Another Week

Hi at all,

Yesterday another week started which is supposed to be as unspectacular as usual. There is not much to do at work but that’s finde because there is a lot of football matches that are waiting to be watched. But I’m able to tell you something eventually interesting about last week.

Last week I had some more installations to do. Basically, I install one of them, take an image and apply it to all the others. Afterwards I set a new system ID and thats it. Thursday and Friday were more interesting. I was on site with Mark (a technician from Nitec). We had to replace a PC in Lisburn at a Company which is dealing with dental prostheses. Then we went over to a site where there was a problem with the Citrix server. A harddrive failed but we couldn’t replace it because of the HDD being too old. The server was 7 years old and applying a new hard drive would cost the customor an amount of about 600£ so we decided not to schedule further on and even charge him for that. There were a couple of PC installs later on but nothing special, just plugging them in, join a domain and finish the task of. We had an issue with a PC that was infected by some viruses and trojans. We removed them and had to provide a repair installation for that PC. So you see, that is not really what I’m supposed to do as a network related IT guy, but that’s just the way it is over here. But I was having a good time with Mark because he has got this typical irish humour which I actually like the most about the irish people ^^. During our journey he phoned Jonny (the guy I’m working with in the first 3 days of the week) and told him that I stole his car and left him behind beside of the road. After a few minutes he explained Jonny that he was joking, but he is very good in sarcasm so that Jonny actually believed him the first time.

My weekend was quite exhausting but interesting, too. My girlfriend and a good friend of mine visited Belfast last weekend. On Friday, we met Mr. Schlenger in the Bourbons Bar to have something to eat before getting into a Pub („The Laverys“) to watch the rest of the World Cup’s football match. I think it was Uruguay vs. France. We explained Mr. Schlenger how we settled in and that most of us are feeling comfortable living in Belfast. A lot of experiences were covered and we were happy to tell him how many cultural differences we found between Germany and Ireland. There was much to tell about and not all of our stories could have been told. I think it was great that at least someone participating in the organisation of the exchange vistited Belfast and managed to see all of us. We’ve had a very good time in the Laverys for the whole evening although Mr. Schlenger had to go to bed a little sooner than we had to. I regret that I don’t have a camera but I think al the other guys took a lot of pictures of the Laverys and Mr. Schlenger.

On Saturday I god up early because of having bad pain in the back. I got to sports and felt better afterwards. Later on we went into the City to purchase some things and to give my friends from Berlin an understanding of the City and to show’em the good sites of the City Centre. After coming back, we went to „The Bot“ to watch England’s first football match.

"The Bot"

 After watching the game, we walked over to „The Empire“. It is a very impressing pub in the South of Belfast. The building was a church before and they just rebuilt it into being a pub. There was a liveband playing there and we had a lot of fun (spending a lot of money). I attached some pictures of „The Empire“. They had a windows filled up with stuff from Jaegermeister and we took pictures of that as well.

We met a lot of irish people and we were at in the pub for a really long time talking as much english as possible. After the pub closed we went to our friends from Switzerland who we met in the few weeks spending here. Down at their place, we met other people from different countries. I think a lot of them are international students in that house.

We used the Sunday to relax and to see the City Centre again. In the evening we went to „The Bot“ again to watch the Germans winning against Australia. Nothing too spectacular for me and my girlfriend because we went off after the game even earlier than the others. Sebastian told that in his previous article.

I think that is a good summary of the last days 5 that I spent in Belfast. Of course there is a lot more to tell about but it’s defenitely not suppoosed to be written in the blog…

see you

David