Yesterday was my first day at Celtrino. Its a IT-Solution company for automated trading. The office is in the highest floor of a old house near city centre, with about 20-25 employees. My first day consisted of a PC that wont boot over CD or USB and a slow notebook. We could not fix both but that wasn’t much of a problem. The „IT“ consist of Amit (IT System engineer) and now me. Amit showed me the „Server room“ and where i can find everything I might need. Overall was it a nice day and I look forward my next weeks.
Monat: Mai 2014
First day of work
Hello everybody!
Today Tim and I had our kinda first day at work. What do I mean? Yeah The first day we had were more like an introduction to the company itself and that was quite intresting. I forgot to say that I am now working for the IT Support at Concentrix. Concentrix provides phone, chat and mail support for other companies like Microsoft, EA and Kings(Candycrush) and just took of the customer support from IBM so they jumped from 6000 employees to 45000 employees and in the next month 1000 more will join them. Thats quite a number of people and of course those people need a place to work and I think that will be our job. I think we will set up the workplacements for most of the time and of course support the people who are currently working but what we acactly hove to do will us told tommorow, our first official first day at work where we going to meet our co-workers. I am looking forward to meet them. My first impression of the company is that those people are all nice and flexible and I hope my first impression wasn’t wrong. That’s what we will see tommorow.
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.
First free weekend in Belfast
Hi everyone!
Like it was said in the title that was our first free weekend we had in Belfast but it wasnt that spectacular like you could imagine. Most of the time we were sitting at home and were watching the british television. I for myself love british television shows like „Doctor Who“ or „Sherlock“ are really awesome shows with a lot of drama and thrill. today however we decided to go out and have a little BBQ. The weather was like always not the best but we got that going for us. The hardest thing at the BBQ was to get it started because a the wet air the fire extinguished really quick but after some time we finally made it and the meat was well done like it has to be. Now we are justing in our flat and relax ourleves because tomorrow is our first day of work.
The last few days
I used the last few days to get to know Belfast a bit more.
Yesterday we went to the city while the first of 21 stages of the big cycle race Giro d’Italia was going down.
The streets were filled with people and it was like whole Belfast came out to see and to cheer the competitors.
Many stores were decorated in pink and the windows were full of pink cyclists. Since a few days there was a big stage
where you had the chance to see an entertainment program full of music, talks and other attractions.
After viewing the end of the race (with the German „Marcel Kittel“ as winner) Martin, Leo and me decided to go to the big Metro Tesco
in the city center. It was hard to find a way through the masses of the people but with a lot of scramble and some time we were able to reach before it closed.
After buying some groceries and taking a cab back home we had a nice evening with a few people we met in front of our flat.
They were musicians and went for an aftershow party to the club opposite to our home.
Tomorrow Eric, Max and me will have our first work day at Concentrix and we look forward to have a good and productive time there.
The company lately announced that they will create around 1.000 new jobs in Belfast so I think there is a plenty of work to do.
The Irish Food
Hello everyone,
the food in Ireland is very expensive and the fast food is not the same like it is in germany.
So it takes a lot of time to get used to it.
For Example the „Döner“ is completly different to the „Döner“ from germany but it is an experience.
They meat which is used is lam.
and the living costs are very high.
You´ll have to decide what you can buy and what is useless, but in the supermarkets there are a lot of offers so you can for example buy 2 for the price of one.
In the appartements there are modern kitchens so we are saving some money by cooking some of our favorite dishes from home.
Giants Causeway and a few more stops
Today Nick, Maria and I decided to do a little bit of sightseeing and bought a tour to Dunluce Castle, Giants Causeway, Carrick-a-Rede and our last stop was a nice little beach.
Our tour started at 9am, the bus picked us up at our language school, afterwards we went on and picked up a few more guys before we headed to the Dunluce Castle.
It took as about an hour and a half to reach our first stop Dunluce Castle. The weather at that point was very bad, it was raining during our drive to the castle and our stay there.
We stayed at the castle for about 20 minutes before we had to leave.
After we all gathered at the bus we headed towards Giants Causeway. It took us another 30 minutes to reach it. We stayed there for about 1hour 45minutes. Luckily the weather got better and it stopped to rain, besides a few minutes of rain every now and then. Even the sun came out and it stayed like that for the rest of our tour. The view is just amazing.
Our next stop was Carrick-a-Rede, it took us maybe 20minutes to reach it. Our driver dropped us out and told us that we got 1hr 15minutes before we have to leave. So we made our way to the bridge it took us 30 minutes from the parking lot to the bridge itself. The view during our walk to the bridge just amazing the weather was perfect, only a few clouds and sunshine.
Our last stop was the beach where we spend another 20 minutes which we (Nick, Maria and I) used to get some lunch and just relaxing from our journey. We made our way back to Belfast along the coastline which took us approximately 2hr.
A Warm Welcome
The first couple of days passed by and I am more and more adapting to my environment which took some time especially if you are used to really high german food standards and cheap prices. Here in Northern Ireland the clocks really tick differently, not only are the people really unique but there is something about Belfast which is completely new to me. But one thing after another:
We had to call the police after just one day being here because there were some random strangers we could not identify who were throwing stones at the window and managed to break one. After talking to the cops on the phone we could hear them arriving just a couple of minutes later. We had a really informative chat with them in which they told us, that this would be their 600th something case just today (and it was still the early afternoon). This truly was an odd way of greeting your new neighbours and of course the the police couldn’t do anything about it so we just called our landlord and our agency telling them about the situation. Our landlord told us that he will send somebody to fix it and we went on spending some good times around the city and forgetting about the incident.