Tag: 12. Mai 2014

Our trip to the Giant’s Causeway and the first working-experiences

Hi there!

Yesterday was our „little“ trip to the Giant’s Causeway, with some more stops at other famous places, so actually the trip took the whole day. The first half of the day was quite rainy, thats why I hadn’t so much confidence in the racy driving style of the bus driver. He even loses ground twice, but then the weather cleared up and stayed steady. Even so you should have a rain jacket with you, because you definitively catch a cold if you sit in the bus with wet closes. Thanks to the nice weather at the second half of the day we were able to make some REALLY awesome pictures. The next stop after the Giant’s Causeway was the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge which has a pretty interesting history itself. And it is possible to cross the bridge free-handed, but I guess that depends on the wind force. And today I had my first day at work here in Ireland. The day all in all was pretty calm and started with a little introduction to the colleages and an overview of the rooms. After that I even could take part in the weekly meeting, or rather a common breakfast.

First week of Belfast

Hello everybody!

This is it, this was our first week in Belfast. I will make this resume quite short. It was awesome! We met some new and nice people, got to see some of Belfast, ate some irish food and drunk some irish Guinness. My favourite part this week was when we met Jane at the „Dirty Onion“ and learned how to play the Bodhrán, because it was an typical irish pub with all that irish flair I imagined. Now we have to see what the next week has to show us, because now it is getting serious.

I am gladly looking forward to that!

Social Life in Belfast

While exploring every corner of Belfast talking to other people is obviously a must do which turned out to be much better than expected. Most people just confront us because they heard a word of german and somehow become really interested finding out what we are doing so far away from home. This is often the start of a long lasting but still entertaining conversation which already paid out a couple of times. Not only are the people incredibly nice but you can really feel that they want to know your story and don´t have any bad intentions on their mind.

We met a really friendly lady called Jane who worked at the International House and was responsible for some of the social activities in the afternoon. One of the best experiences I had in the first week was our lesson in bodhran which is a traditional irish instrument really similar to a tamburine. Jane told us to come to one of the most famous pubs in belfast the „diry onion“ where we also met some other folks from the International House and started our lesson in bodhran drumming.
It was a lot of fun and after a while people even started dancing around us which made it even better. After some drinks and around 20 songs later we started our trip back to the apartment.