Been a while...

Hmm, been a while since I last posted, sorry about that. So I have pictures, but there's a lot of good ones on other peoples' cameras, so I'm going to wait until I can get them before I post up a bunch of pictures for you all.

Nothing terribly exciting for this post. On Wednesday, after our class got out at 9pm, Devon's coworkers took me and him out to a pub and fed us booze all night. It was great, they wouldn't let us pay for anything. After the pubs closed we ended up going over to one of their apartments and hung out and kept drinking with them until about 4:30 in the morning. We ended up getting back here to Shanowen at 5:30, and I was 2 hours late to work Thursday morning. Everyone at work was really cool about it though, they just laughed at me and told me not to worry about it. Obviously I don't plan on making a habit of it, but it's nice to know that the people at work are understanding and don't mind that I put having fun infront of work from time to time. When they asked me how drunk I was the night before, this is how I explained it (because I thought it was kind of funny):

On the walk to the taxi rink (about 2 miles), me and Devon found 4 bottles of milk that had crested their sell-by date outside of a SPAR (the Irish version of 7-11, they just leave it out there for homeless people to take). They were still cold, so we grabbed em. I managed to drink a one-liter bottle of milk to myself without getting sick on the walk to the taxi rink. But we were both drunk enough that none of the other bottles made it back to Shanowen with us, because we kept dropping them on the ground and eventually they all burst open.

Anyways, Kathleen's parents were around so we went out to Temple Bar with them on Thursday night and then called it a night early on. On Friday morning, we went to a place called Collin's Barracks, which is an old military barracks that has since been turned into a museum. I was expecting it to be a military museum, but it was actually just a bunch of random Irish artifacts, etc. I had brought my camera to take pictures, but there were people in almost every room who would yell at you for taking pictures, so I only shot off a few. Erin also got a few pictures, so I'll grab those from her and once I can consolidate everyone's recent pictures, I'll post those all up.

The Stonehill girls decided to stay in on Friday night, but me and Devon went out and met up with these two other girls we had met, Colleen and Courtney. They're lucky enough to live right in the city center, so we went to their apartment, hung out for a while, and then went bar hopping. We ended up falling asleep (more realistically, passing out) in the wee hours of the morning on some couches they had in their living room and then caught a bus back here today. Seeing as we had two crazy nights of drinking on Wednesday and Friday, only separated by a night of light drinking on Thursday, Devon and I decided to stay in tonight and take it easy while the Stonehill girls went out and did their own thing. The past few days have certainly been pretty crazy, but I assure you all that I am not turning into an alcoholic (I wouldn't be able to afford it)

Coming up next week, Devon and I are going to be heading to Amsterdam! I'll be sure to take pictures and update you all on some stories when I get back. I've got 10 weekends left here (man, it's already been almost a month. Time flies...) and I'm hoping I'll get the chance to do a lot more traveling. I know I'll definitely be going to London, since one of the girls here has a friend in London who offered up his flat for us to sleep in. I have a friend in Italy who I can stay with, so I'm going to try and get there sometime in November. Other than that, I'm going to try to get to Galway/the Aran Islands, and Belfast. Maybe one or two other places too, if I can swing the funds.

Anywho, until next time.

Lazy Saturday

Nothing terribly exciting for this edition of the blog. Work has been going well, but I won't bore you all with the details. Devon and I whored ourselves out to science and got our brains scanned over at Trinity College for 30 euro on Friday afternoon. Through talking with one of the girls who was helping to conduct the study, I also learned that there's a student bar on Trinity campus which has the cheapest drinks you'll find in Dublin - it's only open on Fridays though. Needless to say, we went that night, and it's true. 3.60 for a pint of guinness - which is almost a full euro cheaper than anywhere else in the city center. It was a great time, the place was packed full of students and they had a bunch of TV's showing the Ireland vs. France rugby game. Rugby, by the way, is intense and a lot of fun to watch, but confusing as hell. I've picked up on some aspects of the game, but by and large I still have no idea what's happening.

Anyways, tomorrow I'm going to walk around and explore Dublin (there's a lot to explore for such a small city) and the camera will be coming with me, so hopefully I'll have some pictures to share tomorrow evening.

End of the first full week and weekend #2.

