This week has been insane!

As I mentioned in my last post, we headed out for the company Christmas party this past weekend. The Christmas party was held at the beautiful Lyrath hotel in Kilkenny. There are so many people at the company that we couldn’t all be put up in that hotel, so we were spread across four different hotels in Kilkenny for the night. Darse, Xan, Diane and I headed out on Friday afternoon to Kilkenny and stayed there on Friday night so we could see a little of the town the next day. We joined several other people for a nice dinner at the Lyrath. Post dinner, we spent a fair amount of time hanging out and socializing in a bar in the Lyrath. By the time Diane and I caught a cab back to our hotel (the NewPark Hotel), it was three in the morning!

We slept in the next morning, and finally got out to explore Kilkenny a bit. It was a crisp afternoon that felt very much like morning, even though we didn’t get to Kilkenny Castle in the afternoon. There was a bit of fog in the air, and the green grass was covered in some light frost. Kilkenny Castle was a pretty formidable structure, but we didn’t get a chance to explore inside since we had missed the latest tour and the next one was sold out. Since we didn’t have time to wait around for the tour after that, we walked down main street in Kilkenny to see some other sights.

One of the places we ended up in was the Black Abbey, which we almost went by. We walked along and were taking a few photos of the outside the church, and were about to move on when a lady passing by stopped and told us that it was “really quite lovely inside”, that it was “open anytime”, and that is was her “favourite church in town”. That was quite a recommendation, and we became a bit more curious about finding the entrance. It was indeed open, and it was breathtaking. The church featured several very large and very colourful stained glass windows that shone very well in the afternoon light.

The afternoon was rapidly disappearing though, so we needed to get back to our hotel to get dressed up for the black tie affair that evening!

We arrived at the Lyrath dressed up and ready to party. The hotel lobby was already filled with people chatting, helping themselves to the appetizers and wine that were being served. At roughly 6pm, the company poker tournament began — a super speed poker tournament where 4 employees formed a team at one of 8 single table tournaments. The winning team at each table took down €1000 to split amongst themselves. Unfortunately, while my team did well, we finished in second. We bubbled, as we say in the poker world. That is to say, we finished in the place before they start paying out money!

Dinner was scheduled for 8pm (which gives you an idea how fast the poker tournament went) so we were hurried to a huge room with 55 ten person tables set up. Diane and I sat with the Biotools guys, who were flown out for the Christmas party! Nice perk huh? Dinner was a 4 course plated affair: chicken caesar salad, potato and leek soup, either a stuffed chicken breast dish or a steak dish as the main course, and a dessert. It was pretty good!

After dinner there was several attractions: they had a DJ getting the dance floor hopping, there was an open bar all night long, and they brought in some Cuban cigar rollers to demonstrate and hand out the results of their work. The party went super late, with an afterhours bar open until 4am! By the time Diane and I got back to our hotel, it was after 6am. It was an epic party!

We drove back to Dublin on Sunday afternoon and took the rest of Sunday to recover a little bit before starting back to work. But the party didn’t stop there. The Biotools folks were still in town until Thursday morning so we had to make sure they enjoyed their time here. So we proceeded to go out for dinner on Monday, over to Aaron’s place to hang out and play foosball and nhl ’09 on Tuesday, and to the Rockfield pub for poker and trivia last night. I am some burnt out after all this hard partying, but it has been a lot of fun too.

In last night’s poker tournament, I managed to catch a good run of cards and turn them into a first place prize for a tidy profit. It’s not that often I win a poker tournament, so that was pretty nice. The tournament started out a bit rocky when my full house ran into a bigger one. Whoops!

So it’s been a crazy busy week! I’ve got a bunch of photos to catch up on, so look to see those up soon. I think there’s a few worth looking at.

Hope everyone’s well, and looking forward to whatever Christmas plans you have. On our plate? Getting ready for our trip to Austria!

Morgan

Gee, it’s been a little while since our last post. Time has been moving right along for us, and it’s hard to believe we really have been here for four months already! The big news this week was our friend JR was over in England for a work trip and managed to get a few days off to come visit us in Dublin! So we had our first houseguest here. Unfortunately it was in the middle of the week and I felt too guilty to ask for both days off so I just got the Wednesday off.

