I'd like to start off by apologizing to all of my devoted readership for my lack of updates. They made me start a Google account at work and I was really confused because it kept asking me to start a new blog with my Gmail address and I didn't really want to do that. Speaking of work....
I don't think it really hit any of us that we were here to partake in an actual internship this summer and not just play downtown, eat out, shop, and drink a lot. It's a really stark wake up call to have to get up at 6:30 to catch the bus on time when you're used to staying out until then.
But I'm getting ahead of myself as it's been quite a while since my last post. The weekend was really fun, but kind of uneventful (and by uneventful I mean I don't really remember much...) Friday we went downtown. The bars close surprisingly early (2 am) as do the pizza delivery places (midnight) and so we spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to get any sort of food delivered to our residence at 3:30 in the morning. We even considered calling a cab to go through the McDonald's drive thru as they informed Lana over the phone that we wouldn't be allowed to order if we were walking. We all woke up around 1..starving...and it took an hour to figure out how to get Domino's to deliver. Then we went back to bed around 4 and slept until 8. We went downtown again on Saturday night. Sunday we woke up feeling productive so we headed back downtown to eat lunch at La Gondola (this small little Italian place we found that serves big cheap pizza) and then went to the Guinness Storehouse (which as it turns out is located across the street from my work). The Storehouse was really interesting. It was a self-guided tour and you could walk through and see the whole brewing process. I even tasted the roasted hops (I think..or maybe Barley...either way it tasted like dirt but it's apparently really important. That Storehouse was the one that produced it for all the factories in the country and a secret stash is kept in a locked and gaurded safe in case something would happen to the main stock. That way Guinness could continue on if something horrible were to happen to the Storehouse...I mean these people are pretty serious about beer.) There were several levels that covered the companies various advertising and on and on until we finally made our way to the Gravity Bar. I felt like I was in Willy Wanka and the Chocolate Factory...the elevator kept going up and up over Dublin and I figured eventually we'd just shoot through the roof or something. The view was incredible...you could see forever over the tops of houses and buildings. The room was circular and the walls were made of glass (or hopefully something sturdier because we were pretty high). Plus..you get a free pint of what I'm guessing was really fresh Guinness.
Luckily, my boss is nice and Melanie and I didn't have to work on Monday, so we spent the day downtown trying to find where the building was. We found where we thought it was, took pictures in front of the sign and pretty yellow door, only to find out the offices where we actually work are like half a mile away.
Tuesday...our first day of responsibility. Actually, we would come to find out that I'm playing pretty fast and loose with the idea of responsibility as we don't really do much. We met Michael, our boss, down by the gates and he walked up through to our offices. He set us up with intermediate laptops (our new ones were supposed to be there on Wednesday) and showed us around the website we were going to be working on. It's a consumer review site of businesses around Dublin, and we are supposed to manage content and try to pull customers in from other blogs with promotional posts. This will all be well and good when the website actually LAUNCHES. Since it's not public yet there are only a handful of posters, and so we spend our days looking up contact info for businesses that could potentially become advertisers, read different blogs, play on facebook, and Gchat with each other from across our cubicles. We really like our boss though. He's fairly young and most of his reviews start with "If you're really hungover this is the place to go...".
They warned us that the Irish workplace is different than the American workplace and they were right. Wednesday we busted our butts to get to the office on time...we were supposed to be there at 9 and were excited we made it 5 minutes early only to be turned away by the cleaning crew because they gates the block off entrance to the building were still looked. Thursday we were the first people in the office at 9...we had to unlock the doors and turn on the lights and nobody else rolled in until between 9:30 and 10. On top of that...nobody there talks. They don't just ignore us, but each other as well so it can get awfully quiet around there sometimes.
We managed to hit up The Comet on Tuesday, but Wednesday I fell asleep on the couch in the living room right after dinner around 8. Thursday nights are a big night in Dublin, and judging by how hard we went out you'd think we were blowing off steam from working for years instead of just a couple days. We had a great time...I even risked a couple pints of beer. We slept in late this morning, but spent the afternoon downtown shopping on Graffton and Henry Street. No really big purchases to report but it was a nice day to walk around.
Tomorrow we leave early to go on a bus tour of Wicklow County and the countryside. We get to see where they filmed P.S. I love You and Braveheart. We get back tomorrow night but we're really looking forward to getting away even for a little bit.
xoxo E
No comments:
Post a Comment