Hello from Dublin

For the last week and a half Mona (from Munich) has been over visiting
me in Ireland. We went down to Kilkenny (a couple of hours south of
Dublin) for the weekend. Kilkenny is a nice little town, much more
relaxed (and cheaper) than Dublin.

While we were there we went to Kilkenny Castle and did a tour of the
inside and also had a walk around the ground which are quite cool but a
lot smaller than they used to be a few centuries ago. Before the family
who owned the Castle started to go bankrupt they owned about three
counties in Ireland so they had a decent sized backyard.

We also went to some churches and to a small museum which was all about
the local history which was interesting.

Even though Kilkenny is relatively small there are still heaps and heaps
of pubs in town so we sampled a few of them...and tried the local beers.
My favourite beer in Ireland is 'Smithwicks' and it's brewed in an old
monastery in Kilkenny so I made sure to drink a few of them.

After that I had to go back to work but we went out in the evenings. One
night we went to the theatre, another time I took Mona to the Australian
pub and we drank some Aussie beers (Coopers, Crown Lager, Extra Dry,
James Boags) and watched Australia beat England (again!) in a one dayer
from Brisbane. I tried to explain the rules of cricket to Mona, who'd
never seen a game before. It's bloody difficult to explain cricket to
someone who wasn't brought up with it, there are so many complicated
little rules

Then one night Mona cooked (with a little help from me) traditional
German food: wiener schnitzel. I didn't realise that cooking schnitzel
was so complicated, I thought you just dipped it in bread crumbs and
that was that. But there is a whole process of washing the meat,
hammering it, then dipping it in flour, egg and finally bread crumbs.
Anyway, the end result was delicious!

Mona's gone back to Germany now and I'm back at work, trying to save
money for travelling once it warms up a bit.

I'm going to an Australia Day party this Friday at one of my friends
places which will be good fun. I think I'm supposed to be in charge of
cooking a bbq so hopefully that goes alright...

Anyway I have to get back to work so see you later!!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone!! I hope you all had a great New Year and good start to 2007.

Firstly, congratulations to Australia for winning the Ashes 5 - 0. Not a surprising result but still good to see!

Ben came over to Dublin on the 29th for a few days. We went on a mini pub crawl/walking tour of Dublin on his first day here. Had a look at Temple Bar (the most touristy area in Dublin, full of pubs), saw the River Liffey, strolled round Trinity College, went to Ron Blacks (the smallest pub in Dublin) and went to the Woolshed (the Aussie pub) for some nachos.

The next day we did the 'Porterhouse Challange'. The Porterhouse is a pub which brews its own beer and they have 10 beers on tap. We sat down at lunch time and set about trying to drink a pint of all 10 of them. The first 9 were fine.

When we came to the 10th they had run out so we substituted it with a special beer celebrating the fact that the pub was 10 years old that year (that we later found out was 10% alcohol). This kind of ruined our night. After the beer we started to feel sick and went straight home and fell asleep at about 9. We slept for 15 hours until noon the next day and did not feel like going out at all.

However it was New Years Eve so we were kind of obliged to. We went to a party at a friends of mine and I didn't drink much because I was feeling sick from the day before but I still had a good night. Ben was worse than me and managed to fall asleep at about 11.

Last week Dave Lawler came over for a quick visit from Wales so I went out for dinner with him which was cool.

I have also started work. Working at a health insurance company in the centre of town. The first few days have been training and have been really slow and easy (hopefully the actual job will be like that). I'm not sure exactly what I will be doing but as long as its money and I can save some to go travelling once spring comes and it starts to warm up I don't really care.

That's it from me for now, see you later alligators.