JR arrived Monday afternoon and Diane met him at the airport so he didn’t have to worry about finding his way to our place. On Tuesday, Diane and JR wandered through downtown Dublin catching several of the attractions down there including Trinity College, Dublin Castle, and the like. They really did a lot of walking and sightseeing! On Wednesday, we took JR to a museum, the Guinness storehouse tour, and the Jameson distillery tour. We got to the distillery for the last tour of the day and it was pretty neat. There was only a handful of people there for it and as a result we all got to do the taste testing of Jameson whiskey next to Jack Daniels and a scottish whiskey. Add to the taste test our free glass of Jameson, and we had a pretty good buzz going after those tours!

We just saw JR off to the airport this morning. I hope he enjoyed himself :) It was pretty surreal to see him here!

Outside of that, we’re getting excited about the Christmas party. It’s just a couple days away, and it really does sound like fun. We’re going to go down on Friday evening and stay that extra night so we can see a bit of the town before the party starts in the evening on Saturday. It should be a good chance to get some more photos.

The past few weeks have been pretty busy for us, but we have managed to get out to do a few things too. Diane and I went and saw the Book of Kells the previous weekend. The book was pretty neat, but the real attractions for me were the information on how much work went into making the book (and books in general back then), and the view down the Long Room which is the library on the upper floor of the building that the Book of Kells is in. Today, it’s easy to take for granted the availability of books, but back then the amount of work that went into copying and binding each book guaranteed that there really wasn’t enough for everyone.

This last Saturday, we joined in with a very large group of people to help wish Aaron a happy 30th birthday. It’s a good thing that their apartment is HUGE, or there’s no way we could’ve crammed us all in there. For this party there was a team event where teams of four competed against each other at various gaming events: Rock Band on the Wii, NHL 2009 on the XBOX, and Foosball. I got conscripted onto a very strong team (including the birthday boy himself), and we eventually went on to win the competition. It was pretty fun!

So that’s a taste of what we’ve been into. Hopefully I’ll get a blog entry in soon after the Christmas party so you can hear about that!

Morgan

It’s a little crazy to think that we’re fast approaching three months in Ireland! It’s been a big move, and we totally miss seeing the people we’re used to seeing all the time. Thankfully, with this being the internet age, we’re able to video chat with people. If you’d like to hook up with us on the video chat, we’re on skype and AIM. Give us a shout and we’ll organize a time to meet up. It’s been pretty nice to be able to chat with both Diane and my families back home.

Anyways, back to point form updates (since I’m tired and it’s time for bed):

• Last weekend Darse and Xan got us out of our house to go check out Kildare. The main attraction there is the Irish National Stud which is a thoroughbred horse breeding operation of apparently some fame. (I don’t exactly know much about horse breeding, but I learned some). We did a guided tour of the grounds, and saw some of their stallions. The most expensive one’s stud fee comands €75,000! The grounds there are actually quite lovely, and we got a chance to check out a couple of gardens — a Japanese garden, and Saint Fiachra’s Garden. I got quite a few photos that I’m actually quite happy with, and it was fun to get out of the city!
• Work has started to get busy. Lots of projects are under way now and I’m starting to get into the thick of things. There’s still a few moments where I don’t feel particularly useful, but on the whole it’s starting to feel like I’m settling in okay. Lots of stuff to learn though, that’s for sure! This week, we released a new version of the software which introduced matrix tournaments. They’re a new format of poker sit and go tournaments, but you play 4 tables at once. Not only do you compete for individual prize pools on each table, but how you do at each table contributes to how you rank for the matrix tournament as a whole. I haven’t had a chance to try playing one yet, but it’s a pretty cool new feature.
• There’s been quite a few nights spent late at the office playing games. In addition to playing poker with Chris Ferguson, he’s stuck around a bit longer to play some geeky board games with us. So there’s been a few late nights of Ticket to Ride, Blokus, Medici, Aquaretto, Carcassonne, and other fun board games. Chris really liked quite a few of them, so hopefully he’ll be back soon to play more of them with us.
• Thanksgiving isn’t really celebrated here, so we were a bit envious of the food our families were going to be enjoying this past weekend. It’s a bit weird not spending thanksgiving with the folks. It was nice to be able to chat with family over the weekend though!
• The desk that we ordered from Argos came this week, so our place is getting a little bit better organized. We also got blinds several weeks ago, so our home is starting to feel a lot more like home.
• The weather here has actually been quite good for the past couple weeks. There’s been some rain, but not as much as we might’ve been led to believe. As a result, we’ve had a chance to take in some rather pretty sunsets, and some beautiful weather for walking around a bit.

