Current Landmark Project

The last few months most of my time at work has been consumed in trying to get documents together, in conjunction with another architecture firm, for the redevelopment of an entire pier in Dun Laoghaire, a city just outside Dublin. The competition was held several years ago and the winning design is Proposal D. The other architects, Heneghan Peng, have been great to work with, and it was also nice to hear another American accent that I could understand very clearly and we could have the rest of the room wondering what the heck we were talking about.



There is a derilict building on the pier right now which would be removed. Then two residential towers would be built on top of an aquarium, retail shops and a large carpark. The whole thing is glass so there are uninterrupted views of the Irish Sea and the harbour. Ben and I went out there on a windy, rainy day and grabbed a few shots, and even in the dreariest weather, it still is a good site. Here is a link to see some more of the competition drawings. I would love to see this project completed!

Strange Anomaly #13

Tree roots are paved over. When the sidewalk is concrete or concrete pavers, they take asphalt and pave all the way up to the trunk of the tree. My theory is it stops the roots from buckling the concrete and is easier to repave/maintain.

Happy Christmas

Father Christmas almost missed our house since we do not have a chimney but he made it. We had a very quiet Christmas. I got up at 6:30am to do a conference call with my parents so they could open their gifts that I had mailed to them and I could open the ones they sent to Ben and I. Each item was individually wrapped with its own bow and cards, fancy! We got some yummy food stuff that I have been itching to make such as waffle batter, muffin mixes, graham crackers, other crackers and Mexican sauces. My girlfriend Michal also sent us a care package that can help expand our dinners for sure! All of our Christmas cards are lovingly taped just above our oven so that way I can see some of our loved ones smiling faces while I make breakfast in the morning. Not a bad way to start out my day!


Muffin mixes that require a muffin tin, but with everything closed up it was hard to get a muffin tin. Now when I say everything, I mean everything. Just a few select pubs open on Christmas and St Stephens Day (the day after). At 7:00 Christmas Eve the whole city shuts down, pubs close, since they don't want people completely drunk when they show up for midnight mass.


Ben got a new phone for himself and I got a 4000 piece puzzle of Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Five days later I had the whole thing done. Ben has been creating a whole new interface for his computer phone that has a Xmen theme. We were supposed to head out west, but when it came time to hire the car, there were no cars to be had in the entire island. We could get a train, but the problem is when you head out to the country, if you have no car, you cannot get anywhere else but the station. We just will have to wait until another break to head out to Kerry. We have been watching tons of movies to pass the time. It has been sunny in the mornings, but by afternoon it is raining and windy. Not much of an incentive to leave the house if you ask me. We plan on a quiet New Years at the pub with Claire and then it is back to work on the 2nd. It was nice enjoying 11 days off work!

Photographer: Next Career Move?

The social committee at work puts on every year a in-house photo competition. There were 6 categories, and you could enter only one into each category. The pictures had to be taken by you in the last year. I submitted three: humour, architecture and nature. We rented out the top floor of the closest pub to our office and headed there after work for some dinner, entertainment and the competition. A fantastic spread of food was put out and we enjoyed the show of last years Christmas party, sports day, study trips, trip to London for the office's 15th anniversary and other work gatherings. Lots of pictures of the 4 o'clock girls (as Karen, Claire and I are now known as since we promptly go down for our tea break in the canteen everyday at, you guessed it, 4:00) doing a variety of things, bungee run, soccer tournament, London mischief and just fun in the sun at a lunch break.

Then the competition began. A co-worker's sister is a professional photographer and after she went through a few hundred pictures to select the winner out of the four finalist for each category. First up was abstract, which I did not enter since most of my photos are mainly of buildings. Then was Office Related, and although I am always there and were in some of the photos, I usually never am the one taking the photos. Then was movie clips, but I have not been tech savvy enough to learn how to do movies on purpose with Ben's camera, just on accident. The came Humour. My picture of Manekin Pis with his orange raincoat was not selected, but I was not disheartened, this was just the first of three. Then came Nature, which I had a Bend waterfall picture from right before I moved. I was not selected, but I was a top finalist! Last but not least was architecture. Now working in an architecture firm with about 130 or so other architects in four different offices with Europe at our fingertips, I knew this would be a challenge. First one up was a great black and white of a Gothic church. Next was a famous Japanese church that when photographed at the right time of day has the most amazing shadows. Then was some roman ruins with cats running about over them. Then finally was mine! The Guggenheim in Bilbao! Everyone was cheering, and they were all shouting out their favorite, up until now there had been all male winners, but not this time! I WON! I got a 100 euro gift certificate that can be used and a variety of different places. Very popular here, I can get a new outfit, get something for the kitchen, sky dive, horseback ride or go TANK DRIVING! I mean, how cool would driving a real military tank be, not a chance every person gets to have...... we will see. After the holidays I can figure out what to do with it. Look out photographers, here I come!

