Chapter 12

So, I've been guilted into updating my blog. Here's looking at you Jen and Caoi. Quite a lot has happened since the last post. Six days after the last post, Ciaran and I got our visas. We booked our flights and left Ireland on the 11th of April. The flight wasn't the best now. Ciaran had this stomach bug that I apparently gave him. What I thought was a really bad hangover on the Monday after our going away party actually was this 24 hour stomach bug thing which I also gave to my Mum. So, if I gave it to anybody else, I'm sorry. It's not pretty. So, we flew Dublin to Gatwick with Aer Lingus, who are shitheads. I booked an extra bag with them after I realised that I wasn't going to get everything in one bag. Got to check in and they were all like "Eh, you realise that if you book an extra bag, it doesn't mean you get extra weight." Well, fuck. They were going to charge €300 until I burst into tears, at which point they reduced it to €150. Still a rip-off.

Not well at all.

We got to Gatwick where we had to wait about 5 hours for our connecting flight. So we had three suitcases to lug around from bathroom to bathroom as Ciaran needed to take frequent trips (without going into too much detail). After we checked in our bags on the Air Transat flight to Calgary, we went through security and slept in the waiting area before the displayed our gate number. It was only an hour but we felt so much better after our little nap, which was especially good for Ciaran. One 9 hour flight and two meals later, we landed in Calgary and got a taxi to the hostel. Of course, our first port of call after we got our bags and stuff into our hostel room was an Irish pub. Just for food though.

Thursday and Friday consisted of viewing apartments, getting phones, getting Social Insurance Numbers and the like. We had our eye on one particular apartment on RentFaster but they only provided a phone number and not an email address so we had to wait until we got our phones at about 3 o'clock on Friday. We called the landlord at about 4, went to view it at about 5 and we'd signed the lease by 6. It was actually so lucky. And I love it. We only have the lease until 30th of August at which point we'll have to find somewhere else, but that's fine. Once we get jobs we might want to live closer to them or get a bigger place. This place is plenty big enough for the two of us though. Cue the apartment pictures.

Kitchen

Bathroom

Bedroom with unpacked suitcases

Living area

We're actually in a basement apartment hence the high windows.

As far as meeting people has been going, most of it was done in the hostel. The hostel was really nice and the people were deadly too. We had our own private room because we had laptops, Kindles, important documents etc. We went out on a pub crawl on Friday night for the hostel owner's birthday. It was fun but we left the last place early with this English guy because we were starving. We'd skipped dinner with the whole getting an apartment thing. Drink seems to be slightly cheaper at home, even when you include the tip and tax. Actually, nearly everything is slightly cheaper than home, not dramatically cheaper but just a nice amount that makes you go "Oh, that's not a bad price".

What else? Oh, the weather. It's quite changeable. I mean, it snows one day and you get sunburned the next. But even when it's snowing, it's doesn't feel as cold as it would be if it was snowing at home because the humidity isn't as high here. As far as the job search is going, I'm really only starting this week. The response from say the girl at the bank when we set up our accounts, the girl who gave us our SINs, people at the hostel seems to be good. People tell us we came to the right place when we say we are Civil Engineers. Oh and speaking of banks, before I started this post, I transferred my money from my Ulster Bank account to my TD account here using online banking. Fingers crossed it makes it. Basically all of my money is somewhere in electronic banking world, hopefully on it's way to my Canadian account. I won't find out for 1-2 working days. I seriously hope I don't have to follow it up if it gets lost, but anyway, stop worrying Hannah. It'll probably never happen, and if it does, I'll have plenty of writing material for my next blog post.

So, that's basically it. I'll post again with more pictures that I'll take with our brand spanking new camera that our fantastic friends at home got us before we left. Thanks guys!