That’s all I can think about from this update. Be sure to check out the photos from our visit to the Irish National Stud!

Morgan

I tried to get a blog post written here a few days ago, but I had to restart my computer, and while I though I had saved the draft post I had written, it appears to have disappeared. Whoops! So here’s a quick update of what’s transpired in the past little while.

• Our stuff arrived! Earlier this week, a truck pulled up at our place and delivered a pile of boxes that we had shipped from Canada. Some things we were missing a lot were our box of board games, the kitchen knives we got as wedding presents, and my computer. We haven’t really gotten unpacked yet, but that should happen in the next few weeks.
• Last Saturday, we attended an end-of-the-world themed party. Aaron and Christine threw a really great party at their place. The original theme was based on the LHC warming up to create mini black holes, but it seems it was mistimed for that purpose as the LHC ran into trouble last week delaying the end of the world.
• Darse and Xan are moving, so Diane and I have been helping them a bit with the move. Truth be told, Diane’s been much more helpful than I. All I did was help Darse with a couple of large heavy items.
• Work has been progressing well. I’m slowly getting more comfortable with parts of the codebase, although it’s going to take awhile to get fully immersed. It’s been fun so far, and quite a challenge, but I feel it’s been pretty rewarding and I’m pretty excited about a couple of the coming projects I’ve got to work on.
• The weather here has been gorgeous the past few days. Lots of clear sky and sunshine. It’s starting to cool off at nights though — down to 5 degrees celcius or so at nights.

That’s all I can think of for now. It feels like we’ve been busier than that.

I hope everyone back home is doing well!

Morgan

One of the things we unfortunately missed out on in our move to Ireland was the Edmonton Fringe Festival — an event that we’ve faithfully attended at least a couple of shows every year for the past couple of years. We’ve had some good memories of watching shows like the One Man Star Wars Trilogy, The Great Pretenors, and Rainer Hersch’s Victor Borge.

So we were rather enthused to find that Dublin had its very own fringe festival soon after our arrival. On Saturday, we checked out a show called All in the Timing which was playing in the theatre in Bewleys. This restaurant was the first place we ate on our first night in Dublin. We shared that meal with Darse, Xan, Mike and Marja.

All in the Timing was a fun show. They did about five short-ish sketches of varying amusement. The first of which was probably my favourite where they did a sketch similar in style to the improv game “new choice”. The scene started with a woman sitting at a table in a restaurant reading a book and is approached by a man who asks if the seat is taken. He makes several missteps and gets several bad responses before finally getting to sit in the seat across from the woman. After each misstep, a bell rings and they go back in time to redo some part of the scene. It was quite humorous throughout the sketch.

The did a couple other neat sketches including one where a woman comes in to be taught a new universal language. The man she sees talks in a weirdly bastardized version of English, using other english or nonsense words in place of other english words. As the scene progressed the woman becomes fluent in this new language and the two spout several joyous sentences of this new language that sounded remarkably like ridiculous lyrics to some well known musicals. It was quite a fun scene.

In another scene, the actors did a very short skit involving people meeting by random chance at a bakery. They then did a several song musical using just the words used in that skit repeated in a musical way. It made a weird sort of sense, and I think was quite a bit more enjoyable in experience but a bit hard to explain.

So that was our first Dublin fringe show. Tonight we saw our second show which was a circus/burlesque show called La Clique. It was a bit on the racy side, but definitely a thoroughly enjoyable show.

Highlights from the show included:

• Two British men in suits who did several feats of strength including holding each other up. One man stood on the other’s head, one man used the other’s legs like they were gymnastic rings, you know, simple stuff like that.
• A woman gets four hula hoops going around her body at once in various forms.
• A double-jointed rubber man calling himself “Captain Frodo” contorts himself through 2 tennis racquets: a 12 inch one and a 10 inch one.
• A man in a bathtub full of water whirls himself in the air using two long straps suspended from the ceiling. This was probably my favourite — the guy did the whole thing choreographed to music, and included a jaw dropping manoeuver where he spun the straps around his arms and legs to ascend to near the ceiling, but stopping at intervals to flash a pose timed perfectly with the music. The manoeuver was incredible for strength and flashiness to begin with, but timed with the music it was absolutely amazing.
• Ursula Martinez performed this little magic trick (warning: nudity, NSFW).
• The rubber man returned after the intermission to stack a series of buckets on top of a piano while balancing on top of them. Each bucket was smaller than the previous one until he was down to a small coffee can which he proceeded to sit on and then tuck his feet behind his head. I don’t want to know how many times he’s attempted this trick in practice and fallen.

