Dublin

I’m pleased to annouce that we’ve arrived safely in Dublin after 3 weeks of travel and are being very well looked after by Google.

We arrived on Sunday afternoon and were picked up at the airport and driven to the apartment that Google is putting us up in for the next month. Along the way the driver gave us a short introduction to the city and the current events (including NZ’s win in the Rugby U19s that day which I was completely ignorant about!). The apartment is very nice and is only a 5 minute walk from the Google offices. Click here to see a map.

On Monday morning another car and driver arrived to take us on our city orientation tour. This was a four hour trip around a good portion of Dublin, focussing mainly on introducing us to the various parts of the city and giving us a feel for the housing and rental prices. Some of the prices to purchase property here are ridiculous, we drove down a street full of nice houses that apparently sell for around 45-50 million euros!! (that’s close to 100 million NZD). Needless to say we won’t be renting anything like that and luckily rental prices for 1 or 2 bedroom apartments are much more sensible (about 1400-1500 euros/month). One thing that I did find interesting is that rental prices don’t really decrease as you head further out of the city unless you go a really long way out.

At this stage our list of desired suburbs looks a bit like: IFSC, Blackrock, Sandymount, and the Rathmines/Baggot St area. We can’t really look seriously for somewhere to live for a week or two yet as we’re still waiting for our shipped things to arrive and most places are rented within a day or two of being put on the market.

I start work on Monday with two days of Noogler (New Googler) training! I’m looking forward to it.

Comment from Gill on 2007-04-26

Great you are safely there and housed. Looks very central to where you need to be- happy hunting. Be over to check things out soon!

Comment from Paul on 2007-05-17

Do you found a flat in suburbs?