Visiting the Homeland!

     Dia dhuit or Hello in Gaelic! I just got back from Dublin and it was AMAZING!!! The Irish are so friendly and helping. At the first glance of confusion there is someone that stops and asks what you're looking for or if you need some help. I went with one other girl that is on my program and we packed in a lot in 3 days. We left Thursday night and checked into our hostel. The hostel was actually really clean and nice for the price we paid. Sadly I did not get any pictures of our room the first night, but it was a very fun atmosphere with free breakfast every morning! After checking in we went down the street and found a bar and just hung out and talked to some locals. Sad part is that since Ireland is in a bad financial states drinks were a weeeee bit expensive this weekend!


     On Friday we got up decently early to head over to the Guinness Brewery and did the tour. We also shelled out the extra 7 euro to learn the history about Guinness, get tastings of all their beers, and of course to become experts at pouring the Guinness draft from the tap! There were about 9 of us total learning from these 2 experts who talked about how Guinness was started, how the beer was made, and how you are supposed to drink Guinness. Yes there is a specific way you are supposed to drink the beer to get the full flavor of the beer. Fun fact, the Irish used to give those who gave blood a pint of Guinness after they donated blood because the Guinness draft helps the iron content in your blood is has natural vitamins! I would recommend if anyone is ever in Dublin to shell out and do the extra private session, especially you Pat. We got 3 sample tastings then a complimentary pint of Guinness draft that we poured on our own after learning the 6 step method of the proper way to pour it from the draft. After become experts on Guinness we did the self guided tour of the area and learned all about the brewing process (most of which I knew in a general basis thanks to Pat). The entire place was huge and best part of all with our admission we got to go up to the Gravity Bar atop the factory which has a 360 degree view of Dublin. Since it was a decent day out it was simply amazing to look out onto Dublin with no impeded views!! After Guinness we went back to the Hostel took a nap then headed out for the night.


     Saturday we woke up and decided to have a relaxing day and went on a tour of Dublin castle, then walked along the river Liffey to the docklands area. It was simply gorgeous out, sun shining, small amount of clouds and warm! It was a wonderful break from the always gray and windy London. We learned a great deal about the origins of Dublin and how the name actually came from a series of cultures not understanding what the previous one was saying. The vikings who originally founded the city called it Dufflin which meant Black Pool, due to a pool of water that was black near their castle. When the English came they heard the name and thought the vikings were saying Dublin. Thus the name stuck and it has forever been called Dublin. After the tour of Dublin Castle we went into the gift shop and of course I found things all around the store with the McLaughlin family name on it. Best of all you could purchase certificates that gave the history of the name, motto, famous lineage in it (as in kings and etc.) and coat of arms. While it was quite expensive to buy that, the best part was that the example that was on display was of course the McLaughlin last name. It was like I was meant to go through the store. In the end I bought a shot glass with McLaughlin on it along with the family crest! Along our walk of the River Liffey, we saw Christchurch, St. Peter's, Temple Bar area, and monuments to the Famine.

St. James' Gate

Me pouring my perfect pint

The SURGE! The teacher was impressed with how well I did

Guinness buys/used 3/4 of the grain grown in Ireland

View of Dublin from the Gravity Bar

Couldn't believe that our family name was the one used for an example

Should have bought it!

Christchurch

View of Dublin down the River Liffey

Every street name was in English and Gaelic

Tribute to the Famine

     All in all the trip was simply amazing and Dublin is one of my new favorite city. The atmosphere was just so relaxing and things never seemed to be in a rush! Hope you enjoy the pictures and until next time (which might be Windsor Castle) take care everyone!
     

Long Weeks

     'Ello again everyone! Not too much has happened since Scotland, mainly I've been working on doing a mass mailout to 5,000 UK postal addresses for work. We are including a flyer for our St. Patrick's Day event (which I designed and created), an invitation to a race day event in two months (which I didn't create), and a sheet talking about the company and what we do. Needless to say this means everyone has been in the conference room stuffing envelopes, putting on stamps (luckily they are self adhesive), and folding thousands of pages of paper. One little glitch though, printer broke and is being repaired as I type this. Brand new industrial sized copier/scanner/printer only two months old or something and the motor already broke. Freak accident claims the technician but who knows.
    
     The main reason I'm putting up this post is to give everyone a heads up that I'll be in Dublin this weekend. I have to pack, print out my ryanair boarding pass, and charge my camera. For those of you who don't know Ryanair is by far the cheapest airline in Europe and the reason it's so cheap is because they just fly something that will get you there and don't spare much for comfort or pampering. So check back in for the post on Dublin which will be coming up probably on Sunday! Cheers!

