Let's give this a go

Greetings to all of our family, friends, well-wishers, random acquaintances and those who stumbled upon our blog and have nothing better to do. It’s been a week since we landed in Dublin and we’ve been busy to say the least. The trip to Dublin was uneventful with the exception of a carry-on related incident on the flight to Boston. The good news is that Bethany is durable enough to withstand a carry-on bag dropping on her head, bad news is we aren’t sure there haven’t been any lasting damages as of yet. Keep your fingers crossed and we will keep you posted. Our trip got interesting in the Dublin airport as soon as we got to customs. Apparently the immigration officer was at the tail end of his 9-hour shift when we came through at 5am. He was slightly perturbed at the thought of Bethany coming to work in Ireland and nearly sent her back to the plane. All in all we wound up with two 30-day visas, one third of the 90-day standard tourist visa. My student visa should be easy enough to obtain after we get our permanent address. Bethany’s work permit has proved to be a little more challenging. With unemployment currently around 12%, the Irish government has been a little less than welcoming to foreign workers. We have a meeting Thursday with the Citizen’s Information Bureau to look into the possibility of starting a practice for her as a way to avoid the work permit issue. Needless to say, we’re both a little frustrated. On a positive note, I have met my course director at Trinity and he seems to be a very nice person and I’m sure will be a wealth of information. He himself is a transplant from Australia by way of Japan after an MBA at Trinity in the mid 90’s. Orientation starts 20th September and classes start the following Monday. I am definitely looking forward to classes; I’m going stir crazy in the hotel. We’ve found a house to let and will be giving the landlord our deposit on Thursday. It’s a 2 bedroom townhouse located in Ringsend, east of the downtown area. While we’re not sure, we think it was built at least 100 years ago. We’ll add some pictures of the new digs when we get over there again. So as we wrap up our first week in our new land, all in all it’s been productive not entirely frustrating. Chalk it up to the same things you have to do when you move anywhere new. The bright spot on the horizon is moving into our house next week as well as the used bicycle dealer I’ve been talking to getting back into town later this week!