In between these, there were several fun bits in between. A guy calling himself the Queen of the show (because he’s a big Queen fan) juggled and rode a unicycle to some Queen songs and provided a bunch of entertaining banter. “Captain Frodo” used a saw as a musical instrument in a song that also involved a piano, an accordian and some little bells.

All in all, an enjoyable show! The fringe continues for the next few days, but we might not make it out again since the upcoming weekend looks a bit busy.

One last thing before I head for bed here. I finally caught up with photos from our recent treks. Have a look if you are so inclined!

Morgan

One of the things that I never really expected coming out here was how much it would be in a living-the-life style. Let me see if I can give you an example of what I mean.

A couple weeks ago, one of the co-presidents of the company was leaving the company to focus on other things in his life, so we had a huge farewell party for him. The entire company was invited out to a Cuban-themed bar called Floridita which the company had booked entirely. In addition to the canapés that were distributed to us throughout the evening, the event was open-bar to a dazzling array of some pretty fancy cocktails. It was a pretty fun night, filled with many mojitos. We found our way home via taxi cab at 4 in the morning, and slept in for a little while, but not for too long …

The very next night, we were invited to the other company president’s house for a bit of a smaller party. I’m not entirely sure why I got an invite actually, but I was happy to go. There we were treated to some appetizers prepared by the company’s chef, Allan, as well as a fridge full of beer and other drinks. The appetizers were something else … they were visually stunning, and amazingly tasty. The highlight though was the mini-burgers. These were the most incredible things I have tasted in quite some time. They were freshly prepared burgers with freshly ground beef — which meant they could be cooked rare, which they were. These were the juiciest, tastiest burgers I think I’ve ever had.

After a relatively quiet week or so, the server team went out for a dinner last night. We started at a Tapas restaurant where we proceeded to order one of everything off of the extensive menu. Loads of tasty food were delivered to our table which we enjoyed immensely with a couple of bottles of wine. After the meal we proceeded over to a bar where we met up with some coworkers and proceeded to have even more drinks.

This has all been fun, but I understand the company Christmas party is supposed to be something else. We just got the news of what will be going on there, and it looks sweet! The entire company (some 300+ employees) and their spouses will be taking over an Irish town for a night. Since the company is so large, we’ll be scattered across the town’s several hotels, and be shuttled in to the main event where we have a black-tie affair with fine food, drink, and prizes. It sounds like an amazing time.

I knew that the company was generous, and concentrated on making the employees enjoy their time, but I never quite expected the treatment we’re getting. Frankly, we’re getting really spoiled — and it’s pretty incredible.

Morgan

This past weekend was pretty fun, and now I’m fairly well set up as far as my new household (I have a household!), I can’t pretend I have much excuse for not blogging occasionally.

It was a pleasant weekend all through. We started off on Friday having some supper with our neighbours from upstairs. It was nice to get the skinny on their favourite places to eat and share stories from home and about our experiences in Ireland so far. I’m really glad to have these folks around. So far, they’ve helped us figure out how to work the boiler and the washer/dryer, and provided pleasant company too!

Saturday was a games party at Darse & Xan’s. It was a lot of good old fashioned fun, with all kinds of tasty snacks besides. There was Ra, Medici, Carcasonne, Blokus, and RoboRally (I love to be the “TrundleBot” – I’m so gleeful it exists!), culminating in Taboo and Apples to Apples that were good for the whole group to play together. Oh yes, and we got to see for ourselves that Darts and Xan aren’t kidding about the size of their spiders.

Sunday was glorious – the weather was lovely and warm, and it held the whole day. Morgan and I took ourselves over to Dun Loaghaire harbour. My intention was to enjoy the sights and sounds of the Festival of World Cultures whilst finding the farmers’ market, but neither Morgan nor I anticipated how many folks would be taking advantage of a sunny summer day. Everyone and his dog was out, riding the midway attractions or buying things from stalls or watching the many musical acts on the outdoor stages (or watching the ticketed shows – it sounds as though there was a pretty decent line-up in general). To me, it most closely resembled the Children’s Festival, which graces my hometown of St. Albert every spring.