Lochs, Pheasants, Scots, and Hamish

     So I guess this will be the first official post that relates to an actual Euro trip!! This past weekend I went to Scotland for Friday-Sunday, so get your cup of coffee, tea, or beer and get ready to read!
The trip started off by meeting up at King's Cross Station at 9:30 am on Friday where we all loaded the train for our roughly 6 hour train ride to Edinburgh, our first Scottish city on the trip. There was a mix of seats facing forwards and backwards, since the train heads both directions. Every now and then there was also a table with seats on both sides, so of course I grabbed a table with the 3 other people in my building that were on the trip. Added bonus my seat was facing the opposite way the train was headed, very odd feeling! Anyways the trip up England and into Edinburgh was filled with gorgeous country side and small, quaint towns seated right next to the ocean! There are plenty of pictures on my Facebook (I took over 400 for the weekend) if you want to look at them.

     We arrived in Edinburgh at about 4:00pm and after checking into our hostel we set our stuff down then darted up to Edinburgh castle. Sadly though we arrived 2 mins late to catch the last tour of the castle! So instead we took pictures outside then went into this place called the 'Woolen Mill" which was a HUGE shop that made Tartans (kilts) and had any and every typical Scottish thing you could think of. I was fully planning on buying an authentic kilt uuunnntttilllll I looked at the price tag. About 40 pounds to make a kilt that was custom to you, which is about $60. While it would have been awesome to have an authentic kilt made in Scotland... $60 is a bit too steep! Anyways after touring that shop we went around to the rest of the city real quick before we had dinner. We ate at a local pub where I order smoked salmon on top of mash potatoes with a prawn lemon sauce...... Delicious! I was going to order Haggis which is a Scotland traditional dish but I wanted to wait until we were in the highlands to get it from a small town that made it really well! After dinner we had to meet back at the hostel at 7pm to go on a haunted tour of Edinburgh. The tour took us around what is called the "Royal Mile" which was the main strip back in the middle ages. We basically went around St. Giles Cathedral and the building of the Scottish Parliament building. after that we went down into the part of the city that they walled up and put everyone that had the bubonic plague in to quarantine the city. These vaults supposedly were haunted and there have been a number of encounters on the tours. While nothing happened on our tour it was kinda spooky and a sad story about how people were basically walled up and left to die. After the tour we were on our own, so me and the other people I was with went to a couple of the pubs where there were tons of Welsh people because of the Scotland vs Wales rugby game the next day.

     The next morning we had to be up and on the coach bus by 8:45 am where we had our own tour guide for the weekend. He is a blue badge tour guide, which basically means he knows anything and everything about Scotland. He was really fun and very interesting. Our final destination on Saturday was to end up in a town called Oban. But throughout the day we stopped at sights such as Loch Awe, Loch Airy, Loch Lomond, Inverary, Kilchurn Castle, and Crianlarich. These were all up in the Highlands of Scotland and were simply breath taking sights!!! Oban was a nice fishing village that had plenty to offer. It has a natural harbor protected by a group of small islands right at the mouth of the port. It was also a very hilly area where at the top of the highest hill that overlooked the entire city they built a short, wide tower that was built solely to help fight unemployment a long time ago. We got to the top right at sunset so we got to look out at the city right at dusk, a gorgeous sight! After this we went back to the hostel that we checked into previously to take a nap since it had been a very, very long day. Once we woke up we went to go get dinner then to some pubs. But that night was an early night cause we had been in a coach for about 9 hours with intermittent stops and had to be up at 8:45 am again.

     Sunday we did a little bit of back tracking but the main sight of Sunday was Stirling Castle in Callendar. We got a tour of the castle from our awesome tour guide Gavin Hunter who did by the way wear an authentic kilt allllllll weekend. We also saw Perth and Doone Castle (where Monty Python was filmed and at the entrance they have a pair of coconuts you can click together). But second best to the Castle was stopping and seeing Hamish. I've added a picture to show who Hamish is, but he was definitely the highlight of the weekend! After the Castle and Hamish we headed back to Edinburgh train station to catch our train back to London. A fun little event that happened on our ride back home, about 4 stops away from our final station there was engineering work and signal failures making it so that only 1 rail line was open. So this meant we were delayed an hour and a half and ended up arriving at the station two and a half hours late. That wasn't really the best way to end the weekend but we might be getting compensated the price of the return ticket soooo that is a bonus!!

Dochart Falls

Inverary Castle

Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe

Oban

HAMISH!!!

Stirling Castle

 1

Us and Gavin Hunter

Wallace Monument in the background

So that was my past weekend! Hope you guys enjoyed reading about it and until next post Cheers!

You'll Never Walk Alone....