Jacquie has left the island.....

The Legend which is know as Jacquie has departed Ireland to make her way back home to Johannesburg, South Africa. She has lived all over Ireland and Africa, but is looking forward to heading back to her husband's home town of Jo'burg where his parents have been living in their house. Jacquie was a fast friend of mine, since we are both foreigners, and she had the energy and creativity to match my intenseness. As I have said before she showed me the ropes of not only our own neighborhood, but also the rest of Dublin. We both have about the same amount of experience so I took over her work when she left since we are on the same team. So in about one week, she had to impart all her architectural knowledge to me since we were no longer in denial that she was leaving.


The weekend before she left, we had one last girls night out. We headed to Tullia's who lives in the heart of Temple Bar to dine on some South African food, drink some wine and just have the craic. She brought her mac laptop which has the most wonderful program, Photobooth, that can manipulate photos, so she got a good and crazy picture with each of us. The gang was Catherine, Katherine, Tullia, Ruth, Claire, me, then Jacquie, Karen, Clementine and Edell in the hat. Here are just some of the samples from that night. It was great to all hang out together one last time, and it was a happy time with no tears.




Since Ben and I just got here and have nothing, and Jacquie and Phillip and wanting to leave with nothing, we did inherit some of their things, so with Africa now hanging on my wall, there will always be a piece of Jacquie here.

Hungary Like a Wolf

As I have said before the 80s are making a comeback. Duran Duran made their way through Dublin so of course I had to go see them. Tullia and Franchesca are my two little Italian beauties that are old enough to know who Duran Duran were back in their heyday. The three of us arrived and we made our way to the front. I realized that I was by far the tallest girl in the entire place and one of the youngest. I was even taller then most of the guys, Irish people are not that tall. I could see the stage clear since we were only about 12 feet back, but my counterparts were having a harder time being able to see. I had to save one of them from being crushed behind some drunk girl who was thrashing about a little too much. Duran Duran came out with a newer album and they played a few of their new songs, but they played all their old hits! They were the only act and played for just over an hour. Simon looked great for being nearly 50 and danced and shimmied the whole time. We came away delighted that although we were too young to go see them back in the day, we got to now!

The Short And Dirty: Christmas Is Coming!

There was Thanksgiving, and now there's Christmas. We are on a hiatus from traveling at the moment, but we are looking to do a bit of local traveling through a few of the counties of Ireland over the Christmas break (many service businesses close up shop between Christmas and New Years, and our offices are on board...yay!). I've been keeping myself entertained with a new Pocket PC phone that I got on the cheap from a guy at work, which I lovingly call iPseudophone. It's a hold over until I can get myself a proper iPhone, which probably won't be until I move back to the States. Mariah has been working on a 4000 piece puzzle which will likely take up the whole floor of our living room... Work is work - extra hours for both of us. We've been trying to frequent the gym with mixed success. We have managed to upgrade our internet connection, so communications are working much better at this point. Look for a reissue email of our contact data in the near future.

For Christmas it will just be the two of us. Pretty much all of our friends will be out of town, so we will be braving Dublin on our own. This will be different and good in a lot of ways, at least for an experience. We have blissfully managed to avoid most Christmas chaos given our remoteness, which is nice as well.

That's it really...

Look for a more interesting post at a later date...

Thank You Ireland!

The long awaited Thanksgiving blog...Sorry about that...

As it turns out, they don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Ireland. I know, I know...you are surprised... For the most part, though, nobody here really knows anything about Thanksgiving beyond what they see in movies, so a big part of our Thanksgiving this year has been about introducing the concept to our pool of international friends. Leading up to Thanksgiving Mariah arranged the importation of a variety of thanksgiving foodstuffs that we couldn't find around Dublin. Nobody here has ever heard of pumpkin pie, so that was the big one. (We did later manage to find a shop that is very internationally oriented and had a bit of canned pumpkin - it was only there the one time we went in and bought some, the next time it was all gone - along with some canned cranberries, so next year we may be able to collect everything we need if we start buying things up early.)

Since no one had ever heard of pumpkin pie, Mariah made it her mission to introduce this taste to everyone...well...everyone at her work anyway. She baked up two pumpkin pies which she toted into coworkers and watched a very mixed range of expressions as people experienced the flavors for the first time. For the most part it started with extreme skepticism or expected disgust and ended with enjoyment. Often the enjoyment took a lot of confused bites to get to. "Interesting" was the most common descriptor and a whole piece of pie was in some cases not enough for people to decide whether or not they actually liked it. No plates were left uncleaned, so someone definitely liked it in the end.

