A Single Bound

Flight was delayed 2.5 hours due to maintenance issues. I think they switched planes to get us on our way. This cut in to my layover at ORD. Wast still able to make the flight, thankfully. Arrived in Dublin, bleary and exhausted at 8am ready for a full day of work. :( Fortunately I had enough time to check in to the hotel first. Standard hotel room. And I missed it the first day, but the elevator has a GAUGE SHOWING HOW MUCH EXTRA WEIGHT YOU EXPERIENCE WHILE STOPPING AND STARTING. (Possibly my favorite part of this trip)

The office is really nice. This is the NOC area where I was sitting. All those computers on the desk and floor are only a fraction of the ones I was here to prep. I was working several days over the weekend as well.

As it turns out, almost no one was in the office today due to a summer festival. I had to stay in and miss the fun to train up on what they needed from me while the local tech was on vacation. I passed out at 5:30pm that night. Woke up at 8:30 to bright daylight. It took me a minute to realize that this was still 8:30pm and being this far north, the sun sets way late. Nice sunset though...,

7/27/2012 : Second day of work

Nothing much happened the rest of the weekdays. Grabbed lunch with several of the people from the office. They're all really nice and from all over Europe so damn near everyone has a different accent. One of the highlights of the week had to be finding a California style burrito bar within a block of work. It was delicious and I ended up there every couple of days for lunch.

More lunch related antics, I went to a pub called the Hairy Lemon. Hairy Lemon, as it turns out was a dude who caught stray dogs in the Forties, he just happened to have a squarshed face and stubble. Colourful local character, so he gets places named after him. Anyway, good fish and chips.

7/28/2012 : Kyle Kinane's show at the Comedy Festival

Smith emailed me during the week that one of the comedians we had seen in LA was here in Dublin for 2 nights during my trip. It seemed fated that we had to go. So, after asking the office, the only one who wanted to join was Hideo, another LAX employee.

The two of us went Saturday night and it was a hilarious time. Natasha did a rap about how tech support makes the girls hot. I'm pretty sure I'll never live that one down.

7/29/2012 : TLDR; Took walk around the park. Got back to work.

The hotel I'm staying at is at the corner of Stephens Green, a large city block sectioned out as a park. It's divided into sections with tall bushes and trees separating it. There's the duck pond area, a large open field area, and I managed to find a mini-parkour area with little 2 foot high raised blocks. I failed to manage to take a picture of that one. :(

8/4/2012 : Giant's Causeway bus trip

The bus tour of Giants causeway was an amazing day. After a week of exhaustive work and not a lot of downtime afterwards, I had nothing to do but sit and relax and read during the bus ride. Or so I thought. My seat neighbor, her friends and I hit it off, so we talked damn near the entire trip. I tagged along with them, was officially recruited to be their photographer, and just generally had some great company for the entire day. (BTW, I took the best photo I will ever take in my life of them at the rope bridge, and I'm really hoping she'll send a copy. It'll get posted.)

Anyways... The bus ride in this luxurious masterpeice, started on the 3 hours from Dublin to Northern Ireland with a couple stops in between. The first photo stop was at the Dunluice Castle. The story goes, this cliffside castle was a super majestic place, until one stormy night when they had a dinner party. Extra kitchen staff were hired, it was a big thing. Until a giant wave crashed into the cliff, collapsing it and taking out damn near the entire kitchen. One lone boy was the survivor and they found him huddled in the corner up against the wall. Amazing view. The iphone doesn't really capture it.

The view down the cliff face was pretty spectacular also.

From the castle, we continue on to the first real stop, Giant's Causeway. I really won't be able to do justice to this hexagonal volcanically formed masterpiece in text, so i'll just leave you the pictures. Those are 2 of the tourist girls in the pictures with me.

This was a million-plus dollar visitor center facility that they were trying to drive traffic to. I kindof just wanted to see the rocks, so I skipped it. That said, the building was really nice.

The girls were slowly making their way down, so in typical Brian fashion, I skipped out and headed straight there just because I couldn't wait to jump around on the rocks. I was not disappointed. We had an awesomely sunny day, so the rocks weren't slick and it was heaven. Hard to describe how surreal it is standing on the things, but they seem too shapely to be natural. Loved every minute of it.

Also, as you can probably tell, the cliffside has veins of these hexagonal rocks in it. On the last pic, in the lower right, that formation of striated rock is a slew of these about 30 or 40 feet high.

The next stop was the Carrick-A-Rede Rope Bridge. Just a really nice location outside. The first picture shows Scotland across the water. The bridge is a government maintained tourist spot with a suitably large line to match. It's between the mountainside and a grass-covered rock column. I would have guessed about 80 or 90 feet up. Very bouncy.

More nice scenery. I liked the reflection of the clouds in the water here. Also, those are a flock of birds flying around way below us on the top of the cliff.

The path leading to the bridge had loads of sheep penned in next to it. Presumably to keep down the grass. But they were fun and noisy and spraypainted. The girls and I have determined this is due to rival sheep gangs tagging eachother. The ones with two colors are fraternizing with the enemy-sheep.

Final stop on the trip took us to Belfast. Not much to see here, I think it's meant as a shopping trip. We looked for an ice cream place. But the City Hall building was cool and had an Olympic logo hung on it. There was a crowd of several hundred people watching the games on a big screen and listening to the live music. I foolishly did not think to take a picture.

8/5/2012 : Recovery and visit with Conor

So, as you can see from the previous day's photos, we lucked out and had some beautiful sunny weather at the Causeway and Rope bridge. Delightful, except if you're Irish-level pale like me and tend to burn in the sun.

I'm pretty sure I got off light. Had dinner with Conor and his lady, Jocelyn. It was really great to see them. As it turns out he and his friend Simon are very familiar with League of Legends, so we talked shop most of the time. I'm still surprised how widespread the game is despite all the company stats I know.

I think that's going to be it. I'm flying home on the 7th and don't expect to be doing any more sightseeing. Hope you all enjoyed tagging along on the trip!