     Sorry all for not posting in a while!! It has been a hectic past couple weeks, so I am going to do 2 posts right now. It's too much info for 1 post, don't want to make everyone feel like they're reading a novel. So on Feb. 6th a group of us decided it would be fun to try to go see Chelsea vs Liverpool, two major soccer teams here in England. For those of you who don't follow the English Premier League I have to give you a quick back story. During the month of January they have something called the "transfer window" where they can trade, buy, or loan out players. On the last day of January Liverpool sold their star forward Fernando Torres to Chelsea for the sum of 50million pounds (roughly $79 million) the highest paid English transfer in the history of the league. This game that we went to go see if we could get tickets for was going to be his debut.

      So we all met up near the stadium and started walking towards the stadium thinking it would be nearly impossible to find 6 tickets to this game. To our delightful surprise though there were guys all up and down the street asking if people needed tickets. After talking to a couple of them we found someone who would sell us tickets a reasonable price not too far above face value, especially for this game! 2 of the guys decided the price was too steep for them so they decided not to buy but the other 4 of us bought the tickets and went into the stadium and found our seats! Even though we were on the lower level and underneath the overhang so our view was slightly impeded but the game was incredible!!!! It was unreal that I was so close to many of the superstars that I've watched on countless weekends on TV. Also we sat in the Chelsea Fan section, which stood and sang the ENTIRE game!! Secretly I was rooting for Liverpool because Chelsea was closer in the league standings to the team I support (Manchester United who is 1st).

     The first half ended 0-0 after some close chances by both teams. Luckily for us the action switched ends the 2nd half and was played towards us (our seats were behind the net too, forgot to mention that earlier). Early on in the 2nd half Liverpool scored the opening goal and the away section went absolutely wild! It was quite a sight to see! Sadly though there were no more goals to be had and the game ended 1-0, which for me was good cause it meant Manchester United stayed in first place.

     After the game I went back took a nap and then woke up ate some food, then went to a pub to get ready for the Superbowl. We luckily rented out a pub to watch the Superbowl at since it started at 11:30 London time. Most pubs close at 11:00 but we came to an agreement with the owner to stay open and show the game! Only down side is we got British commercials not the US ones =(. I still have yet to see any of the Superbowl commercials, but we did get to see the halftime show which personally I didn't think it was very good. After the halftime show I went back to my flat to watch the rest of the game. I was getting tired and didn't want to stay in the packed pub when we had it on our TV at our flat, where one of my flatemates was watching it and he's a HUGE Packers fan. I ended up staying up for the whole game and watched it til the end even though I had work the next day! It ended around nearly 3am London time so needless to say I didn't get too much sleep! So that was basically all I did that weekend, look at the next post for the official kick off to my Euro Trip!! Cheers!

Wait....What Did You Just Say????

So after a couple of weeks of having to take a couple of double takes and asking someone to repeat what they just said I figured I would pass along my knowledge of the crazy words the Brits use. Sorry if some of this are a bit basic they're funny nonetheless:
Brolly= Umbrella (I think I said this in a previous post, but misspelled it then. They say it like 'brelly')
Lorry= Truck
Quid= A British Pound (I was aware of this before I came but I don't how many of you guys already knew that)
Answerphone= Answering machine (I died laughing when my co-workers said this, makes more sense but just sounds odd)
Baby minder= Baby sitter
Blues and Twos= Emergency Vehicle (such as police cars and ambulances, blue lights with a two toned siren)
Bobby= Police Officer
Biscuit= Cookie
Brekkie= Breakfast
Car park= Parking lot
Cash machine= ATM (they do look at you a bit funny when you say ATM)
Rockets= Broccoli (they do this as a cheap way to get their kids to eat it as kids, trying to make it more fun. But I'm not kidding on menus it will literally say rockets)
Cool box= cooler
Crisps= Potato Chips (I think everyone knows this one and the next one)
Chips= Fries
Drink-driving= Drunk driving
Bin= Trash can
Oh this is just a side note/fun fact, there is no diet anything over here. Diet= Zero or light. So cans will say Coke light or Pepsi light
Gobsmacked= Astonished
Greengrocer= Grocery store
Jacket Potato= Baked Potato (took me forever to find this one out)
Lead= Dog leash
Jumper leads= Jumper cables
Lift= Elevator (another obvious one I think)
Loo= Bathroom (had to include it)
Off License= Liquor store
People mover= Minivan or a passenger van (my jaw literally dropped when I heard this one just out of pure confusion)
Phone box= Phone booth
Row= Fight (for the Harry Potter readers this one should already be known)
A rubber= Eraser
Sacked= Fired
Sellotape= Scotch tape
Uni= College or University
Wage packet= Paycheck
Windscreen= Windshield (another one where it just feels so out of place you're dumbfounded for a couple of seconds)
Zed= Z (can't remember if I discussed this on another post but nothing is pronounced 'Z', it is always "Zed". For example they say "Jay-Zed", not "Jay-Z". For those of you who don't know Jay-Z is a famous American rapper is also really really good. First time hearing Jay-Zed I thought it was a British rapper that was trying to copy Jay-Z's name)

I have been keeping track of those so that's why it is mostly in alphabetical order just in case anyone caught on to that! But I have one more little phrase for you guys and this is one I fully plan on integrating into my vocabulary for the rest of my life! I learned it from our British professor while talking about parts of British culture.

