Matt and Kat Brown

Almost two months since our last update, we’re getting lazy! In our defense it has been a busy few months.

After getting back from a long weekend in the UK and spending a week recovering from the flu (normal not Swine) I was off to San Francisco for the last 2 weeks of August. This was my annual trip to Google HQ in Mountain View to catch up with my colleagues there and meet some of the new people that I’ve started working with over the last year. As usual it was a very productive couple of weeks, being in the same timezone has that effect. I was there for two full weekends in between the work, so for the first weekend I drove southwards along the Pacific Coast Highway, unfortunately it was a very smokey/hazy day, so my photos didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. The second weekend I spent in San Francisco itself, admiring the cable cars, and enjoying a cruise across the bay to Suasalito. Click the links in the previous sentences for the photos.

After one day back in Dublin to catch up with Kat, I was off to Barcelona again for 3 days with the rest of my team from Dublin and Zurich. We had a wonderful time sitting on the beach drinking Mojitos and shooting each other with small plastic pellets while playing airsoft. Excellent team building. It seemed like half the team had SLR cameras so I did my bit to provide my share of Barcelona Photos too.

I love travelling and seeing new places, but after pretty much three full weeks away from home it was nice to spend the rest of September in Dublin enjoying a surprisingly nice end of summer weather wise.

We’re over this side of the world to make the most of travel though, so last week we were off again to Portugal to catch the last of the summer sun with 6 friends. We rented a villa in Monte Gordo, right down the bottom of the country on the Algarve, next to the border with Spain. We had an excellent week playing in the Villa’s pool, floating in the sea and visiting small Portuguese villages. The highlight for me (other than the sun) was visiting Sevilla in Spain for the day. Of everywhere we’ve been in Europe so far, Spain is pretty much at the top of my list thanks to the attractions of Barcelona and Seville. And of course we took plenty of Photos on this trip too.

We both got back to Dublin on Saturday night sporting fairly reasonable tans, although while we were away Dublin seems to have slipped firmly into Autumn and the temperature has dropped more than a few degrees.

Not to worry though, in 12 days we’re flying out bound for NZ where we’ll be staying until the end of the year, catching up with family and friends, and most importantly celebrating Andrew and Sarah’s wedding in early November!

Hopefully we’ll see many of you before too long!

Things are rather quiet here in Dublin at the moment. I made banana cake on the weekend, a maintenance guy came to repaint the bathroom ceiling today, I had a bagel for lunch… not too much to report really.

Of course it may seem quieter than normal right now because Matt is in San Francisco for work this week and next!

Nevertheless, there is still news to write about! Two weekends ago we were in the UK on a bank holiday road trip. We posted photos (1), (2) & (3) when we got back but now here’s a run down of what we got up to…

We flew into London Stansted at lunchtime on Saturday and drove a rental car to Oxford. We managed to find a lot of slow outer-London traffic on the motorways but eventually made it to Oxford late in the afternoon. We wandered around the town center admiring the old college buildings. Oxford really seems like a lovely place – gorgeous old architecture but also with the buzz of a student town and lots of nice looking cafes and bars around. We decided to see an outdoor performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that evening which we both really enjoyed. There were some great comedic performances from the cast and it was very cool to see Shakepeare performed in a small, relaxed, outdoor arena. Perfect thing to do on a summer evening in Oxford!

On Sunday we left Oxford and drove down towards Bath with a detour to Stonehenge on the way. Stonehenge was a little disappointing – interesting enough but kind of expensive to see, not as big as I imagined it and surrounded by a throng of tourists. Anyway, we went, we saw, we crossed it off our list.

We spent the afternoon exploring Bath. We walked around the town for a while before making our way to the Roman Baths – the central attraction of the town. Bath is built on a thermal hot water source. Back in the day, the Romans built the impressive Bath houses here so people could come an enjoy the restorative waters.  Quite picturesque and interesting to see the remains of the whole series of pools that used to be in use there.

