10 August 2010

My move into the city

Woo we have sunshine! And I have moved house. I have spent the last two weeks moving and then settling in; and now I feel settled.

The living room of my new apartment. See the sunshine! That does not happen so often.
My bedroom. By Ireland standards it is huge! I am happy with it though. Just need to decorate a little.
Last but not least, the guinea pig. It's pretty friendly, even when it's trying to eat my toes.

My new apartment is right in the centre of the city - a slightly dangerous location considering that every second establishment that I pass on the way to work is a great cafe. I will have to slowly try each one out until I find the best. And not only cafes, but all the shopes! I am right amongst them. Luckily Galway doesn't actually have such a great selection of shops, so my dilemma could be worse.

Here is Quay St, with lots of nicely painted establishments to put out of mind the excessive price of everything here.

But as it is, it's quite bad. Except I am broke for the next couple of months so I don't need that much will-power to prevent myself from shopping - my lack of money will do that for me. The view is not great. It could be worse I think but still - I am right on a relatively busy road, facing yet more apartments.

And this is the street that I live on. As you can see it is not very exciting.

But when the traffic is quiet I can hear sea-gulls because the docks are just one road over. And the location is great. The kitchen is a bit cramped but nothing like some of those Dunedin flats. And my room is huge. Unfortunately some nights I hear drunk people making a huge racket. And what would you know it but the worst lot were a bunch of bloody aussies - which I know because they began chanting aussie-aussie-aussie, oi-oi-oi. To think I could come all this way and still be woken up by that!

So other than moving, all I have been doing recently is working. And I don't really feel that I have been doing much of that either. I had my review the other week which looks at my progress and determines whether I can continue in the PhD. Which is not actually a scary thing unless you are doing really badly so it was quite good, it gave me a chance to talk about all my results, which I like to do, and to hear that I am progressing well, which is always nice. My crazy supervisor is still crazy, and still has a new topic for me to focus on every other week. But I don't see her much these days so it's not so bad. My barnacles are still stupid. They don't breed, they don't produce lots of adhesive for me, they just take up my time.

But luckily it is very important that we get more samples so that means trips to the beach, yay. Because other than the beach I am going nowhere exciting until October, when I will take a holiday to Dubai for a couple of weeks. And after that? Maybe Vienna for my birthday! So that is how things are at the moment, and it is pretending to be summer here in Galway for the time being so now I must go outside and make the most of it.

Here is the Corrib and the Salmon Weir, plus the fishermen that catch fish in there. The other evening you could see the salmon jumping out of the water all over the place.

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