Now, hear me out. I'm not going to trash talk my own country without cause. Honestly, we could take some ideas from them. We're both countries trying to become more efficient, and America needs quite a bit of help.
First off, the plumbing here makes so much sense. Low water pressure everywhere, and two different pressure settings for toilets. Water is not constantly heated here. You have to manually turn on the heater, and in these dorms it is on a timer, so we irresponsible teenagers don't forget about it.
Transportation is completely different. Bike lanes are everywhere, bus lanes are everywhere (even though bus drivers can be totally rude). Buses are number one for cross country transport. We keep passing ones with labels like Wexford and Belfast as well as ones within Dublin City.
Regarding the eco-friendly, recycling bins are everywhere. Lights are automatic and motion detected, and the hall lights turn off automatically after ten minutes. All the individual light sockets need to be turned on before use.
Also, they're not afraid of lawsuits or terrorists. Construction equipment is not bright, obnoxious orange but soothing, helpful blue. Glass Nutella jars here wouldn't be unusual to us, but America has overprotective plastic ones which probably originated from somebody suing the Nutella corporation. There is also no metal detector to get into Parliament. Just verification of I.D. is needed to get in.
So really, they're not perfectly efficient, but we're even worse, and we could stand to do way better. At least the folks here are trying to do better with the new UCD residences (dorms). They still use gasoline and cars a lot of times just like us for daily commutes. They don't use solar panels or anything like that as far as I can tell. But we can and should work together to do better.
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