Matt & Kat

My first week in San Francisco passed relatively quickly in a fairly regular routine of wake-up, catch shuttle, work, catch shuttle, sleep, repeat. I did manage to walk around some of downtown San Francisco on a couple of evenings, but it gets dark around 5:30ish here at the moment, so there isn’t alot to see by the later evening.

My impression of San Francisco is fairly neutral, there is nothing that I really dislike about the place but it certainly doesn’t grab me or make me feel like I would like to stay here for an extended period of time.

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Photos

I had a great long weekend in Whistler catching up with Christopher (or Brownie as he’s now called, I was reprimanded several times for using his full name!), meeting his friends and remembering how to snowboard. My flights from Dublin to San Francisco and then on to Vancouver were uneventful, and the Delta airport hotel that Chris had arranged for me to stay in overnight before catching the 5am Greyhound up to whistler the next morning was one of the best rooms I’ve ever stayed in.

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As Kat alluded to at the end of a recent post I’m travelling again to visit “head office” in Mountain View for two weeks.

This coming weekend is American Thanksgiving and due to various flight timing quirks the best option for me to be in San Fransisco by Monday morning (ready to work and not too jet lagged) was to fly before the holiday weekend. Hanging out by myself in San Fransisco for the holiday weekend didn’t sound like much fun, but it is the perfect opportunity to pop up to Vancouver/Whistler and catch up with Christopher before he departs back to New Zealand sometime next year (assuming he doesn’t come up with another scheme to stay in Canada for longer…). So I’m currently sitting in San Fransisco airport waiting for my connecting flight up to Vancouver. Ironically I’ve already flown across Canada this morning on the way to San Fransisco from Dublin, but unfortunately more direct flights between Dublin and Vancouver are not really possible to do.

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Sorry to keep you all waiting for the photos of our trip to Paris last weekend. I’ve been busy putting the final touches on a new bit of software that I’ve written to nicely display all our photos on this website. You can find the result via the “Our Photos” link above.

The new gallery organises our photos via ‘tags’ rather than into discrete albums. Every time we take a photo, we download it from the camera into an application called F-Spot which organises the photos and lets us tag them with tags to describe the content. A tag is just a short one or two word descriptive phrase and we can attach as many tags to a photo as we like.

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Phew! It’s the weekend at last. After getting back from Paris at midnight on Tuesday we were straight back into work on Wednesday and playing catch-up for the time we were away. Now that it’s Saturday – the chores all done and cosy inside looking out at the drizzly grey Dublin day – I have time to sit back and think over our trip to Paris and finish writing about it. So, here we are….

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We’ve just returned from our 4 day holiday in Paris. Our trip was wonderful – it’s only a shame we couldn’t stay longer! We managed to miss the French transport strikes which started just after we left.

Paris is both beautiful and romantic – a perfect place to visit on our anniversary. I found Paris to be a city steeped in history, cultured and refined but also bustling and alive! During our 4 days we visited plenty of the city and enjoyed all of it 🙂

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Nous allons à Paris pour un long week-end. Il devrait être amusant! Nous allons prendre beaucoup de photos pour vous montrer une fois que nous y revenir.

Goodbye

Comment from Mark Brown on 2007-11-09

Very impressed – we will look forward to enjoying your photos in due course!

Comment from Mum- Wendy on 2007-11-10

Very clever Matt. I didn’t do french at school so wouldn’t have a clue what this says, am impressed that you do. Hope you are having a fab time.

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Hello all. I realised today it’s been quite a while since I wrote anything here. So, I hope to bring things up to speed now and I really will try to keep up-to-date better in future!

We’ve been in Dublin for half a year already now. I’m surprised to think that we’ve been here that long – it’s gone so fast! We arrived in April, found an apartment in central Dublin in May. In June I accepted a job offer with a small IT development company as their ‘Web Designer’. Since then we’ve had several visitors over from NZ, we’ve found a great church here – St Marks, we’ve made a our first sightseeing trip across to continental Europe, and we’ve made plans for several more trips in the coming months. All in all we’ve been keeping pretty busy and we’re enjoying life here in Dublin. As the Irish would say – ‘it’s grand’

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I’m pretty sure that we’re living in Ireland these days. I hear funny accents when I step out the door every day, the streets are dirty and it’s starting to get pretty cold when I would normally be expected summer to start. Despite all of this, the postal system doesn’t seem to have caught up with the fact that we live in Europe now.

Twice in the last month, Kat has ordered things from US online stores and when the package has arrived it’s had a NZ Post, Auckland sticker on the front. Despite the address being clearly marked as “Dublin, Ireland” and the package arriving here in Ireland relatively promptly it appears to have travelled through Auckland on its way here!

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Our trip to Luxembourg started at 4:30am on Saturday morning with the screeching tones of Kat’s cellphone alarm rousing us from what had been a comfortable slumber. By 5:15 after a quick shower and some food, we were leaving the house towards Dublin airport. It turned out to be a very very popular weekend for travel! Even at 6am in the morning the check-in area of Dublin airport was jam packed. The queues for the two security screening points were both 100m (literally) long, snaking back and forth against each other up and down the length of the departure hall. Luckily they were moving fairly rapidly and it only took up just over 30 minutes to get through security and begin the 10 minute walk to our gate. Dublin airport’s passenger volumes have doubled to 20M in the past 10 years and the need for an expanded terminal (coming in 2010) is plainly evident.

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