Natural History Museum

Today was my first day off since I started working for Paddywagon Tours, and Colin and I spent the afternoon at the Natural History Museum - also known as the “dead zoo”. The museum was only reopened a month ago; it had been closed since July 2007 after one of the building’s staircases collapsed.

We spent a few hours browsing the museum’s two floors of preserved animals and fossils. The first floor featured wildlife native to Ireland, and the second floor contained animals from around the world. 

My favorite artifacts were the giant extinct Irish deer skeletons and all the unusual marine life that has been discovered in Irish coastal waters. The museum houses a few of the biggest sea creatures ever caught in Ireland, including an enormous crab, a cast of a basking shark (the second largest living shark) and lots of eerily large fish.

The best part about the museum was the free admission. In fact, all of the Irish National Museums - Natural History, Archaeology, Decorative Arts & History and Country Life - are free to enter.

Click here to read an Irish Times article about the museum’s reopening.

Working for Paddywagon Tours!

Well, I found a job. It was a bit random how it happened, but I’m now officially an employee of Paddywagon Tours in Dublin.

The company headquarters are located in the Paddy’s Palace hostel on Lower Gardiner Street in Dublin 1, only a few blocks away from the central Spire. 

I’m going to be working part of the time as a reservations agent for the tours, and the other part as a receptionist for the hostel.

The two girls that I’ve worked with so far are both from Australia. I think I got the job simply because English is my native language. This is how it happened:

I walked by Paddy’s Palace, as I do frequently because it’s on my route out of town, and noticed a “staff wanted” sign on the door. The only details it listed were “Fluent English, valid work visa and some office experience required. Call Charlie at (mobile number).”  Colin and I are always talking about the Paddywagon buses because they’re so noticeable around town (bright green with leprechauns and sheep decorating the sides), and we’ve said in the past that it looked like a fun place to hang out. So I was pretty excited to see that they were hiring and decided to save Charlie’s number into my cell phone.

Then we were walking away to the bus to go home, and I thought, maybe I should just go ahead and ring him, even though it’s a Saturday. What the heck. And he answered right away, asked me how long I’m here for, where I’m from, and then said I should go back to the hostel and ask for an interview with Bianca.

Bianca turned out to be one of the two Australia girls I’m now working with, and she didn’t even interview me because she was on a call when I came in. The other girl, Kim, asked me a few brief questions about my work history then said she would ring Charlie, who is now my boss, and see when I could come back for training.

I ended up doing the training about 15 minutes later, and I was back in today for my second session. Tomorrow I’m working my first full day, from 7:45am to 4pm.

The girls told me I should be getting about 40 hours a week and earning a little over minimum wage, which works out to roughly €350 a week — €1400 a month! Sweet relief! I’m going to be rich compared to before. And now I have the means to stay here for the summer, so I don’t have to leave my baby behind.

I never listen to Collie when he tells me not to worry, but he was right this time. Everything worked out in the end, and now I get to enjoy a summer of rain and World Cup football watching, woo hoo! Well, maybe I won’t enjoy those parts so much, but I am happy that I don’t have to leave Ireland, and the Finns, just yet. Should be a summer to remember!

Being a Vegetarian in Dublin

I’ve taken a bit of a break from my blog, but I think I’m ready to get back to it now. I finished up my internship on April 1st and went home for a three-week visit. It felt really good to be home - almost too good, because I had trouble making myself get on the plane to come back here. But I missed my Collie doggie too much to leave him in Dublin all on his lonesome. So I made it back, and now I’m starting my job search all over again!

I’ve had a little bit of luck with my employment search so far, but I don’t want to talk about it yet because I don’t know anything for sure yet. So I’m going to dedicate this post to my recent decision to become a vegetarian.

Colin doesn’t agree with my decision, but he’s trying to be supportive. I thought it would be pretty difficult to avoid meat in Ireland, but it’s been two weeks since I returned and I haven’t run out of meal ideas yet. Its a bit annoying that there aren’t any large health food stores here that would compare to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s back home, and Tesco, Dunnes, Superquinn etc. only offer a limited selection of soy products. But I’ve been doing some research online, and there is a chain of small shops called Nourish that sells tempeh and tofu, among other things. And there’s a Nourish store in a shopping center not too far from our house (the Omni), so I’ll probably be making a trip there soon.

As far as vegetarian restaurants go, Govindas - which I blogged about before - seems to be the biggest (it has three locations in Dublin). There’s also a place called Cornucopia off Grafton St. that has received good reviews online. (When I have more money I’ll be heading there to make up my own opinion about it.) Then there are a few little cafes that cater to vegetarians, but as far as I know they don’t serve dinner.