Our supplies of pumpkin were limited, so I got stuck with offering up apple pies to my coworkers (I wasn't baking, so these were bakery bought). American enough, I would say, but by no means uncharted territory for people's taste buds. Hopefully next year we can round up enough goods to give my office a taste of the pumpkin ecstasy.

The main event ended up being held on Saturday instead of Thursday. Since it's not an Irish holiday we still had to work on Thursday and we preferred to save our days off for adventures into Europe and we knew no one but us would really know the difference. We also had visitors coming over to join us for the holiday that couldn't make it on Thursday. My sister Holly has been studying for a term of exchange in London, so she came, along with her friend Ellen, over to the little island to enjoy some Turkey and see Dublin in one fell swoop. Good craic.

On the day of the big event we got started relatively early (for a Saturday), had some breakfast, and then headed into town a bit before noon. Thanksgiving was to be held at Bruno's place (of course), so we were to gather up groceries, including the turkey, and then head over there for an afternoon of food preparation. The dinner wasn't to begin until 7:00pm or so, but turkeys take a long time to cook and the prep, I am told, is half of the fun. We were also expecting about seventeen people total, so a lot of food was to be prepared.

We found one shop that would order us a turkey (it seems the Irish only eat turkey for Christmas dinner, so this was harder than it sounds) and we headed there first to pick that up. Here's where the trouble started. It seems the delivery guy forgot to throw the turkeys in his truck, so he was going to have to go all the way back to the meat packing plant to pick them up. The predicted time was round 2:00pm for arriving back at the shop. We were also getting the "crown" of the turkey (which is just the breast portion of the turkey) instead of a whole turkey. The crown wasn't what we were expecting and the delay was a little disconcerting, but...what do you do.

We headed on to the grocery store and picked up the rest of our supplies, a few of which were no where to be found, but we made due. We lugged everything back to Bruno's where Holly and Ellen started cutting up produce while Mariah started putting together side dishes and hors d'oeuvres. I, on the other hand, spent the whole afternoon walking back and forth from the apartment to the shops - walking to the turkey shop only to find out the truck was late, or walking to the grocer to grab this or that which had been forgotten. Multiple trips were made to the turkey shop before the finally said they would just call me when it was actually there. This call came around 3:30pm. When I got there they somehow managed to give me too much turkey and I ended up half way to Bruno's before realizing this and took the excess back.

I arrived back at the apartment with turkey in hand (a 5kg/12lb slab of pure breast meat with no bones or anything) just after 4:00pm with some serious doubts about the achievement of our timeline. The butcher had said this crown should cook faster than a full turkey with no bones or excess, but we only had three hours until dinner was meant to be served and I was still skeptical. The oven was hot, ready and waiting when I arrived, so the turkey went straight in, and we were left to simply wait for people to show up and hope our time would be enough. As it turns out, a meat thermometer is harder to find than crack (real crack, not craic...craic is easy to come by...) in Dublin, so we had to make cuts here and there in the end to discern the turkey's level of cookedness (this is a new word designed exclusively for this blog...share it among your friends...).

People started filtering in at 7:00pm. It was our usual mix of pan-world nationalities: Americans, Portuguese, South Africans, Belgians, Irish, Czech, Polish...you know...the works. Conversations trickled between new and old friends and Holly got to see a bit of what we get to enjoy while living here. The turkey was done (or at least done enough), though a bit late, and we had the full spread laid out by 8:00pm. We ended up having so much food that it took all of the table space to set it out, so people were forced to stand or sit with plate in hand and eat, which didn't seem to end up a problem for anyone. We would have preferred to gather everyone around a table and eat in a more traditional style, but when you're lacking for space you adapt. The food spread was amazing and all credit goes to Mariah for putting this together. We had everything: turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, macaroni and cheese (craft style), salad, corn bread, dinner rolls, zucchini with cheese, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, cranberry sauce (canned style, which I think only Mariah ate), stuffing, garlic bread. Did I say everything?...I meant EVERYTHING!. It was ridiculous. Everyone enjoyed everything. Despite the fact that nothing seems to be easy in Ireland and the build up to the meal was fraught with frustrations, it was a really spectacular end result and everyone really enjoyed themselves. Given the quantity of food I expect that all of our non-American friends got a good taste of what Thanksgiving is really about...food...lots and lots and mounds and piles of food! And to end it all off...pumpkin pie. Mariah saved half of her pumpkin pie supplies for Thanksgiving proper and so lots more folks who had never experienced pumpkin pie had the opportunity to have a go.