I was impressed with the food in Bath. At lunch we had some amazing woodfired pizzabread topped with pesto, garlic oil and chopped tomatoes. Then for dinner we ate at a restaurant called Gascoyne Place where I had beautifully cooked lamb with roasted vegetables and tomato pesto finished off with an apple and cinnamon crème brûlée for dessert. Making anyone hungry? hehe

Our Monday our plans fell apart on us. We intended to see the Banksy exhibit at the Bristol Museum but we’d somewhat underestimated the queues and when we got to Bristol mid-morning the wait time was about 2 1/2 hours. We decided to give it a miss! It was probably a good choice because Matt ended up feeling progressively worse as the day wore on and ended up with a flu that he spent the next week recovering from! We headed back past Oxford and to Luton airport to catch our flight home later in the evening.

Apart from a disappointing Bristol and the beginnings of a flu on Monday we had a really fun weekend.

As we turned inland from the French Riviera the landscape changed to old farm houses and fields of grapevines and olive trees – our first taste of Provence. We stopped briefly in Aix-en-Provence which I found very charming. The whole town seemed to be roofed with sycamore/plane trees – very pretty. Lynley and I enjoyed strolling through the market there and found some nice locally made soaps to buy. We had our first introduction here to the ‘Mistral’ which is a very strong dry wind that characterises winter and spring in Provence.

We reached Avignon in the evening and looped around the outside of the city before parking and walking in through the city gates. What makes Avignon unique is the solid castle-style walls which encircle the city – very cool. Lynley showed us the very sweet little building where she lives, complete with green wooden door and shutters and we then walked into the center for a quick dinner.

We spent the next day in Avignon. We saw the university where Lynley studies and assists and we also toured the school where she teaches English. We then browsed through a lovely indoor market and picked out bread, olives, cheese and strawberries for lunch. I would love to have so much variety of fresh, cheap, local food in Dublin! We took our purchases to the Popes Palace gardens and relaxed in the sun there with our picnic.

After lunch we went into the Palais des Papes. The Palace was the temporary residence of the Popes in the 1300’s and features many grand halls and rooms. The palace is mostly empty and unadorned these days but must have once been very ornate and overwhelming. After leaving the Palace we took a free ferry across the river for a nice view back to the city walls, the Palace and the Pont d’Avignon. After visiting Avignon its easy for me to see why Lynley loves it there so much!

On Wednesday we drove out from Avignon to Arles and the Camargue. In Arles we saw Roman ruins including the remains of an amphitheatre and other buildings. From Arles we headed down to the Camargue which is a different landscape to the rest of Provence. The area is flat and marshy with flamingos and other birds as well as distinctive black bulls and white horses. At the bottom of the Camargue we stopped at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and spent the afternoon at the beach. We enjoyed the sandy beach, went swimming and tolerated the wind which quickly covered everything in copious amounts of sand. The afternoon was topped off with icecreams and a big punnet of strawberries by the beach. Yum!

On the drive back to Avignon we also stopped in at Les Baux which is a very small medieval village nestled high in the rocky hillside. It was very sweet and had gorgeous views out over the area. We ate dinner in St-Remy which is another charming small village in Provence. Back in Avignon we said goodbye to Lynley. It was fun to holiday with her and I’m looking forward to showing her around Dublin later in June when she comes to see us

The photos from this leg of the journey are available under the Provence tag in our gallery.

Thursday we left Avignon early and drove south west to visit Carcassonne before catching our train to Barcelona…

We got back last night from a fabulous week away in France and Spain. We visited some gorgeous places, oohing at the stunning vistas and ahhing over the charming buildings and places. I’m feeling very relaxed and content after a week of good food and wine, warm sun and no work!

Part One – Côte d’Azur

Our holiday started on Saturday with a 6am flight to Nice (thanks to Kieron for the ridiculously early airport drop!) which placed us on the Côte d’Azur by lunchtime. We met up with Lynley who arrived by train from Avignon and together we spent the afternoon exploring. The center of Nice is impressive to walk around with cool fountains, big open spaces and the palm tree-lined Promenade des Anglais. We spent the late afternoon basking in the sun on the beach. The beaches in Nice are all rocks rather than sand and the water in early summer is still very cold for swimming. Despite that it was still great to relax on the beach for a while. We ate dinner in a restaurant called ‘Le Maori’ which featured a ‘Maori burger’ with egg in it and also an ‘All Black’ dessert. Hilarious.