We found the People’s Park and the farmer’s market and something to munch as we trundled though the crowds. (I told you I love to trundle!) We moseyed (dare I say it) down to the shore taking pictures and kept going down the east pier, the weather inviting us to linger there awhile. There was someone making a perspective painting – if you stood at a particular point of the decorated sidewalk it seemed as though you were standing in a glacial crevasse.

Not only was it perfect weather for festivals and street paintings, it was also a very good day for a hundred sea-bathing junkies to participate in the Annual Harbour Swim. It looked a little chilly with everyone in normal bathing suits, but I must admit I was impressed. I mean, not that bog snorkeling isn’t cool too.

Diane

Sorry for the lack of updates, folks. Diane and I have been pretty busy the last week as we get settled and acclimatized. It’s late here, but I’m wired and still wide awake so I think I’ll try and catch you up with what we’ve been up to this week.

I forgot to mention in my last post that not only did we go to the Powerscourt gardens with Darse and Xan, we also climbed up Killiney hill. I hope to get photos of both the gardens and the hill soon, but that probably won’t be for a day or two at least. Thankfully, that’s all I’ve got for a backlog of photos now so I’m almost caught up!

So what’s happened since then? Well we got a bank account open, and it looks like it was in time to get paid into, which is nice. We’re awfully grateful for Darse and Xan’s help and advice. It’s helped smooth our transition into the country waaay more than we expected. It’s almost been too easy on us.

We’re now mostly settled in our new place, although there’s been some hiccups. We had to go without hot water for a few days until we figured out the system. Apparently if the thermostat is turned off, the boiler doesn’t turn on. It took us a week to figure that out. I don’t know why it’s done that way, but my conclusion is that the Irish don’t like hot showers in the summer (when the heat isn’t on in the house). Weird.

The other couple of things we’re waiting for is our laundry machine doesn’t appear to work, and we could really use some curtains. Our place has some pretty nice big windows, but they aren’t exactly good for privacy when we want it. Other than that, we’ve got internet, and pretty soon we’ll have a bank account with my first month’s pay in it which we’ll use as a time to start picking up things that our place is missing.

The week pretty much flew by. At work, I’ve been tossed in to start working on some features already. The codebase is huge and a little confusing, but I can tell that this job will be pretty rewarding. I feel like I’m learning at a pretty good pace, and hopefully they’re satisfied with how I’m doing so far.

On Wednesday evening, there was a party at a bar one station away from our place. I left work late and met Diane there, and we hung out with a bunch of pocket kings employees, had dinner and a few drinks. It was a pretty fun night. It was trivia night, but the guy asking the questions was from the company. So that was a bit neat. As usual, I was pretty useless for any trivia knowledge, but it was fun to be a part of it.

Thursday night there was an office poker game and geeky-games night. I played in the poker tournament, but got knocked out before the money. I felt I played alright, although I think I made a few errors in a couple places. Diane came by too and played a couple of board games with Darse and some of the other pocket kings guys.

So I think that about catches you up with the activities from my point of view. At some point soon, hopefully Diane gets a chance to share her little adventures.

Before I finish off here, I just wanted to jot down some general notes about our experiences here so far:

