The First Weekend

I took a nice, deep breath…

There wasn’t much to it. I finished unpacking my clothes and getting them put away on shelves and in the closet. Irish bedrooms are very small compared to the US standard (especially secondary bedrooms – usually small enough that you can’t get a bed bigger than a twin inside, or a double would be very tight) and the one I am staying in, though I was offered the larger of the two available, is no exception. It is about 6ft. x 13ft. with a good 9ft. of closet, which is more than I need, furnished with two twin beds, a small table with a small TV, and a small night stand. I can use the kitchen/dining space and living room whenever I need to, but I spend most of my time (when I am here) on the bed watching movies or typing on my laptop (Ireland is also not particularly warm, especially with an older radiator based heating system in the house, so being in bed under the blankets is often the best choice). (I will get some pictures when I can and try to put them up here.) So, most of my weekend was spent doing just that.

I did take a few trips to the shopping center to email and make internet calls. Eventually I will look around and see what other options are avaialbe for internet connection, but for now this will suffice (of course when we get our own place we will have a full time connection). In the same shopping center there is a 24-hour grocery store called Tesco (actually owned by the Walmart corporation, but fortunately there are Irish laws preventing them from doing what Walmart does in the US), so I took my first swing at buying some real food to make myself. At the house there is, oddly enough, a George Forman Grill, so I decided to get ingredients for some simple toasted ham and cheese sandwiches. I also bought some Ramen type noodles (different brand name here), some apples, bananas, bag salad (because I am lazy), and some granola bars. Generally you can get just about everything in a grocery store that you could in the US, though some things have more or less a variety of options. Many of the brands are the same, but some things are completely different, or the same product under a different name.

The food in Ireland is traditionally very basic meat and potatoes types of food, and typically a bit more bland than an American palate might expect, but I would predict that the more and more international Ireland gets (with so many different people moving in), the better the food will get in this regard. So far I haven’t delved too deeply into traditional Irish cuisine, but then again, I never ate “American” food while I was in the US, so why would I eat Irish food in Ireland…

Somehow the days feel a bit shorter, but I think that has to do with the window of time I have available to call the US when people will be awake being fairly short – especially on weekends. They close the mall at 7pm, if you can believe that, so I am only left with a few hours to try and call people, assuming they aren’t sleeping in.

The bulk of my time, however, was just spent watching a few movies, a little PSP game playing, and trying ready myself for the throng of interviews that faced me during the week ahead.