Rainy January

The weather here can be very depressing, as we were well warned before we arrived. But some moments are bright and warm like a late spring day in Edmonton with rainbows...and then it can be storming again within minutes. The wind was gusting up to 100km/hr last week, crazy. But we can cycle all year long here, so we aren't complaining too much.

Not too much new here now that we are settling in to a place instead of trotting between cultures...for New Year's Morten visited us from Berlin and even though Mike had to work at the pub on New Year's Eve, we went to visit him and have a taste of the Irish craic (pronounced 'crack': an Irish word with no proper translation into English that is an atmosphere of laughter, good conversation, music...basically a really good time, but the Irish have a proper word for it! That just shows how much fun we have here!). The next day we went to Dublin to visit our friend Caroline for a couple of days and show Morten the capital. That is a great city to party in, but we are glad that we live in Cork. Cork is smaller, safer, quieter, friendlier. But Dublin is great to visit, especially now that we have friends there that we met through the hospitality club when we went through the first time. New Year's Day in Dublin there was as much barf on the sidewalk as there was dog poop, and that is alot. Bit of a hazard.

Then we took a bus to Galway, a student town on the west coast of the country. We rented a car and drove around Connemara, which is supposed to be the most beautiful part of the country, and it was stunning. For anyone who has seen 'The Quiet Man', that is where we were. We saw dolmens (2000BC burial tombs with one rock perched on top of others like a door frame) and early Christian monastic stone beehive dwellings (the farmer chased us off his land though because it was after dark and he was convinced that we were going to leave the gate open and let his sheep escape, as they did the day before). And the weather was so miserable, that we were the only ones crazy enough to be touring the countryside, so we had each of the ancient places all to ourselves! The Cliffs of Moher were amazing, we hope to get some photos online soon. But the wind was blowing so strongly that the little streams that were running down the cliff faces were being blown back and into the air 2 meters, and we thought that only in Ireland would we see waterfalls flowing up.

Now that we are back, our work schedules are settling into a regular routine, which will probably consume most of our time, but we are going to try to get out of the city as much as we can. Ireland is definitely a different culture than Canada, but in other ways it is so familiar (especially compared to traveling in Japan or Mexico) that we almost forget that we live in a new country. So that is when we know we have to get out of the city, even just for the day, to see the magical place that we are living in for a short year.

So, we might not update as often in the next bit if we do not have much to say, but think of us drying pint glasses behind the bar, a rugby/soccer/hurling game on the screen behind us, a group of old bearded men playing an accordion, a fiddle, a flute, and a guitar to our side, setting the atmosphere to the proper Irish tempo, and us struggling to understand the accents of our customers. Not much to picture to the Personal Assistant job, so we can leave the imagery at that, or us chasing rainbows on our bicycles, bouncing off the pot holes of the bad Irish roads. No gold yet, but we are still hopeful...take care!

False Alarm....we are not moving again...

OK, we have come to a cool arrangement with our landlord and we are not moving again, which is a releif because it is alot of work. We will update when everything is confirmed. Work at the pub is going good and it is good to be earning euros...hoping to go to Spain in the spring maybe and take advantage of some of the cheap intra-European flights...write more in a few days! See ya!

Moving Again

Hey kids, we are going to be moving again in a week or two because the girl we are renting the place from is leaving, so if you are sending anything in the mail, hold on till we get another place. And only phone us on Mike's mobile, too please.

We had a good New Year's, our friend from Berlin came out for a week so we gave him a whirlwind tour of Ireland: Dublin, Galway, Connemara and the Dingle Peninsula. We'll write more about it later, but we are doing good, nice to be settling in with our jobs...talk to you later!