Alright. So no new pictures unfortunately, but I'll get to work on that sometime this week... hopefully. (by the way, thanks to Cassie Duke for learning me how to actually resize my photos without a decent photo editing program)

I finished my first week of work at XS Direct. It's a pretty cool place. I've been testing their quote engine (basically, you plug in information, it spits out an insurance quote. but it turns out it wasn't working well. but now it is, partially thanks to me.) And I guess I'll be doing that even more next week with other systems that various brokers use to sell XS Direct insurance packages. Probably nobody cares to hear about the intimacies of number crunching though, so I'll spare you the grass-growingly boring details.

So this was a pretty nonchalant weekend. Thursday (which is the new Friday since I don't work on Fridays) was pretty low key. We just hung around Shanowen square. Friday was Allison's birthday, her 21st infact, and so we celebrated the American way. We went to the Temple Bar area and grabbed dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe which, as history proves time and time again, is more about the atmosphere than the food. I got a chicken sandwich and parts of my chicken were overcooked and rock hard. I should've guessed they would find a way to transpose the name into the food. After that we swung by the Ark, where Kathleen was working, and saw what was probably the most pathetic art gallery in the world. It was all art created by children, and there's a reason those finger paintings go into the trash once the refrigerator gets sick of them.

After the Ark, we headed over to the Palace Bar - which felt like somebody took an 1800's Victorian house and decided to start selling booze out of it. I am in no way condemning this, I thought it was a really cool bar. We met up with a girl that Allison knows from work and two of her friends, and proceeded to head over to some place called Capitol bar - which is known for selling cheap mixed drinks (Allison's forte). It turns out the drinks are cheap because they decided to use thimbles as shot glasses when measuring the alcohol that goes into them, so I reverted back to the tried and true Guinness. Even crappy drinks aside, I can't say I was a fan of the place, it was overcrowded and the bartenders wouldn't serve you if you were a guy. After ten minutes at a time of standing at the bar and trying to flag down a bartender, I resorted to just having Erin go get my drinks for me, since the bartenders were more than happy to serve her within about 30 seconds. That's okay though, we all had a good time - especially Allison, which is what matters since it was her 21st.

I found out that 2 of the 3 girls that Allison is friends with all work around Merrion Square (which I also happen to work near) so we made tentative plans (as any plans that are made while drunk at a bar tend to be) to go grab lunch in the square this week. So that's cool. And also a bunch of kids are scheduled to move into Shanowen Square this weekend, so hopefully things will liven up around here, as it's been pretty dull and I haven't met as many new people as I would like.

After sleeping in this morning, Devon and I went and did a bit of grocery shopping. We also decided while sitting around to set apart the weekend of October 5 - 7 to fly over to Europe, but we're not sure where we want to go yet. We had planned to head into Dublin again tonight and meet up with Allison's friends from yesterday, but by the time everybody was ready to go, nobody was really in the mood - especially since we all ended up spending so much money the other night for Allison's 21st. Dublin is by no means a cheap city. So instead, we all just hung out in Kathleen's room and shot the shit and watched youtube videos, which was entertaining enough.

Devon found a place that has shotgun and rifle shooting ranges that'll let you shoot targets or clay pigeons, so we're going to look into doing that one of these weekends. I think tomorrow I'm going to go out for a run and try to get some exercise for a change, and also explore the DCU (dublin college university) area while doing so. We've explored a lot in one direction (i.e. towards city center), but not in the other (i.e. the direction of DCU), so maybe I'll find some cool stuff.


In the meantime to keep you all entertained, check out Devon's blog as well.

http://devonindublin.blogspot.com

He's got a link to a webshots album of some cool pictures he and Kathleen took when they went to the Dublin Zoo a few days ago. I wasn't there since I had to work. I thought this one was especially funny for the caption:

funny guinnea pig picture

Alright, that's all for now. I'll try to be ontop of this blogging thing a bit more in the future. Although I think I said that last time I posted too, so we'll see...

Wheekint Nahmber Wahn (as the Irish would pronounce it)

Alright, so quite a bit to post. Today was the first day of my internship, which wasn't too shabby. I really like the people I'm working with, they all seem very laid back and friendly. I'm working in a little 5 person (now 6 with the addition of myself) car insurance company, and I guess the majority of my scope of employment is going to be risk analysis and testing the system that delivers insurance quotes. They said that they've been very impressed with their past interns, so hopefully I'm able to extend that tradition. But I'm still learning a lot about how the company operates, so there's really nothing exciting to report on at the moment.