• The weather here has been pretty good in general, although there’s been a lot of rain. In fact, record amounts of rain. There was a day where we ventured out of our place and on our way to the mall we got absolutely dumped on. The streets were flooding and people were drenched through.
• The Irish are much more dependent on street markings that Canadians. It’s something I never really thought of, but because of the large amount of snow in Edmonton, the street markings can’t be the sole markings for major roads. But here, where snow is rare and doesn’t stick around, they can afford to put the markings right on the road.
• Also, the roads here all seem in amazingly good repair. What I realized is that Dublin must not suffer from the same pothole problem that Edmonton has to deal with. Since the temperature here is so temperate, and there are days that the temperature drops below freezing, the freeze-thaw cycle that causes pot holes isn’t an issue.
• The LUAS is an amazing transportation system. It is fast, reliable, and they’ve built a tremendous amount in a short time. It opened in 2004, and in just 5 years, it’ll have networked an amazing number of stations. By this time next year or so, they’ll have added another 10 or so stations — which should take me straight to work.
• Speaking of work, I love my job. The work is good, and they treat us very well. The daily lunches are fantastic. Gourmet quality food, and tons of choice and variety every day. Lunches cost all of €0.10, and breakfasts are free. For breakfast, the kitchen bakes fresh croissants that are absolutely amazing.
• My spot in the office is a “cubicle” in the server team area, and I have a very nice view of a small duck pond, and some distant mountain. On the downside, there’s a children’s daycare right underneath my window, so for most of the day I can hear the screams of some very powerful little voices. It is a bit annoying, although I’m told that you stop noticing them after awhile.
• When it rains here, not only do worms wriggle out onto the sidewalks like in Edmonton, but they are joined by snails and slugs — both of which are quite sizable in some cases. It’s a bit weird!
• Everything here is done to a smaller degree it seems. When Diane and I went to the supermarket, it was a bit weird not being able to bulk-buy kleenex, and shampoo, and those sorts of things in the quantity we’re used to. It’s rather interesting to me. Another example is the pop cans here are 330ml instead of 355ml like in north america. Not too sure why the differenece.

That’s enough for now. There’ll be lots more to come as we experience new things. We’re not too sure what’s on for this weekend, but I’m sure we’ll be up to a little bit of fun stuff.

Oh a note about pictures. The gallery link at the top of the page and on the right side of the blog are a link to a cached copy of my flickr photos. If you don’t see new photos that I mention, it’s because I forgot to go click the refresh cache button. You will be able to see photos I mention on my flickr photostream (also linked on the right). There’s probably a better solution that that, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

Morgan

Okay so Diane and I have now had a couple of days to spend exploring a bit and getting our feet wet in Dublin. It’s been fun so far, if a bit confusing and bewildering at times. What did we do over the past two days?

On Monday, we slept in as much as we could. This time around I’m having a bit of an issue coping with the jet lag — both sunday and monday night I was wide awake around 2am Dublin time. I’m not exactly sure why, but it was a little bit annoying. Sleeping in was nice though, and we didn’t get ourselves moving until well after 10am on Monday morning. We scouted the area right around the apartments for a place to eat and settled for the Spar, which is a little convenience store which had some fresh food that was actually quite good. We each had a sandwich freshly prepared for us there. Not so bad!

Our next stop was to get some basic groceries and supplies for our stay in our temporary apartments. For that, we went to a store called Dunnes which at this location is kind of half grocery store, half fashion/department store. The grocery section is quite extensive with just about everything you might want to get, so that was pretty nice. The weirdest thing about it? They stock their eggs on an unrefridgerated shelf. Weird.

Dropping our groceries off at the apartment, it was time to take a look at some apartments to see if there was anything promising available. The source for new listings is http://daft.ie, and we spent several hours looking through the listings and making some reservations to see some places over the next couple of days. Our search is primarily on the southern light rail train line called the LUAS. There are two LUAS lines, the red and the green. The green is the southern one and the red is up north cutting vaguely east to west. They are not connected though, so you have to hop off one and walk to the other. Both Diane and I are in favour of an LRT-like experience, and the LUAS is very close to giving us that.

Afterwards we ventured forth to Darse and Alexandra’s place for dinner, games, and a little bit of chatting about our next steps. We stayed late enough that we missed the bus back to our apartment so we had to catch a taxi back in a raging thunderstorm. While those are apparently not that common in Ireland, we kinda felt at home — the pounding rain and the thunder was so similar to the summer thunderstorms that we got in Alberta.

This morning the plan was to get up and head out in search of a mobile phone for us to be reachable. So after having some breakfast, we returned to Dundrum mall, where we walked between the three main mobile phone dealerships here (Vodafone, Meteor, and O2) and eventually selected a pay as you go plan with Meteor. It kind of felt like the Fido of Ireland, although we could be mistaken there.

In the afternoon we had appointments at 3, 4 and 6 to see some apartments. Having spent awhile debating mobile phone plans, we hastened to our first appointment to check out two apartments. They were really quite nice — brand new, never before lived in suites with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Nice, but pretty pricey, although I’m not totally certain we’re going to find a place that will be much cheaper and in a good location. Oddly enough, our second appointment was in the same building (we figured that out late the night before, but figured it couldn’t hurt to take a look at more suites in the same building. Turns out that the second guy was going to show us the same two suites! Huh.

