Our lease for our apartment finished about 3 months ago. About 3 months ago I asked our landlord if we could just go month to month without signing a new lease and she said that would be ok. We planned on moving out of our place because, while it was close to work, it was kind of boring after work. We kept procrastinating for 3 months on moving just because we were always busy and our place was good enough.
Anyhow, about 3 weeks ago, our landlord sends me an email saying you must either sign a new 1 year lease or get out in 8 days. We definitely didn't want to sign up for a full year. I was pretty sure I had more rights than this, but instead I just figured we could use this as an opportunity to bite the bullet and finally stop procrastinating and make the move. Dublin is a very strange market for rental houses. In Ottawa I was used to places advertising a place that will be available in about 6-8 weeks time. In that model its very easy to plan a move. However, in Dublin, everything is available for move in "Immediately" and the good places are snatched up in the first few days. This was a problem for us because normally we had to give our landlord 1 months notice when we were going to move out but we couldn't plan to move into a new place before we gave the notice. So this 8 day ultimatum was a blessing in disguise.
So, Julie went on a rampage seeing all the properties in our desired area and we found a place in the first 2 days. I never actually saw the place before we moved in because it was in such demand Julie had to sign before I could come see it. She told me all the details over the phone and it sounded good. The place is a newly renovated, basement flat, in and old Dublin house. It is right smack in the center of town!
When we finally moved in, it seemed pretty good, but had some serious flaws. For starters the wall in our bedroom was damp and paint had started to fall off. Also, the stove wasn't working and the "furnished" apartment was missing a few key items like a dresser, a vacuum, and a microwave. The apartment also seemed to be very humid all throughout.
Needless to say we thought we had made a serious mistake. However, the landlord came over and turned out to be a super nice guy. He quickly dealt with the stove and the damp wall. He also promised to buy us a dresser, vacuum, and microwave. Once the damp wall was taken care of, the humidity of the apartment seemed to come down a bit (although, maybe we just got used to it - I can't be sure). After all of that, we are now happy with the place - phew!
One thing I find in just about every Dublin house is drafty windows. As a Canadian this drives me crazy because I am used to very tightly sealed windows. In fairness, the climate is more mild here so the seal doesn't need to be so tight as in Canada, but I still don't think that's any excuse. So, I just went around with packing tape and taped up all the drafts :). Its much better now.
The location of this place is really the best thing about it. I find we are able to do so many more things now because its just so much easier to get to them. It's much easier to go read a book for an hour in the park or go have a few drinks in town. Also, we are right beside a "Dublin bikes" stand. These Dublin bikes are amazing! Basically, you pay 10 euros per year and you have infinite access to a bike that you can use to bike around the city. There are about 30 stands around the city and you can just take a bike from 1 stand and leave it at another. It's such a cool way of getting around town. You need to limit your trip to 30 minutes or else you start paying money, but realistically, most trips are less than 30 minutes. The bikes themselves are very high quality bikes and really a pleasure to ride.
Moving day was interesting too. I hired a guy I found off the web who had a van. He had a big van and we got basically everything in the van. I feel bad for the guy though. He used to be a truck driver but has now been unemployed for about 3 months. This is his only source of income and he said he's only moving about 1 person per week. He only made 40 euros to move us. It's interesting to see how tough going Dublin is these days even for go-getters like this guy. He said there are a lot of unemployed people with vans doing the same thing.
After we moved, I went back to the old place to give back the keys and get back my deposit. We had taken everything out of the place, but we hadn't vacuumed or cleaned. When the old landlord saw the place, she said that it must be "like new" and fully cleaned. So, I spent the next 2 hours cleaning the place from top to bottom. The oven hadn't been cleaned in a year so I spent the most time on it :(. I did a kick ass job cleaning it but I still haven't got my deposit back. Apparently she has up to a month before legally required to give my deposit back. I have been hounding here a few times. I'm pretty confident I will get it back though, it's just annoying that it hasn't happened yet.
Work is still crazy busy. Today was a holiday, but I went in anyway. I can usually get twice as much work done if I am the only one in the office and that proved to be true today. I think I will do a fair bit of overtime in the next few weeks because review time is in 9 days. I want to get one little project completely done and dusted by the time I write my self evaluation. I'm still gunning for top marks in my evaluation, but this year will be much tougher than last. In fairness though, today was pretty much the only overtime I've ever done at Microsoft.
Julie and I decided to take a last minute trip to Galway on the weekend. It was a really good time. We went with 5 of Julie's schools friends. We stayed in downtown Galway the first night then stayed with a friend in a tiny village, called Oughterard, about 40 minutes outside of Galway the second night.
Julie & I stayed in a 6 person hostel room in Galway. There was a big festival on in Galway the night we went. There are about 20 bars on 1 street and they closed down the whole street for the festival. You could drink anywhere on the street, it was pretty cool! Its funny in Ireland, technically you can't drink in public places, but really the worst thing that will happen is that the cops will pour out your beer. We were talking with an American at the hostel who was walking around town with a beer in hand, not knowing what the drinking in public laws were. The American went up to a police officer and asked if he could be walking around with this beer and the officer said "well, no.... but this is Ireland". We got a decent sleep in the hostel with 4 other people.
The next day we headed out to a friend Rick's parents house in Oughterard. His parents have a large farmhouse on their cattle farm. We played a bit of Frisbee, had a nice dinner, then started drinking. At about 10pm, we headed into "downtown" (small town) Oughterard. This is a classic small town where everyone knows everyone. This first pub we walked into was an experience I will never forget. When we walked in, it was like everything and everyone in the pub just stopped for about 10 seconds. Everyone was looking straight at us. We all went up to the bar and got a drink then headed back to a table. The owner of the bar was an 80 year old woman, named Mary, who kept her eye on us the whole time. Rick says everyone knows her and she knows everyone. He said that she gets very nervous about strangers and we all got that vibe from her all throughout our stay at that pub. The next few pubs were pretty uneventful though. When we were finished up and ready to head home I quickly figured out that there are no taxis in Oughterard but rather some guy named "Kevin" who occasionally brings people home for money. We called Kevin on his mobile and he said he would pick us up soon. However after an hour of waiting he still didn't pick us up because he was too busy with other people. The girls in our group were getting increasingly restless, so we eventually called Ricks parents at 2 am to come pick us up. Here is a picture of Mary from the first bar, she is on the right:
I think I liked Oughtererd better than Galway simply because it gave us an interesting glimpse of small town, rural Ireland that we had never really seen before.
I'll put some pictures of Galway and our new apartment up soon.
Cya