Let's get on to the good stuff: the pictures! If you click on these, they should open up a larger version of the picture... So while I got my internship interview out of the way on Thursday, everybody else (the 4 other Stonehillers I'm here with) had theirs on Friday. So we all went into the city center and hung out together, with some of them kicking off for a couple hours at a time for their interviews. I saw this guy down on Grafton Street (a very touristy shopping area) playing some kind of funky instrument. This was the first street performer of many that I saw, so I had to snap a picture.

After cruising Grafton Street for a bit, myself, Kathleen, and Allison went over to Trinity to meet up with Devon and Erin after their interviews. Here's me infront of the entrance to Trinity.
Looking in through the door to the courtyard:
One of many cool buildings inside of Trinity:
This one is from the center of the Trinity courtyard looking out towards the exit/entrance:
After rendezvousing with Devon infront of Trinity, we took to a different area of Grafton Street area and found this street performer. This crazy SOB was balancing on a ~6 foot tall unicycle and juggling a scimitar and a couple of lit torches... and I saw him mess up and drop them right next to / in to a huddling crowd of overly-trusting tourists. This guys idea to toss weapons around in a crowd of people was probably the stupidest move I've seen since John Travolta agreed to star in Battlefield Earth - because he sucked just as bad as that movie. (although this was admittedly much more entertaining). Don't worry, nobody was hurt...
And a better shot of the juggling:
After everybody finished their interviews and we all met back up, we went out for some din and then headed back home. I snapped this picture of the sunset over the Liffey:


And this cool statue over on O'Connell Street.

Here's another one I took to let in a bit more light. This picture is a bit washed out, but you can make out a bit more detail in the statue. I should probably warn you all now so nobody expects anything fancy in the next 3 months - I'm not a photographer. Michael J. Fox could take better pictures than me:
So we caught a bus a few hundred feet down the road from that statue and headed home. On Saturday, we woke up and went back into the city for some more touristy stuff. We got onto an open-top, double-decker bus and I tried snapping a few pictures from a moving bus while we headed to the Guinness factory. Here's me as the meat of a Stonehill sandwich on the bus. That's Allison, Kathleen, Myself, and Erin from left to right. Devon was manning the camera.
Here's Dublin's answer to the Space Needle, the Spire. Kathleen overheard some Dubliner bitching about how all the natives hate it because it was just a giant (literally) waste of taxpayer money. I wonder how many times it's been hit by lightening...
Christ Church Cathedral (I think?) Sorry for the crappy picture, it was taken from a moving bus don't forget:
I believe this is the pedestrian entrance to the Dublin Castle courtyard:
Some castle, also the start/entrance of Dvblinia - which is basically the medieval Irish take of Sturbridge Village. We haven't gotten to it yet, but I'll definitely be checking it out in the future:
On to the Guinness brewery tour! This was pretty awesome... I have a few pictures from the brewery tour, but nothing worth posting because they're all pretty dark and don't really show anything too interesting. St. James' Gate, right outside the brewery entrance:
Me infront of the sign:
A crappy crooked photo taken by some incompetent Frenchman of me and Devon (I'm not bitter):
You walk through some gigantic revolving doors, step onto an escalator, and above you hangs this sign as you enter the brewery:
Apparently punctuation isn't a popular school subject in Ireland...
So I lied (what else is new), I did snag one picture inside the brewery tour. This is the original Guinness harp (their trademark logo). There's some kind of back story to the harp that I intended to remember, but have failed to. Some guy known for something or other made it and carved some kind of epic inscription into it. Then another famous guy played it for a while or something. And then something happened and it's special now. What do you expect, it was a friggin brewery tour...
And now the best part of the Guinness tour - the Gravity Bar! At the end of the tour you find yourself at the highest point of the Guinness brewery, which just so happens to be a bar with glass windows giving a great panoramic view of the city. Oh yea, and they give you a free Guinness. You're supposed to turn in a voucher you get at the beginning of the tour for your free Guinness, but I somehow managed to hold onto mine the first time around and got two. Sweet. Here's the four of us with our Guinness. From left to right - Myself, Devon, Kathleen, Erin. Not pictured is Allison, who was taking the picture.
Me with a Guinnes stach - a marketing ploy I'm going to try and sell to the company when I run out of money over here... hey, if it can get kids to drink milk, it can also get kids to drink Guinness (which is their worst performing demographic, I'm told):
Here's a pic of the view from the Gravity Bar. The pictures really don't do the view justice (especially since this is only a small portion of what you can see):
One more (go me for getting the window joint in this picture. Get used to the crappy photography, it's not going anywhere):
After the Guinness tour, instead of eating food like sensible people (now about 4PM - aka 16 in Ireland - we hadn't eaten since about 10AMish), we figured we'd just go drink whiskey instead. So off to the Jameson's distillery it was. Now, at the Jameson distillery, everyone gets a glass of whiskey at the end except for 6 people who volunteer for a taste testing competition instead. Unbelievably, Myself, Devon, Kathleen, and Erin all got picked for the taste testing competition. Mind you, about half of our 30-person group raised their hands to volunteer, so that's some damn good luck. Kudos to Allison for taking the pictures (don't feel bad that she didn't taste-test, she's not a whiskey fan and so wasn't interested). Here's us as we were about to begin the testing. From left to right, Erin, Devon, Myself, Kathleen, some German girl, some German guy's elbow:
Bottom's up:
Displaying my official whiskey taster certificate:
You might notice in that last picture, and again in this one, that there's yet another glass of whiskey infront of us. Apparently, when you drink 5 shots of whiskey, the Irish reward you by giving you another glass. I guess they were fibbing when they said we would be taste-testing instead of getting the hefty glass of Jameson's...
After these pictures were taken, me and Devon went to the complimentary bar and asked for some glasses of cranberry juice because after 5 (not-quite-full) shots of whiskey, you really need something to get a sixth down. What we discovered shortly thereafter was that the glasses of cranberry juice they give you are already mixed with whiskey. And Allison gave us her glass of whiskey as well, which we split between us. So needless to say, we were pretty tanked. Also, Kathleen needs an honorable mention here, because she took down more than any of us. Ontop of her extra glass of whiskey, she had 2 of Erin's shots. Kudos to Kathleen.

