Playing Catchup

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

Guinness Storehouse, Powerscourt Gardens, and a week of work

It's a little hard to believe it's Friday already. At the moment, I'm awaiting the next shuttle so I can head home for the first weekend after my first "real" week of work. Last weekend, Diane and I spent a lot of time relaxing, but we also hit up the Guinness Storehouse, and the Powerscourt Gardens. The Guinness Storehouse is a pretty neat experience. Your ticket gets you in for some interesting information presented in a museum kind of style, plus a complimentary pint of Guinness that you can either just receive, or pour yourself. So after spending a bunch of time looking at stuff, and then having lunch, Diane and I each learned how to pour our own pint of Guinness. Good stuff.

On the holiday Monday (it was a long weekend here too), Diane and I hooked up with Darse and Xan and we hopped in their car to go to the Powerscourt gardens. We spent a bunch of time there wandering around taking pictures and admiring the various areas of the garden. It was really neat, and I'll be putting up pictures when I finally get to them (I've got quite a backlog of pictures!).

This week was my first real work week (since I only had one day before the long weekend). It's been pretty cool -- I've had a lot of information to absorb, but so far I think I've been following along pretty good. Today was the first day I wrote code, and I'm pretty happy to be at that point already. The code is large and complex to understand, so to be making any changes is pretty gratifying (even if the changes are simple).

Diane and received our PPS numbers which means that we can now apply for a bank account. Hopefully we'll be able to successfully apply for one tomorrow morning so that we can get the remainder of the other paperwork and beaurecratic stuff out of the way. We move into our new apartment right away too since we've signed the lease on Wednesday.

I gotta run to my shuttle now, but you should go check out my pictures on my flickr page! All the cruise photos are now up!

Morgan

Deposit on a Place!

Today was an exciting day! But first, let me talk a bit about yesterday. Our goals for yesterday were to go into the office and pick up some paperwork that I needed to prove that I was indeed an employee, and some information on where to go for some important government paperwork. After chatting with the HR lady for awhile and dropping in to say hi to Darse and Aaron, we took our new papers and went to look at a couple of places in the neighbourhood called Cabinteely. They were actually really nice -- I really liked the layouts of both the places. The problem for us was that while they were really quite close to work for me, they weren't all that well connected to the rest of the city. It would probably mean a 45 minute bus ride into downtown, which means if Diane found a job in downtown or somewhere where she had to transfer through downtown, that wouldn't be too pleasant for her. Plus there was limited shopping options for us carless folk.

It kind of tore at us a little though knowing how nice the places were. They were totally valid options and maybe in a year we will have to reevaluate if there are still apartments there available. Maybe by then we'll get a car (not sure how likely that is).

We had another apartment to see in the afternoon, but couldn't find it due to the map on the website being wrong. It was a little unfortunate, but we didn't mind the chance to return to the apartment early and relax for a little while. Having now seen two very valid options for apartments (the first one we saw the previous day at Hazelbrook and the one we saw in Cabinteely) we figured we had a bunch of good information. The other good piece of information we got was we met someone who was living in the hazelbrook building we saw who works for FT too, and got a pretty good review of the building from him. So we debated for awhile about the options and eventually decided that the apartment at Hazelbrook suited our options better by a fair margin.

So today was a big day for us. We got up early and headed to the An Garda Síochána -- the Irish Police, to get out GNIB (Garda National Immigration Bureau) cards. This lets us stay in the country for a year at a time, since our passports were only stamped for 3 months when we entered the country at the airport. With this, we needed to pay a €100 fee which I had trouble paying with my credit card. Apparently having a smartcard chip in it causes it to not be swipeable, and since I don't have a PIN for it, I couldn't use it. Argh. Fortunately, Diane brought her non-chip-enabled credit card so we used that to pay for my fee. We left the office with our shiny new GNIB cards. Woohoo!

The next thing on our list was to go get PPS numbers, which are the Irish equivalent of the Canadian SIN numbers. This involved going to a different building to stand in line for and fill out some more paperwork -- which we did. This time no fee was involved. After Diane and I both applied for our numbers, we continued on to the rental agency and met with the agent we met on the first day. We payed our €500 deposit to apply and he faxed off my employer letter to the landlord and that was that! We had applied for a place to stay.

So now we're hanging out in the apartment. We just got a call from the agent and the landlord has okayed us so we'll be signing the lease on Tuesday, probably in the afternoon. (Monday is a holiday here apparently). So with a little luck, we'll be ready to move into our new place sometime in the middle of next week and will have a bank account setup for sometime near the end of next week! I'm pretty sure this is record time for someone moving as far as we had, and not having setup anything prior to arriving. We couldn't have done this without the help of Darse and Alexandra who have been an amazing amount of help. We'll definitely try to be as helpful to the people that follow us ;-)

Morgan

Early Days in Dublin

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

We're in Ireland!

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