Vegetarianism doesn’t seem to be nearly as popular here as it is in the U.S. There are signs that it is starting to catch on, though. Tesco recently launched its own line of veggie burgers and veggie “fingers” in the frozen food section, and I just noticed this week that they’ve started stocking frozen soy beans, too.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

All the snow and ice melted away yesterday morning, and the dreary, drizzling rain recommenced. Now I’m back to sidestepping puddles and fighting the wind with my umbrella.  The weather was particularly bad during my walk to the bus from work yesterday. As I was crossing my pedestrian bridge, an obnoxiously strong gust of wind and rain whipped across the river and practically knocked us commuters off our feet. In that moment I happened to catch an amusing tidbit of conversation between two people headed the opposite direction: a young guy complained to his friend, “Why do we live here?!” Exactly what I was thinking, man.

The force of the wind rendered my umbrella useless, so, with a bit of a struggle, I collapsed it then tucked it under my arm and let the rain pelt my face. Socks and shoes soaked through to the core, I trudged my way across the IFSC, sloshed over the Luas tracks and rounded the corner. And surprise, surprise! My local bus was there, waiting for me, all warm and bright and cosy inside. I ran up and caught it just as it was about to pull off, and I didn’t feel so unfortunate anymore.

Snow continues to wreak havoc on Dublin

It’s been snowing in the evenings here ever since New Years Eve, and the city has yet to take any action to clear the build up of ice from the roads and sidewalks. This afternoon it hailed and snowed pretty hard for about an hour, adding around 2 inches to the growing layers of wintry mess. Dublin Bus canceled all its services right before rush hour, leaving me, and plenty of others judging by the outrageous taxi queues, stranded after work. (Fortunately, I was able to catch a lift with Johnny at 6 when he got off from Clery’s.)

And the best part is, it’s not really even that cold or nasty outside, at least compared with the winter weather I’m used to. The temperature has been hovering right around freezing, and aside from today, the skies have been clear and sunny during the day. But looking at some of the newspaper headlines, you’d think the next ice age was approaching or something. Here’s a sampling from today’s papers: “Schools to remain closed as arctic conditions wreak havoc” (Irish Independent), “Worsening weather causes major traffic disruption” (The Irish Times), “Big freeze delays benefits payments” (Evening Herald). That’s right, the snow even stopped the postal workers from distributing welfare checks.

The situation doesn’t stand much chance of improving anytime soon, either. Here’s what the Irish Times’ website has to say about the outlook:

“Dublin Bus suspended services earlier today, attempted to resume them this evening, and then cancelled them for the night. The company says it hopes to restart services tomorrow after overnight gritting.

Met Éireann forecaster Vincent O’Shea said there was no sign of an improvement in weather conditions in the next 10 days, with temperatures were expected to drop further.

Temperatures will remain very low, with highs of zero to four degrees forecast. Temperatures are expected to fall to -5 or -6.6C in the coming nights but could be as low as -8 to -10 in midland areas. ‘There will be no chance of a thaw in the daylight hours,’ Mr O’Shea said.”

I also think this bit is particularly interesting:

“The Health Service Executive (HSE) said today emergency wards have been particularly busy in the last few weeks dealing with sprains and fractures as a result of slips and falls on icy roads and footpaths.” Who’s taking responsibility for these injuries? In America, somebody would be getting sued for that shit, for sure! But here none of the businesses seem concerned about lawsuits; even the parking lot at our local Tesco is like an ice rink. If there’s really no salt left in all of Ireland, get out there with a friggin’ shovel and clean it up, Mr. Tesco!

I think it’s best to just embrace hibernation at this point. These “arctic conditions” are too much to bare!

New interns at TTD

I met two Ricardo’s today: my trainer at Slender Health, and one of our two new interns at The Travel Department. The other intern is Rebbecca, an Irish girl who studied journalism at DIT and interactive media at Trinity—pretty similar to my choice of education. Except I wouldn’t quite compare Columbia to Trinity, but still, we seem to have a bit in common. She has a cool sense of style (she wore a sweet grandma-turned-hipster floral print dress today), and she seems pretty easy going. The only reason she loses points is that she has connections to Canada; one of her parents is Canadian, and she chose to live and work there for like 10 months last year. Unforgivable.

I’m kidding of course. I love Mounties really.

Ricardo is a decent guy too, at least from what I can tell after exchanging about a half dozen sentences with him. He thinks his English is bad, but it’s actually not too difficult to understand. He was probably just nervous, being surrounded by English-speaking people on his first day at a new job. I think he’ll loosen up in time, though. Jenny will be exposing him to all sorts of dirty British slang. He probably has no idea what he’s in for, poor guy.

The other Ricardo I met today at the gym, on the other hand, was very difficult to understand. He had a pretty thick accent (I didn’t ask where he was from), and it didn’t help that they were blaring dance hits on the speaker system in there. I think he kept trying to crack jokes, but I was totally missing the point every time. He’d do stuff like go to program in my age into a machine and say “35, right?” And I’m thinking to myself, did he actually confuse the word “23” with “35”? Is he that dumb? But then he just laughed and changed it. It was a bit of a communication breakdown.

But he also showed me lots of different toning exercises I can to with the weight machines, and I learned some good stuff that will probably make my workouts a lot more effective now. I’m usually too scared to go try weight machines that I’ve never used before, but now I can do just about anything in the gym. My next goal is to get Joe to join, too, so I don’t have to go by myself all the time!