Matt and Kat Brown

On Friday we paid the bond on the apartment that we’re renting for the next year. It’s right in the city centre in an area called the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), where all the banks and finance companies have their headquarters.

We’ve yet to actually pay the first months rent thanks to the slowness of the transfer company we were using to get the money from New Zealand, but luckily the landlord has let us move in already as we have to move out of our Google supplied apartment tommorrow morning!

The apartment is a 30 minute walk from the Google offices or a 10 minute walk plus a 5 minute train journey if it’s raining. Kat’s commute is a little longer, a 10 minute walk, followed by a 50 minute tram ride finished off with 10 minute bus ride! I’ve made a map so you can see it all for yourself.

We move in tommorrow morning, we don’t have Internet access setup yet, so we will be offline for the next few days. In the meantime, here are some photos of our new Apartment to keep you going until our next installment…

One thing I have learned about Dublin is that you must always take an umbrella when you leave the house. Even if it is warm. Even if it is sunny outside. Even if you’re only going out for 20 minutes. ALWAYS take an umbrella.

I can’t actually complain about the weather too much because these first weeks in Dublin have been unseasonably sunny and fine. According to Dubliners the weather they have been having is more like the weather of mid-Summer than early Spring.  While it has been reasonably nice it still feels cold to me and these statements by Dubliners about how balmy it is are disconcerting because I have still needed my woolen coat most days!  :-/

We had a quiet weekend this weekend. On Saturday night we stayed in and ended up watching the Eurovision Song Contest on TV. It was BIZARRE and at some points was really quite excruciating to watch. Lots of European countries send a group to represent them in the contest. The music ranged from Opera to Emo to Transvestites in pointy silver disco hats. Yes, thats right. The winners of the contest last year were a hard core metal band who dress up as orcs.

It really was crazy but I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a serious competition. People from all over Europe vote by phone and text to decide the winner. Lots of the countries final votes seem to go in favour of their neighbouring countries. Unfortunately Ireland came in last place Must have been a bit too traditional for Eurovision?

Check out the wacky 2nd place winners from Ukraine on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awVHDMDAu0A

Exciting news from me: on Tuesday this week I formally accepted a job offer with a small Irish IT company based in West Dublin. I’ll be the official Web Designer; working on web, graphic, and application design. The Web Designer job is going to be a great fit with what I do well and what I enjoy.

I started my job search last Monday, browsing job vacancies online and picking out a few. I put in my CV and by 6pm that day I had an interview for the following day… by 6pm the following day I had a job offer! My job hunt ended up being much much shorter than I imagined it would be, something I’m certainly happy about. Assuming all goes smoothly in applying for my work permit, I hope to start work in 2 – 3 weeks time.

What about my NZ design business? Katalina Brown Design Ltd will continue while we’re in Ireland. I’ll continue to maintain websites and hosting for my NZ clients I just won’t be taking on any new business for a while!

So far, so good. I survived my first week of work at Google without my head exploding due to the amount of new information that I had to take in!

The first two days were formal training on Google’s culture, policies, procedures and other important information like how to get an Irish bank account and get paid. The rest of the week involved meeting my team and enjoying Google’s famous lunches in the employee cafetaria. I have a lot of learning to do over the next few months to get up to speed with all the Google systems. The operative word for my Google experience so far is ‘big’. Google is big, in pretty much every aspect you can think of.

For example, first thing on day one, as I arrived I was handed a laptop backpack containing a brand new 15″ Macbook Pro laptop and then when I arrived at my desk towards the end of the second day I found two 20″ LCD screens waiting for me! All of this is standard equipment for a new hire in the Google engineering department.

Now that we’re settling down in Dublin, you should expect that we’ll be updating this blog less often! We’re aiming for an average of 2 to 3 new posts every month.

Stay tuned for some exciting news from Kat in the next few days…