GeoCaching & Taxi Strike

What an excellent game Uncle Alan introduced to us recently! It’s called Geocaching, involving enthusiasts using GPS coordinates to track down concealed boxes of little treasures hidden by other Geocachers. It really puts in some wee-fun into simply hiking or a walk in the numerous parks around UK.

Some Geocaches are even brazenly placed in public areas such as train stations hidden from the prying eyes of “muggles” – non-Geocachers”, using techniques such as magnets behind phone booths. This necessarily involves a security risk though, for Geocaches in such locations as be easily mistaken for bombs. Anyway I’m inspired enough to consider getting a GPS device and jump on the bandwagon!

In other news, we encountered our first union strike in Europe. Thank goodness the whole of Dublin didn’t shutdown. We simply found the taxi stand deserted as most taxi drivers went on strike, campaigning for a cap on issued taxi licenses that had flooded the city, and eating into their earnings. We were lucky enough to source a vehicle eventually through the good people at the airport customer service.

This is apparently a non-official strike which isn’t synchronized between the 3 taxi unions, and not all taxi drivers are obligated to participate in. That’s what we learnt from our driver when we met him at the customer service counter. I wonder if he’ll get mobbed by other tourists or heckled by fellow striking taxi drivers if we met him at the taxi stand instead. So from a pragmatic point of view, it’s probably not such a bad thing that our unions are Singapore are pretty much toothless. But then again, if you really need to fight for fair wages if you’re exploited, who can you actually turn to?