Yeah, we finally got jobs!

The last three weeks in Cork have been good, but not nearly so much to report as when we are travelling. We had another roommate move in, another Canadian studying whales here for a couple of months, and we are hoping to go whale watching together next weekend. So, we can have a Canadian Christmas with the three of us, even if we can’t be at home. Our other roommate went back to Sweden for the holidays. We have been spending most of our time looking for work, and of course after two and a half weeks of not hearing anything, we get four job offers in the last two days. So, we are much happier being able to choose, instead of feeling unemployable. We went to the neighbourhood pub for lunch the other day, and it was such a cute, and authentic looking place (at least by our standards: traditional music playing weekly, the old man behind the bar greets every customer, the interior is all dark wood with drinking quotes calligraphied on the walls and covered in knickknacks) that we thought it couldn’t hurt to drop off our CV’s. And the next day the manager called us, and now we are both working in an Irish pub, just like we had always dreamed for our time in Ireland. Now Mike can become a master pint pourer (we’ve got to study up on the art of Guinness pint pouring – I think they might offer courses – jk). Mike is also working in the pub’s café, and Carli-Ann is also working as a Personal Assistant with a physically handicapped university student. We had just gotten some temp work lined up finally as we got these other offers, so for a few days this week we are working in the kitchen at the Pfizer Pharmaceutical plant here. Yep, you guessed it, in the Viagra factory. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! We’ll keep everyone posted as to our impressions of the operation. We were getting a bit bored waiting for jobs to call us so last weekend we decided to go on an adventure and hitched to West Cork, the west part of our county, which is also the west coast. It was so beautiful, low rolling hills, green sheeped fields (the crows sit on the heads of the sheep and preen their wool, so funny looking) and rugged coast line. We took a ferry out to the most southern point of Ireland, Clear Island, and hiked around. We got goat milk ice cream from the local goat farm, and met a French girl who was staying there and WWOOFing it (Willing Workers on Organic Farms: you volunteer to work on an organic farm for a couple of weeks and your room and board is free, a great way to travel a country and get to know the people), which reminded us that there are plenty of ways to travel if we are creative enough. I think we will try it when we pick up and go again (not till the fall now probably). We spent the last morning hiking up through cow fields and over electric fences to abandoned ruins of castles and watchtowers from clan times on high ocean cliff tops, and the view was stunning of course. It is so nice to get out of the city, and we are going to try to do it as often as we can, if our work permits us to. Hitching here is so easy, we were laughing. Seven out of eight rides we only waited less than five minutes, and we met some great people, who widened our perspective of the country and culture. We learned about the market for acupuncture in Ireland, where to find a hurling game in our community from a mom and her young sons (a sport only found in Ireland, played with sticks and a ball), the design of a typical Irish cottage from a German architect who had been living here for 30 years, all about litigation and immigration issues, and we were taken to a little-known ancient stone circle (more about that later). There is no better way for the two of us to travel here, and we are looking forward to more weekends out of the city! Christmas is coming up soon, and it will probably be pretty quiet here, but we will be thinking about everyone lots!