing how some small task that takes me no time at all to do at home can somehow stretch to fill an entire Dublin day. Yesterday morning I set out walking as I usually do - on a mission of some combination of errands and tourist attractions and the occasional cup of coffee - and 8 hours later, my legs walked off me, I was only semi-successful in my errand running and soaking wet from an afternoon rain storm. I was looking for things that I thought would be simple to find, black beans and nice paper for my CV (along with a few other things that I did actually find easily.) I have seen all the great and small grocery stores in this city, from the highfalutin' Marks and Spencer to Tesco to Dunnes to the smattering of Asian grocery stores and even the Afro-Carribean grocers on Moore street who sell plantains and green lentils but no black beans. I went to the hippie health food, vitamin, store and the Indian market which had a huge array of spices and nan bread and other good things but no beans. The moral of the story is, Don't try to make any form of Mexican food if you happen to live in Ireland. Not only are there no black beans but there are no red beans and no pinto beans and no one, absolutely no one goes Goya in this place. I'm thinking of charging you all one bag o' beans as entry fee to my apartment when you come visit...haha.

Also difficult to find is the Irish equivalent of Paper Source or Pearl. I hit up every stationary store this side of Belfast and turned up Shite, absolute crap paper. I did find out that there's a fancy pants paper store in Dublin 8 but this was only after hours of walking and it's on towards a somewhat sketchy neighborhood that you wouldn't want to hit up after dark. I ended up buying some sort of okay, sort of resembling "cement" colored, Paper Source paper from the stationary store next to my apartment. It will have to do. Of course, I did come prepared with some lovely Paper Source paper from home but I did not account for this whole European A4 sized paper thing. I have lots of fabulous letter sized paper which is about as useful as an American dollar is in these parts. Everything really is just a little bit different.

Other than being black-bean deprived, all is well in these parts. It's actually sunny outside after a very icky, rainy, Sunday and mediocre Monday. Had lunch with Tommy Boy in the park and now am going to brave the world of European laundry for 8 euros a load. Wahoooo. Domestic bliss it is not. Someone give me a job please!

Hope you are all well.