We checked out some more places and then headed downtown to find a place to eat. We ended up back at Bewley’s — the restaurant we ate at with Darse and Xan the last time we were in Dublin. It was rather tasty.

So now we’re back at our apartment. The plan tomorrow is for me to go into the office to pick up some paperwork that will smooth the process of getting a GNIB card (an immigration card) and a PPS number (kind of like a social insurance number). With luck, I’ll be able to get that done on Thursday before I start work on Friday!

I’m going to attempt to wade my way through some pictures tonight so if you want to watch my flickr stream, you just might start to see photos of Vegas starting to show up there.

Hope everyone at home is doing well, we miss you all!

Morgan

That’s right, Diane and I had a safe, if slightly stressful, trip over here. Let me tell you the story of our day(s).

The goaway party was fantastic. Despite the fact that I didn’t get the word out very well (sorry to the people who I didn’t let know about it … I really was too distracted to make sure everyone knew about it), we had more than 60 people show up for it. I’m sure glad the weather held out so that we had enough room for people to hang out. Anyways, it was great fun, and I hope everyone had a good time. I sure did!

After the go-away party, Diane and I returned to the Condo to get ourselves in a better packed state. We got there at about 1:45am, and packed until well after 3:30am before falling into bed exhausted — but we were up again early the next morning to continue packing and cleaning up our place. We then went out to Dim Sum with our parents which was a nice way to spend our last brunch in Edmonton. After that, we went back to the Condo and met up with Megan. The four of us — Megan, Mom, Diane, and I spent a couple hours working on making the condo cleaner and tying up the loose ends. We, and in particular my mom and Megan worked a miracle of a job in there — with the condo almost back in a liveable state. Which is good since Megan will want to live there soon enough.

We then trekked out to get my dad and we got a ride out to the airport where we bid farewell to my parents and Megan there. And we were off on our grand adventure!

After waiting for an hour or so, we boarded our Air Canada 767. It was a pretty nice aircraft, and we were quickly glad to find out that we had the first row of economy class seats — which meant we had tons of leg room! Sweeeet! Not only that, the airplane must’ve been newer than the last two air canada flights we’d taken between Edmonton and London because each seat had its own tv screen. We happily were able to watch our choice of several movies. I love those things.

The flight itself was pretty standard. They fed us, I watched the movies Fool’s Gold and Flawless, and also managed to get 2 hours of sleep or so! That’s like a record for me on these long haul flights!

We arrived in Dublin, and found out that we had to go through UK customs to get our bags and then take an outside route to terminal 1 to get on our aer lingus flight. Turns out this is because air canada and aer lingus don’t have a baggage agreement. Boourns. So our layover time quickly became panic time when we had to wait for our luggage, run to terminal 1, check our luggage, and then run to the boarding gate. Thankfully, the aer lingus people graciously let us check our bags (despite being overweight) and told us to run to the gate. So we did, and got there only to find out the plane was just in its initial boarding call. Whew! So I was pretty tired and stressed out, but we got on the plane and made it to Dublin.

Dublin was beautiful today. It was +21 degrees celcius, and wonderfully sunny. From the airport, we caught a shuttle bus called aircoach for €7 each that took us within a couple blocks of our temporary apartments. When we arrived, we were just in time to get our keys before the office closed at 5:00pm. Whew! Not only that, but Darse pulled up in his car before we even had a chance to go up and see our place! So him and Xan helped us find our apartment suite and got us all setup there. We caught up for a bit and then went out to see Dundrum Mall which is a huge shopping mall here in Dublin. We had dinner at a grill type restaurant — Diane and I were too tired to really make a strong decision on a restaurant so we kinda floated until we found a place that looked decent.

After dinner we wandered a bit more, but found that most places had closed up shop by 8:00 on a Sunday. Oh well, Diane and I will have more than enough time to explore the immediate vicinity shops and services.

So now we’re back to our place, and Diane has already gone to bed. She didn’t get as much sleep as me on the plane, so she was pretty tired. I’m going to follow suit pretty quickly here. I hope that someday I’ll get around to posting pictures, but no promises on it being anytime real soon. We’ll have to see.

Morgan