Here's a random picture I took of a bridge over the river kwai - i mean liffey. I just liked the reflection:
We all spent Sunday relaxing, catching up on sleep, getting food / necessities, and exploring the area around Shanowen Square (our home) - which apparently has a road system that trumps Boston's as far as confusion is concerned. There's a really cool park right next to my work called Merrion Square that I took my lunch to today, I'll have to grab some pictures for my next post. Hopefully sometime later this week...

Cheers

Arrival in Ireland!

Hi all,

So I set up this blog to keep track of my Irish adventures, and so that I can also share them with everyone without having to retype the same stories over and over again. Today concludes my second day in Ireland. We (myself, Devon, Erin, Allison, and Kathleen) all arrived yesterday and were taxied to Shanowen Square - the student apartments that we'll be calling home for the next few months. After checking out our rooms and doing a little recon to find out what's in the area, we all took naps and then headed out to the pub for some dinner. Nothing exciting for the first day, as we were all feeling a little jet lagged.

This morning at 9am, we met Tom and Rebecca (the people who put together our internship program) for our Irish orientation. This was basically just a crash course of how to function in Ireland - i.e. getting around on the bus, places to go, cultural customs to follow, etc. I then had my interview with XS Direct - the company I'll be working at for the next few months. The interview went pretty well and I'll be starting on Monday. It was a pretty intimate office setting, it's a small startup company with only 5 people in a medium size room - but that's not such a bad thing if you ask me, because I'll be heavily involved every step of the way. Rebecca (remember, the intern placement lady) also raved about how great the guys are that I'll be working for, and apparently it's a tried and true internship because other interns have said nothing but positive things about it. So I'm pretty optimistic about my placement at the moment.

After my interview, I met back up with the rest of the gang and Tom and Rebecca brought us out for dinner and some drinks. We ended up meeting another intern student from Texas on the bus, but she's not living at Shanowen Square, so who knows if we'll ever see her again. So far, the culture shock hasn't been bad at all. A lot of things have different names, the euro is a bit of a change, and people use different 'slang' - but nothing I can't cope with. Tomorrow I'm going to try and get a cell phone and explore Dublin some more, and on Saturday the five of us are planning to take a Dublin bus tour and do all of the touristy-type stuff. I didn't bring my camera today (kind of bulky to carry to an interview) so I don't have any pictures to post, but I'll try to share my Ireland story via pictures as much as words in the future, so hopefully this blog will be a bit more exciting. Sorry if it's a bit boring at the moment, the past two days have been mostly acclimation and there's really just not a lot worth saying.

And as a final word: Everyone who says that Guinness is way better in Ireland than in the states isn't lying. I don't care for it much back home, but it's friggin delicious over here.

Until next time.