To start explaining this last word I need to talk about Cricket (the game). The game is similar to baseball in a convoluted sort of way where there's a bowler (a pitcher), a batter, catcher, outfielders and then wickets which the bowler is trying to break. That's the extent of my knowledge of Cricket. Other than that I know games can go on for days, yes days, and that it is for the posh and wealthy. Since it is for the posh and wealthy the rules of Cricket are strictly followed here in England. So much so that in a major match some while ago the England refused to resume the game because their opponent (I believe it was the Australians) were "bowling" (pitching) in a different way than the standard bowl. So to make this a little bit more understandable think of the New York Yankees refusing to play another inning because the opposing pitcher was throwing side armed instead of overhand. It infuriated the England squad so much because they think that Cricket rules should be followed to the letter and while there are no rules saying you can't pitch is alternative ways it was just generally accepted it was an overhead follow through. Anyways the England captain at one point yelled to the officials This isn't Cricket!!! So the last phrase for this post issss:

This isn't Cricket!!= That's not fair!

Until next time cheers!

Work Ethic

So after some complaints that I wasn't posting enough on this blog I figured I'd enlighten everyone to the English work ethic. To start off the word "late" does not exist in the English work place. This is due to what they call the "unreliable transportation" such as the tube and the bus system. Honestly the tube and bus system is much more efficient and easier to get around compared to Chicago or any other city in the States. The only problem with the tube is when you are in a city 7,556,900 people and a good majority of them are commuting the same way you are, things can get a bit packed and you may have to wait for the train or two. Other than that the Brits are just whinging (British word of the day for everyone). But back to my point since your morning routine can vary day to day depending upon the density of people in the tube system when you're travelling you might stroll into work at 8:45 or 9:45. The funny thing is that you will still receive the same reaction whether at both times which is an enthusiatic "Morning!" followed by "Would you like a cup of tea?" This attitude works out great for me because it seems that I can leave my flat at 8:20 am and arrive at 9:00am or if I am running slightly late and leave at 8:22 am I end up finally getting into the office at 9:30am. I still haven't figured out why those extra two minutes means an extra five thousand people are at the tube stations. Regardless of when I show up though it seems I'm always the first one there, except for my boss who sometimes gets there before me.
The second quirk about the British workplace is that there is a constant conversation going, and when I say constant I mean constant. There is never silence in the office which is fine by me! Also breaks are very frequent in the British workplace, you never work more than two hours at a time it seems like. I was given the job of going through my company's database and cleaning up some of the records and updating others and was given these instructions: "Rob I know this job might be a bit boring and tedious so please don't work on it for more than an hour at a time!" He wasn't kidding either an hour later he came by and said "Rob please take a break I imagine you're falling asleep!" This brings me to the next interesting little thing about the Brits, they never expect things to be done fast.
When my co-worker came to make sure I was gonna take a break I told him I was nearly done and his response was "Bloody hell that was quick! Brilliant, well cheers!" I have no clue why but anytime I finish something they always make a comment similar to that so I'm starting to think they drag projects out just to give them something to do haha. I'm not going to lie I could get use to this work ethic too seeing as how I wrote and posted this during a break at my work =).
If you guys want to know something about London or anything specific about what I'm doing leave a comment or just ask Marg and she can pass it along and I can write something up about it! Since some people cough cough Jay aren't satisfied with the frequency of the posts!!
Cheers until next time!

London Life

So I realize it's been a while since the last post and that's because not much has happened! We've mainly just been going around to the local sights. We went to London Bridge, Tower Bridge, St. Paul's, and Millennium Bridge. I stopped by Harrod's to buy some presents for people back home also we went on a tour of Stamford Bridge home to Chelsea football club. It was a pretty cool stadium. We got to go down into the home and away locker rooms and even go out right next to the pitch! Our tour guide gave us some interesting tid bits about the visitors locker room. Apparently Chelsea had a sports psychologist come in and redesign the locker room. Things like putting the small lockers for personal items underneath the benches so that the players would have to bend down to put away their stuff and could possibly pull a hamstring or tweak something before the game. Also putting in soft lighting creating a calm atmosphere so they players are more subdued when they go out. The best one was that they put the whiteboard on the wall that the door opens up on and put a sign on the door saying the door has to be left open for safety reasons. Basically this meant a right handed coach would have to stand behind the door to draw on the whiteboard and talk from behind it. Sort of funny but cheap tricks to help give them a slight edge =).
On a slightly different note I've booked travel plans to go to Rome and Dublin with Paris still being worked out! But for now that is all I have so until next time cheerio!