Matt & Kat

As some of you will already know, my favourite website of the moment is Threadless, a site where people can upload their t-shirt design ideas and the best designs, as voted by the other site users, get printed and sold. I recently bought a new hoody from Threadless. The design is titled ‘Tools of the Trade’ and seemed particularly apt for me. I like it . I like it a lot.

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On Friday we paid the bond on the apartment that we’re renting for the next year. It’s right in the city centre in an area called the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), where all the banks and finance companies have their headquarters. We’ve yet to actually pay the first months rent thanks to the slowness of the transfer company we were using to get the money from New Zealand, but luckily the landlord has let us move in already as we have to move out of our Google supplied apartment tommorrow morning!

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One thing I have learned about Dublin is that you must always take an umbrella when you leave the house. Even if it is warm. Even if it is sunny outside. Even if you’re only going out for 20 minutes. ALWAYS take an umbrella. I can’t actually complain about the weather too much because these first weeks in Dublin have been unseasonably sunny and fine. According to Dubliners the weather they have been having is more like the weather of mid-Summer than early Spring.

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Exciting news from me: on Tuesday this week I formally accepted a job offer with a small Irish IT company based in West Dublin. I’ll be the official Web Designer; working on web, graphic, and application design. The Web Designer job is going to be a great fit with what I do well and what I enjoy. I started my job search last Monday, browsing job vacancies online and picking out a few.

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So far, so good. I survived my first week of work at Google without my head exploding due to the amount of new information that I had to take in! The first two days were formal training on Google’s culture, policies, procedures and other important information like how to get an Irish bank account and get paid. The rest of the week involved meeting my team and enjoying Google’s famous lunches in the employee cafetaria.

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Yes, it’s official – we are now registered as immigrants, officially allowed to live in Dublin. On Thursday afternoon we went into the Gardai National Immigration Bureau to register ourselves. We waited for about 20 minutes in line just for our ticket to get into the actual cue to register. After about two hours waiting on Thursday we got Matt registered but then had to go back again on Friday to get my registration completed as we hadn’t brought all the papers they wanted to see on Thursday!

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I’m pleased to annouce that we’ve arrived safely in Dublin after 3 weeks of travel and are being very well looked after by Google. We arrived on Sunday afternoon and were picked up at the airport and driven to the apartment that Google is putting us up in for the next month. Along the way the driver gave us a short introduction to the city and the current events (including NZ’s win in the Rugby U19s that day which I was completely ignorant about!

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All of the monopoly game place names come from London and every time we walk past another one here I get a small buzz. Silly? Perhaps – but still kinda fun 😛 Yesterday we went shopping along Oxford St, Bond St and Regent, we walked along Pall Mall and had lunch in Trafalgar Square before catching a movie in Leicester Square and taking the tube via Piccadilly to get back to our hotel.

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Why does everyone complain about London so much? We’ve had a great time here over the last three days and we’re looking forward to finishing off our holiday tomorrow before leaving for Dublin on Sunday. The highlight of London for me was definitely going to see to The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majestys Theatre in Haymarket (right next door to New Zealand House!) last night. First thing yesterday morning we went along to Leicester Square, where there is a booth that sells last minute theatre tickets and picked up two cheap tickets for some excellent seats.

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While in London we are staying at Blue Bells Hotel in Notting Hill. (Yes, Notting Hill like the movie with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant). The Hotel is nestled in a row of gorgeous classic old white stone buildings. Notting Hill seems to be an area equivalent to Remuera or Ponsonby in Auckland. Trendy boutiques and antique shops, million dollar villas, and private schools where the kids wear little straw hats and blazers.

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