BBQ and Shopping

May 4 Continued

After work, I walked with the girl that invited me to a BBQ and we picked up some food for the BBQ on our way to the house. The owner of the house is an Irish guy who works at the same Company as me and he often rents out the extra 2 bedrooms in his house to employees on assignment to our Company. They say the house is a 30 min walk. I’m not sure how fast they walk, but it took us about 45 min minus the grocery stops. When we arrived, there already a few people there. We sat out in the back patio and had snacks and finally they started the grill around 8:30pm. I was starving! Eating times and work times tend to be shifted later here. One of the Canadians made these hamburgers that were phenomenal! He said the secret ingredients included oats, brown sugar and egg….I would have never thought to put any of those in hamburgers. It was a multi cultural picnic. There were 2 Irish, 4 Germans, 3 Canadians and me the lone American! It was a lot of fun and I stayed out way too late. I missed the last train around midnight, so one of the people who had a car drove me home. I am so thankful! I called Ami at about 1:30 am Dublin time because it was 6:30pm and I never get to call in the evening. She was really surprised to get a call from me!

May 5 – Day 24

I slept in a little bit after my late night out and then went to the store to get some necessities. I got an alarm clock, some dishes, a baking sheet, a spatula, a couple bath towels, and water and wine glasses, etc. Needless to say I had 4 big bags when I was done and I could barely carry them. I had to walk through the entire shopping center to get to the taxi line. I took a taxi home and arrived just in time for my landlord and the carpet cleaning guy. We had to move all of the furniture out the bedrooms into the hallway and my front door wouldn’t even close. My landlord started working on my list of apartment problems…the list had like 12 items. Needless to say he was here for about 8 hours. I helped move the fridge about a dozen times while he tried to get the door to line up. The refrigerators here are hidden in cabinets, but the doors have to be parallel, because they hook together and when you close the cabinet the fridge door closes and mine was out of alignment and I couldn’t get the fridge door to close to keep the food cold. While the landlord was working on his list, I scrubbed every surface I could find. I started in the kitchen emptied all the cabinets and washed absolutely everything. I scrubbed all the floors and man am I sore! I started washing my sheets at about 4pm. I didn’t think it would be any problem to have them ready to sleep on in the evening. WRONG!! Only one sheet at a time would fit in the washer and the cycle time is around 3 hours for the wash itself and then you have to hang them to dry. I finally had clean dry sheets at 2am. I was exhausted after all that cleaning. I will have to remember to start my sheets early in the morning to get them washed and dried by night time. I also had the NTL guy come and I now have cable tv and broadband internet! Yeah! A very productive and exhausting day.

May 6 – Day 25

I finally got all my clothes hung. 25 days of living out a suitcase has come to a close. With just 2 suitcases of clothes I have a very full wardrobe. I don’t know how they fit all their clothes in these little cabinets without a real closet! I went to church and headed to the grocery store. I was on a mission to find ingredients that I recognize to cook with. Grocery shopping is a big challenge. I started to realize how much I rely on packaging to find the products that I use. There are several items that I couldn’t find and had to ask for assistance. A few of them they had, but there were several that they just don’t have over here. They don’t have jello, anytype of frozen bread( no rolls, dough, pie crust etc.), no frozen chicken breasts, no chex or crispix cereal. It took a long time for me to find stuff that I could cook with. I actually found taco shells and seasoning...I was kinda surprised. Grocery shopping was probably my biggest challenge so far. I again had too many bags and not enough hands. I was able to find a bath mat and some Tupperware in another store near the grocery store, so I took a cab home again. Shopping is hard work here!