IT's the little things, like nobody worrying too much when someone turns up late, that make me feel at home in Ireland," says Esther Prades, a 20 year old English literature student from Valencia, with a teasing smile at Jesus Gadea, who had arrived a few minutes late for our appointment at the English Language Institute in St Stephen's Green.
Jesus, a 28 year old business student from Barcelona, counters with a story about how a group of American, Dutch, Spanish and Irish students had arranged a dinner date in Dublin recently, and the Irishman had turned up a whole hour late. He would never do that.
Despite the torrential rain and glowering skies outside the restaurant window con this August afternoon, both Esther and Jesus are extremely positive about their time in Ireland. They go so far as to declare that they would be happy to live here if it weren't for three things the weather, the food and the fact that most Irish people's early bedtime, by Spanish standards, means there are few late night buses.
The last of these criticisms is the first on the agenda. Esther and Jesus who stay with families in Ballinteer and Monkstown respectively, are enthusiastic late night, even all night, socialisers in the city centre's pubs and discos. In Spain they would normally leave to go out "on the town" at around 10.30. Here they start with the natives two hours earlier, but are unhappy that a 3 a.m. last bus at weekends (and a ridiculously early 11.30 p.m. on weekdays) limits their nocturnal enjoyment.
"I want to go home when I want, not when the bus company tells me," says Jesus. In both Barcelona and Valencia buses run all through the night, with more in the summer when the tourists are around.
They are resigned to our bad Irish cuisine. Jesus dislikes the Irish reliance on frozen and fried food, and misses Spain's delicious feast of pies, hams and sausages. Esther thinks that if she lived here she would be able to find places offering a wider choice of products. They both remark on the huge arrays of chocolates and candies in shops, and the fact that Irish children seem to eat sweets all the time".
When it comes to their feelings about Irish people, they are a Bord Failte advertising executive's dream. They recount classic tales about Dubliners going out of their way to bring them to where they want to go and showering them with offers of drink.
"The Irish are very open to foreigners, unlike many English people," says Esther. She spent some time in Cambridge, where she found that she and her fellow Spaniards were welcome in the local pub during the week, but it was made clear they were not wanted when the regulars turned up in strength at weekends.
She finds it easy to meet young Irish men, too. This reporter wonders if that might have something to do with her striking good looks. No, she answers quickly every Monday night she meets three Dublin male friends in a pub, where they spend their time talking about history, music and poetry. Romance doesn't come into it.
Jesus is struck by how young Dublin women in pubs and discos initiate conversations with the opposite sex, something which would never happen in Spain. "I am 28 years old and this is the first time in my life a woman comes up "spontaneously and talks to me."
Esther says that Dublin is more liberal than Spain in this. "If a girl did that to a boy in Spain he'd think this girl wants something." In Spain, even in the cities, teenage girls still under the influence of conservative Catholic parents are thinking about long term relationships, possibly leading to marriage, when they eye a boy they fancy in a disco. In contrast she thinks Dublin teenagers, even young teenagers, are more open to having sexual encounters.
The more conservative Mediterranean attitude is there when it comes to clothes too. Even for this informal rendezvous with a reporter, Esther is neatly if casually dressed. In Spain, she says, girls want to dress well, to have expensive clothes. Their contemporaries in Dublin would he scathing of such pretensions, preferring to dress down, grunge style.
Perhaps surprisingly, both young Spaniards say they have had little contact with drugs during their stay in Dublin. Esther believes there are more chemical drugs like Ecstasy in Valencia than here. Jesus, while admitting that he would not be tuned into who is and who is not taking drugs as he would be in Barcelona, says in a neighbouring seaside resort like Sitges people smoke joints openly in bars and discos. He has not seen that here.
They have found no anti Spanish feeling in the Irish capital. Both of them sympathise with those locals who find noisy groups of unsupervised Spanish teenagers on buses and trains bother some, although they point out that similar groups of Irish 15 year olds abroad would behave in a similar fashion.
Jesus remembers being annoyed by a group of clamorous young Spaniards at Paris's Eiffel Tower it's because of such groups that Spaniards get a bad reputation.
They find Dublin's famous litter problem no worse than in Spanish cities. They think Irish people get drunk no more often than Spaniards, although in Spain the drunks tend to be younger. They love the wide nightly choice of live music in pubs although Jesus finds Irish traditional music a little repetitive after the first five minutes.
Despite last month's bomb scare in O'Connell Street, the threat of violence from the North doesn't worry them Jesus points out that it was only a few weeks since an ETA bomb exploded at Tarragona airport, south of Barcelona.
All in all, they love Dublin. "It's not particularly beautiful. But it's a nice size, handy and friendly," says Esther. "It's very lively at night, particularly Temple Bar, with a good atmosphere of people in the pubs and out in the streets. It's a little like Spain everyone talking and laughing, dressed casually, nothing very elegant."
She must like it. After studying here for five weeks last summer, she went to Edinburgh this year. But now she's back in Dublin for four weeks' holidays. The handsome, austere Scottish capital doesn't appear to rate very highly in the European "partying" stakes.
