Autor: Stefan Korte

Greetings everyone,

on todays entry I would like to talk about the task to get a proper communication environment setup for us, as well as incredible helpful people. Additionally I will show you the real life-savers of Dublin.

But first things first. As we heard even before we got to Ireland it is a good idea to get Irish SIM cards to be able to communicate with each other without paying a fortune for communication pieces like “let’s meet at 2000.”

Thus we (meaning Erik, Christoph, Robert and me) went to an O2 shop asking how this actually works and how much it will cost and so on. Our vendor was really friendly and quite helpful. As appreciation I got most of my colleagues just to him to get the contracts done (should give him quite a bonus for this month 😉 ). Additionally he, of course, got a 5 of 5 rating when I got the message to rate him. He allowed us to take a picture and add it in our Blog. Thanks Karl!

Also very helpful are the people at the reception. They have been a great help so far to get anything we lacked,  for example dishes and a Kettle. It takes them one or two days to get what we asked for. (They just went to IKEA and bought it there!)

As last point I’d like to show you a picture of the life saver of Dublin. The left handed driving is giving us a bit of trouble but these little instuctions actually make sure we won’t get run over. (Traffic lights don’t seem to have any importance for walkers anyway. Even the police does ignore them!)

Thats it for now, more stuff incoming with my next entry. I may just cover my first workday, theres enough to tell about that. Just keep on reading!

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Hello again folks,

as promised I will now tell you a story of first impressions on the outside, the first supermarket prices we saw and a bit of the Irish „architecture“. But first I need to apologize as I did not have had the time to take any pictures of this yet. Maybe I will be able to do so on the weekend. Also, for now at least, I am writing about pastly events but i guess i will catch up soon enough.

Well, enough introduction, lets get to the topic:

So right after we stored our Luggage, we went outside to get the first items required for our survival. The first thing we noticed was the garbage laying around on the side of the streets. This down is really „dirty“ – and i don’t mean the positive kind of „dirty“, like in „dirty girls“, as most guys might be thinking right now! On the other hand we seem to be living right beside a big shopping street, and between a few more hostels, so there are lots of people everywhere.

Second thing noticable where the weird ample sounds (these sounds are actually for the blind citizens). As soon as the ample turns green (and yes, we also have a yellow traffic-light for walkers), you actually hear some thing you would sort to as a lasergun-sound and a ticking afterward. We noticed that many people are are making jokes about this, just like we do „pew tiktiktiktik“.

There are quite a lot supermarkets around so we had a look at the first one we saw – „Spar“. This one actually is as expensive as german gas stations are (yes, we thought we are screwed at this moment)! We checked about 2 more until we found a „Super Valu“. This was better, but still disastreous compared to germany. A whole toast-bread actually costs about 1,50 € here. Well we where exhaustet and had no other choice, so we did gather all items of desire and got home.

Home again my roommates pointed to me, that there are police- or ambulance-sirens going on all the time. They are right! This feels like a kind of „real-life-GTA with 4 stars“! (this joke actually goes to marku, thanks a lot!). They also noticed the sea-gulls that where quite loud before i did. -> If I close my eyes and stick my feets into a bin filled with sand i could mentally „escape“ to a beach! *yay*

Last thing we actually noticed on our first lookaround: there are pubs EVERYWHERE. And I am not exaggerating when I say there is one at literally every corner Dublin has got to offer. We of course tried one on our first evening. It was decend but lacked life music (WE WANTED LIFEMUSIC!). We will look for something like that next weekend i guess.

So this is it for this entry. My next Blog entry will include the task to get means of communications for us, and incredible helpful people, so keep on reading!

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Hey everybody,

first i’d like to talk about the way I am thinking of writing this Blog. I thought that I could do it in the diary form like mostly everyone else will, or in a more topic related way. I guess I will mix both somehow, whatever feels better at time and day.

Also, as I have no camera, pictures will be some kind of an issue. I of course will be able to borrow cameras of my „roommates“, but we haven’t had the opportunity to take a lot of pictures yet (I will try to edit this later and add pictures). The reasoning brings me already to the actual core of this Blog-Entry – The first impressions.

I will cut the takeoff and arrival at the airport short, as my colleages will surely cover that and my feelings do match theirs mostly.

At the second we got out of the bus at our hostel, he went on. And there we were now standing in front of that house being told to just enter. The man at the reception knew that students from an internship would arrive. He explained the way to the appartment. Still we got lost – badly! This house is like the incarnation of the craziest maze ever invented. We somehow made it back to the reception and he explained it again. Of course we did understand the way. Yet, we got lost again. We found someone from the staff and she was able to bring us to our place. Who could have thought that we had to go through the firedoor?

The appartment is both, big and small at the same time (remember the maze house? the apartment is the same!)

Erik and I got an incredibly small room for us while Robert and Christoph got the bigger one. Upstairs is the living room which includes the kitchen.

We headed out quite soon after we stored our luggage.

The first impressions outside of our house, including the super-market prices and pub density will be topic in the next blog-entry, so keep on reading!

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