As the evening closed the truth came out: the European appetite couldn't handle it. "Eat until you pass out" was established at the beginning of the night as the Thanksgiving credo and not one person lost consciousness. How disappointing... Even with seventeen people we had leftovers galore. We left a good chunk of the leftovers for Bruno and his roommate Joao, quite a few of our guests were berated into taking a plate home, and I think we still took a whole half of the turkey back to our wee refrigerator. We ate turkey at least once a day for a week. I suppose that's how it's supposed to work out, but....jaaayyyysssus! (This expression is very Irish, by the way.) There was much talk early on of going dancing after the dinner and, when things were all said and done, not one foot stepped onto a dance floor. Everyone was too full. I guess I can consider this a consolation prize, given the lack of unconsciousness.

Kudos to all of you folks out there that orchestrate this type of thing every year. Hard work, that.

We ended off the weekend with Holly and Ellen hitting up a few of our favorite touristy hot spots: Kilmainham Gaol and the Guinness Brewery. Hopefully they had a good time, because I know we did. They got on a plane Sunday evening and we were forced to drag ourselves back to the reality that we had to be at work the next day.

What are we thankful for? Well, if the above doesn't say it enough, it is all about Ireland. Despite my personal frustrations with shops and availability, and being in a technological black hole, we wouldn't be able to do any of the great things were are doing or meet the people we are meeting if it weren't for Ireland and it's "open to architects" immigration policies.

So...THANK YOU IRELAND!

Little Slice of Heaven

The closest friend I have made to date is moving back to South Africa very soon, more to come on that bit. So before she goes, she is imparting all her wisdom to me. We took a little trip around Dublin to show me all the ins and outs. It now truly feels like home. I now know exactly where to go to get a tattoo, a piercing, Rainbow Bright satchel, leather pants, leopard print tops, false eyelashes, bowling shoes, striped tights and wigs galore. Retro Shops in Temple Bar near Sun Studios, Harlequin near Georges St. Arcade, Wild Child Vintage Clothes on Great Georges Street, Savage on Bloom Lane, Also Flip in Temple Bar beside central bank and the Eager Beaver, Eamonn Dorans and the Bad Ass Café on Crown Alley. Now, I may not need any of those things, and they may seem silly to some, but I feel better knowing that in a pinch I know where to get them. She also showed me some great retro shops of used clothes, some with strange clothes, and others for work clothes with an extra kick. Small creature comfort, but one I need to know to keep my sanity is such a straitlaced dressed place that has an very 80s look to it. All of my off the beaten path little shops are just hidden in plain sight, so if you do not know to go halfway up the alley, or turn into a small alcove hidden next to a large retail shop, you would never know they are there. From Chanel to 60's classics, I have it all. Fashion world, here I come!

Dry Skiing

In January my office is taking a group of 30 to go skiing in Scotland. Although I have lived my whole life within a 45 minute drive to several ski resorts, I have never learned to ski. I have snowboarded a few times, but that is about it. Since 28 out of the 30 people have never skied either, we decided to take a class. Now you may be asking yourself in a county that has no REAL mountains and no consistent snow falls where could you do that at? Just 30 minutes from Dublin in the little village of Kilternan there is a dry slope. It is sort of like diamond shaped hairbrushes that you ski on. Not soft at all if you were to fall, but I was determined not to fall. I picked it up rather quickly and seemed to be the best in the class. Multiple classes later I am cutting down the slope, turning and STOPPING! Stopping on my own accord is key. Now I don't mind falling in snow, but I am glad that as of yet, I have not fallen onto the hairbrush from hell. If there is no snow in Scotland, a group of us may go to Andorra for another weekend to try out our new skills. Now we will see how good I do in January. Update to follow......

Warning: Fitness Centre may cause extreme exhaustion......

We finally found a gym that we are able to join that has a rock climbing wall! YAY! They also have a pool, sauna, spin classes, yoga, aqua aerobics, free weights, workout equipment and the climbing wall. What more could you really need. It is across town though at Trinity College, but we hope to someday live close to it. Luckily Ben's office designed the place so we get a super discount, essentially a two for one deal. The hardest part (besides making ourselves go) is learning just how heavy 9 kg is. I know how much I could lift in pounds, now I just need to get better on my conversions. 20 pounds is definitely not 20 kilograms!

Girls Next Door

We were watching the telly late one night and the show the Girls Next Door (the reality show of Hugh Hefner and his girlfriends) came on. We stopped for a few minutes just to watch how crazy their lives are when all of a sudden we realized there are no blurry bits. That's right! After 10:00 when all the little kiddies have gone off to bed you can have any nudity or language. Now that was quite a treat. Anyone up for some late night shows when they come to visit?