On our second day of holidays we decided to take a day trip along the coast to Monaco. After a false start taking the train (unexplained problems with the rail lines) we managed to catch a bus to Monaco in time for lunch. We stopped in at Monte Carlo, saw the casino and the beautiful views out over the sea. Monaco seemed to be a country of expensive cars, designer stores and luxury yachts. Well out of our league but still cool to visit. From the casino we walked down to Monte Carlo beach which was packed with vacationers. We ate gelato and people-watched for a while before taking the bus back to Nice. Tired feet and red shoulders and faces after our second day of sunny sight-seeing.

Our third day we checked out of Nice and took a hire car along the coast. Matt had the task of driving and did a pretty good job of adjusting to driving on the right (wrong) side of the road.  Our first stop of the day was in Cannes. We were there a week too early for the famous film festival but we did get to see all the tents and pavilions being set up in preparation and we walked on the red carpet hehe. Cannes was not a glam as I’d expected with much of the town feeling a bit ‘past its prime’. Like most of the Côte d’Azur the beach here was lined with deck chairs and divided up into sections by all of the restaurants and hotels planted right on the beach-front. So different from being at the beach in NZ, I would take a nice unspoilt stretch of the Coromandel over the French Riviera any day!

From Cannes we drove the winding coastal road along to St Raphael. Some stunning views along this drive – charming houses dotted along the cliffs and gorgeous blue sea stretching out to the horizon. Unfortunately by the time we reached St Raphael the sky had turned grey so we turned inland and plotted our course to Avignon via Aix-en-Provence…

Another year is nearly at an end. It’s been a good year for us (and a busy one) with plenty of highlights and very few lowlights!

We’ll be enjoying a quiet Christmas day this year, making phone calls back home, eating some good food and packing for our flight on the 26th when we’re off to Scotland. We’re taking a week to see the sights and enjoy the celebrations in Edinburgh on New Years Eve. It’s going to be cold, very very cold – or so we hear from everyone we’ve mentioned the trip to! We’re hoping for a few days of fine weather – especially for the fireworks on New Years and so Matt can get in a few good photo shoots with his new tripod and the digital SLR camera.

We sent out our Christmas newsletter this week. If you haven’t received a copy already we’re sorry and it’s not intentional. Most likely we just don’t have your correct email address in our list. If  you’d like to receive (very) sporadic email updates from us then just send us an email to say ‘hi’ – then we’ll have your address and we can add you to the list

We’ll keep you posted with more news of our travels in the New Year. Sending out Christmas goodwill to everyone and hoping you all have an enjoyable and not too stressful Christmas break.

Nolliag Shona Duit (Merry Christmas) !

On the way to our work Christmas party earlier in the week, I was discussing the state of public transport in Dublin with a colleague and he suggested I watch this video, made four years ago, that nicely summarises transport in Dublin.

I enjoyed it, hopefully you will too:

It’s now four years after that video was made, and I could only see one aspect of it that has improved in that time. The busses now accept a smart card so you don’t have to carry the exact change every day, except there are a limited number of smart card types available so you end up paying more than your usual fare if you want to use one for a short trip, and they are not rechargeable, so you have to buy a new one every week.

Dublin Transport. Not There Yet.

Despite that, I’ve been really enjoying Dublin the last few weeks, and it is not like any New Zealand city really has any sort of decent public transport either!

In one of my opinion one of the coolest products that Google has launched since I’ve been working there is the Google App Engine, a service that allows anyone to write a web application and host it on Google’s servers. Google then looks after scaling your application and ensuring that as it becomes popular thousands and thousands of people can use it without you having to worry about buying physical servers and all that sort of messy stuff. It’s very cool.

