Well not quite… It’s only Saturday evening and I need to tell you about what happened the last couple of days.
On Wednesday, we met Margaret for the first time. She seems nice enough and is – as far as I can tell – quite committed to making our stay here as enjoyable an experience as can be. I found out where I was supposed to be working, had it not been for a change in personnel in the Beaumont Hospital, which is only about 10 minutes from where I am staying now. They cancelled because, with the changes going on, they wouldn’t have the time to take care of me properly. Margaret however, told me not to worry because she was expecting to hear from another company that very evening. I was not concerned in the least because I was kind of looking forward to another couple of days of vacation. 😉
Thor’s day, was in fact so uneventful that I don’t even remember what I did except for uploading the report I had written on Wednesday but hadn’t have the energy to fill with pictures, yet. Ah! I bought a little container of Nivea Night Cream that was supposed to help with healing my lips and nose because I had actually rubbed them raw with the tissues and the Vaseline only made it worse. The cream helped a great deal although the first couple of times it burned like a sonovabitch but I guess they couldn’t just print:” Don’t apply on raw flesh; hurts like a sonovabitch!” on the container…
Yesterday was our last day of school here in Ireland though we’ll be learning a great deal in the weeks to come. When are you ever done learning, right?! We had a little exam and saw Due Date afterwards. It’s a movie with Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) and Zach Galifianakis (Hangover) who plays a character that nobody could ever stand. It was a lot of fun and I actually didn’t remember this movie being that funny.
After being presented with a certificate for the completion of the course, Toni, George and I went to eat a burrito. We had about an hour after lunch, to get to the Guinness Storehouse and Margaret’s office which is right around the corner of the aforementioned. We decided to walk instead of taking the bus, which turned out to be a good idea because for one, it was a nice and sunny day and the other, we walked by Christ Church Cathedral. Now, I’m not religious but I do appreciate nice architecture and the Head of the Church kind of does, too.
CCC looks really cool with all its really interesting features that come from the repeated reconstruction and probably also adding of specific features, popular at certain times. Margaret later told us, that visitors are actually allowed into the crypt beneath the Cathedral and that is something I am definitely going to check out.
When we arrived at Margaret’s office, she gave us a small tour through the building which actually holds a huge variety of different start-ups and a lot of IT-based businesses. She also handed me the information concerning my work placement but I will write about that later [probably next week ;)].
The tour at the Guinness Storehouse was self-guided which was cool because you could set your own pace. While the process of brewing a Guinness is much like that of brewing any other beer (e.g. Kilkenny, Berliner Pilsner, Becks, Heineken, etc.), George, Toni and I had the opportunity to participate in a course, teaching us how to taste a Guinness the way it is intended.
We went on upwards to the Sky Bar after finishing the class with honors. Well maybe not honors but at least we had a small Guinness before now getting a bigger one. The view from Sky Bar is great. If it hadn’t been as crowded, I would have taken the time to read all the information provided on the glass all around the bar but we just barely managed to find a spot to take a few pictures before leaving there and finishing our pints in the middle of the room.
The Sky Bar being the end of the tour, we decided to go home and not linger on too long. I came home to a salad with eggs, ham and cheese and a cup of tea with Ann. We talked about a variety of different topics ranging from the way her house used to look 25 years ago when they first moved here to the disgraceful murder of a young woman in Galway who was stabbed by a 27 year old man, yesterday. Ann’s daughter Deirdre came by later to do Ann’s hair and I took that as a cue to go to my room. Before going to bed I booked a trip with Travelling Languages (our school here in Dublin) for the 24th and 25th of May for 145€ to Connemara. It’s supposed to play further into my language learning experience here and I’m looking forward to it.
I met George today at around 12 o’clock. We wanted to go to O’Connell Street to buy shirts and a tie for him at Penneys as well as postcards and stamps. I was looking to buy shoes that would withstand the Connemara weather but all they had at Penneys were flip-flops. We had lunch at Papa John’s, a pizza place, for 8€ each including a soda from the infamous Coca-Cola brand. It was a lot of fun, waiting for the little doohickey to vibrate so you know your order is ready. When I was walking home a couple of hours ago, it started to rain again, naturally. But as Roger Miller put it:” Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.” I’ll let you be the judges to which kind of person I am in this case.
Have a good night!
PS: This post scriptum is actually only here so I can brag about having over 1000 words in one of my posts. I hope you’ll understand. It was a lot of fun! 😉
