People says you can tell the city from its taxi drivers - taxi drivers in Dublin are in general nice and friendly, they drive their own car and work for themselves. The one from airport is very handsome, but not talkative as I expected. The lady on the first working day can't find the way even after I showed her the map I printed out, but she is very active giving me sightseeing suggestion and write down all the place names while she is driving.

The first day sightseeing is to the north coast and Malahide castle. For a person never seen a castle, it's pretty good. The driver and commenter is very humorous and a good singer. The north coast is beautiful but it's a pity that we didn't have time to stop at Howth. Otherwise, I will highly recommend this half-day tour operated by Dublin Bus.

After a short break in the hotel, I spent the afternoon visiting Ireland National Museum and National gallery, free to public and good collections. It's just so happened that night I read on news that Shanghai museum is also going to be free to public, big improvement and the way it should be!

Grafton shopping street is only a couple of minutes walking from hotel, so I spent my evening there before the stores are closed. Had a 3 euro McDonald dinner while having fun watching the pedestrians on the brick-paved no car street and many street performers.

Dublin leaves good impression for me on the first day. Neat city and nice people, good place to live if the house is not that expensive.

By the way, there are Chinese people everywhere, in airport currency exchange, gallery café and hotel staff. One Chinese girl told me there are 60,000 Chinese working in Ireland now.

(blogging during the commercial break of American Idol Season 7 day 2 Dallas audition)

Jasmine's story:

Jasmine spent her 1st in the states with us and her 2nd year in Shanghai with the grandparents. As a result she is confused and didn't start talking until she is almost 2 years old.
Towards the school age, we let Jasmine took the gifted program test when she was in Kindergarten. She passed the first round, but failed on the 2nd round on vocabulary :(
Now she is in gifted program, even though her reading level at 3 grade already reached 6.1(one month into 6 grade). her writing is still below average in her class, the teacher made an easy comment: "do you speak Chinese at home? then it's pretty normal for bi-lingual family. I won't worry about it." :)

Justin's story:

Justin was mainly speaking Chinese with our family and our nanny. I was worried by the time he is about to enter preschool and intentionally picked a Montessori school with one Taiwan teacher and one Singapore teacher in the classroom. Many thanks to those 2 teachers, his transition to school life went very smooth and he picked up English in less than 3 month. But the problem is: after a couple more months, he told me: mommy, I don't know how to say this in Chinese.

So I finally realized at certain time I will be either worried about my kids' English or their Chinese, I should just let it go, let them be themselves, no matter it's ABC or banana or a true bi-lingual.