Google App Engine has been live for nearly 2 months now and in that time a whole bunch of applications have been created. One of the best, in my opinion, is Wordle. You upload a bunch of text to Wordle and it creates a pretty picture that shows which words appear most frequently. I uploaded the front page of our blog (on the left) and the front page of my more technical blog (on the right) and you can see the results below (click on it for a bigger version).

Pretty cool, huh? The only downside to it is the fact that it uses a Java applet to display the resulting image and Java doesn’t get installed on most computers, so you may need to install it before you can see the image.

Try it out and if you make a cool image send me a link in the comments.

We’re off to London for the weekend in a few hours so you can expect an update on our weekend early next week sometime.

Our Internet connection went live today which means that we’re now completely settled in our new apartment in the Christchurch area of Dublin. We’ve been here for two weeks now and we are very happy with our decision to move across town.

I have added some photos to the gallery so you can get a feel for what our second home in Dublin looks like:

• Photos from our 2nd Dublin Apartment

The apartment was freshly painted before we moved in, and all the kitchen appliances and lounge suite are brand new! Kat has a much shorter walk to catch her bus in the mornings, and my commute is only about 10 minutes longer, although I now catch a bus rather than walk which means that I might have to stop procrastinating and sign up for the gym at work. Maybe.

We booked a trip to London for next weekend, staying somewhere around Westminster. The plan is to see a show and catch up with a few of our friends who are calling London home at the moment.

Dublin’s weather has been relatively good since I got back from Australia and New Zealand, there have been quite a few nice warm (low 20s) days with sunshine and only a smattering of rain here and there. If Dublin can keep this up for the rest of the summer then there may be a chance that last year was just an abnormality. Whatever the case we’re making the most of the sunshine and good weather while we can.

We’ve been kept busy the last few weeks with moving apartments. We’ve moved across town to a slightly older but more ‘homey’ apartment right in the heart of old Dublin. We look out the bedroom windows onto a sea of red brick and out our lounge windows to Christchurch Cathedral just across the road. Its nice to be really central, close to some great restaurants and shops. We have a local bakery and the ‘best chipper in Dublin’ just round the corner.

We’ve unpacked all our boxes and cleaned and decorated the apartment. The only thing left now to make our new home complete is to get the internet connected. We’re into our second week without internet now and starting to suffer withdrawal. Hopefully it will be set up later this week… all according to plan.

Once we’re back online we’ll put up some photos to show off our new ‘gaff’  =)

NZ translations:   ‘Chipper’ is Irish slang for a fish and chip shop.   ‘Gaff’ is Irish slang for someone’s home.

I arrived back in Dublin safely on Sunday afternoon following 40 hours of travel from Sydney via Auckland (5hrs), LA (1hr) and Heathrow (another 5hrs). The best part about all the travel is that I haven’t really had any jetlag, I was back at work at 9:30 on Monday morning, and I’ve been back to normal sleep, wake, work, play, sleep routine without any ill effects.

My two weeks in Sydney were very enjoyable, the Google office there is very nice, looking out directly over Darling Harbour from nearly the 20th floor and with a fairly laid-back and relaxed atmosphere. I also caught up with our friends from Auckland, Sam and Manuela who have been living in Sydney for the last year or so and we swapped some stories about our various experiences living overseas and away from family which was interesting.

There is a bunch of photos from New Zealand, Brisbane and Sydney in the gallery at:

• NZ
• Brisbane
• Sydney

It’s been a busy week back, both at work and catching up with what friends have been doing while we were away. We went to a Habitat for Humanity pub quiz night last night, raising funds for a trip to build some houses in Ghana later this year. Our team only had 3 out of a desired 4 members, but despite that disadvantage we still managed to post a semi-respectable score of 49 (the winning team got about 96, the losers were on 30 I think) and had a great time.

We’re moving out of our current apartment in two weeks, and I think we found where we will move to this evening. Apparently sleeping on decisions allows your subconcious to make cleverer decisions than when you are awake so we’ll decide tommorrow morning if that’s where we want to move or not :p

Watch this space.