Hasn’t been too much to blog about lately, just business as usual here in Dublin. I guess we should still keep you posted on what we’ve been up to, but I’ll keep it brief.

A few weekends back we had a nice visit from Brayden’s friend Katie, from back home. Katie’s parents are living in Germany so this was a nice long weekend trip for them. Katie arrived on Friday evening and we took her to the National Basketball arena to watch Tolka’s under 19’s team play for the national championship. Despite a great game (and even greater performance from our friend and acting mascot Sean) Tolka finished 2^nd. There was also a disappointing ½ time show from a Harlem Globetrotter... they aren’t what they used to be!

(Sean being a Tolka mascot)

Later that evening, despite the Tolka loss, we took Katie to the local Tolka hangout, McGowan’s. Located on the North Side in the heart of Dublin’s classist, McGowan’s is a typical Irish pub filled with locals. Due to the high ‘class’ of the clientele this is not Brayden’s favourite hangout, but none the less we had a good time and showed Katie the real Dublin!

(Katie and the Guys)

Saturday was a rainy day and since Katie’s parents were joining her for a few more days of sightseeing we just layed low, relaxed, played more than a few games of hearts... Then later we had some of our friends over and showed her the Temple Bar area.

Sunday Katie’s parents arrived and we joined them for a Sunday afternoon carvery. Carvery is one of the most exciting food options in Ireland. It is basically like a big Thanksgiving meal where you can pick which meat you want freshly sliced and then chose all the sides. It’s amazing and we all enjoyed!

Now onto the next weekend, the weekend of 5^th-6^th of February and the National Intermediate Cross Country Championships! This was the biggest race for my team, Donore Harriers, all year, and finally my last of a long season. Since it had been raining all week the conditions were less than desirable, ie 6-inches of thick mud. It was actually a really unique experience which I’m sure I will never elect to do ever ever again. In the end I was extremely muddy and cold, but really glad to have raced and helped my team to achieve a Silver Medal! It wasn’t my best race but it was good enough for a silver! Very relieved to finish off the season as the second best team in Ireland!

(This was actually a good part of the course)

In other sport related news Brayden’s school team, DBS, continues to be undefeated. Just Friday they played in the semi-finals and won by something ridiculous like 58 pts! If we haven’t explained already in Ireland the collegiate sports would be much more recreational and less competitive than the clubs, which would be like the professional teams. On that note the club team, Tolka, is on a winning streak and also won this weekend, clinching a no.2 seed for the National tournament! Brayden’s once unrecognizable ankle is doing much better and played in the last two games. We will keep you posted on our ‘March Madness’.

Visitors, Visitors, & Sprained Ankles

This is a bit delayed but last weekend (before last) we were very lucky to host some lovely visitors… my cousin Lisa and her husband Benson! Coincidentally Glenn’s little brother was also in town/country visiting, so our flat was almost full to capacity!

As Lisa and Benson are currently living outside of Venice it was just a little Ryan Air flight over the water to visit us in Dublin. They arrived in on Friday, and as soon as I got out of work we headed to one of my favorite local pubs for some delish beef pot pies… mmmh! After the travels and a bit of walking around the city we decided to call it an early night so they could rest up for a big Saturday of sight-seeing. After visiting some of the main local sights (Kilmainham Goal, Guinness Storehouse, and Jameson Distillery) we had a nice dinner and wee bit of a house party with some of our friends here before hitting the town. I think my fam was impressed with the crazy night-life that Dublin has to offer… as the reputation suggests… Irish people looove the weekends!

Sunday we did some more walking around the city and as we had mild weather we took a bike ride around Phoenix Park.

We stumbled upon the resident 300+ deer that live in the park…always shocking to see how close they let you get.

Anyways later that night we all went to the one sports pub in town that shows American football to watch the playoffs (enough said there). Overall it was a quick trip but I think everyone had a ball! And I am very excited to go visit them in a few weeks time and try out the slopes in Italy!

Onto the ankle. So that next Tuesday the guys had a big big game. Opponent: a team called ‘Ballin.’ Earlier in the season the Tolka Rovers had an unfortunate severe loss to Ballin, which is the 2^nd best team in all of Ireland. This time around, after a few months of practicing together, Tolka proved to be a worthy opponent for Ballin. With Glenn’s little bro in town, and the usual cheering crowd of our friends Franzie and Marine, the stands were packed! The game was excellent, back and forth, with Tolka leading by a few points almost the entire game. Then the worst thing happened: in the mid 3^rd quarter after jumping for a rebound the big guy, Brayden, landed on another guy, and Brayden was out of the game w/ a terrible sprained ankle! As Brayden sat on the sideline for a few minutes the team started to struggle and got down as far as 7… then… a pained Brayden on the bench starts to tape his own ankle (no physio at the game) and lace up an ankle brace. Hobbling out onto the court Brayden played the last 8 or so minutes and the team rallied to win by 1!!! It was a tremendous effort, but in the aftermath lay Brayden’s un-recognizable ankle. Dave and I accompanied him to the hospital to confirm there was no fracture thankfully… but as you can see this was quite the injury… We will keep you posted on this one!

Christmas/2011/Stockholm

Both Alisa and I were lucky enough to return Stateside for a quick week for Christmas. We were actually extremely lucky to get out nearly on-time because there was another "snowstorm" in Dublin. Alisa flew back to Boston and I spent the week in Orlando at my Grandma's house. My parents flew in from Seattle and my sister came in from Chicago. Also my three Spanish cousins were there, which was great because I hadn’t seen them in almost 5 years. The weather was a little chilly for Florida and I got laid out by the flu for a couple days, but other than that it was a great visit.

A church in the Stockholm city center.

The highlight of my Christmas trip had to be going to the “The Villages”. This is a retirement community that my grandma lives near. It has over 100,000 retirees so it’s pretty large. It’s a funny scene, everybody in there drives golf carts instead of cars. My family went one weekday night and watched as the 80+ crowd got their groove on. The old ladies leering at me made me a bit uncomfortable but I figured I could always outrun their golf carts!

Alisa had a good Christmas too, including hosting her friends to a Christmas Eve Breakfast, and skiing up in Maine with the Kelly's. I’m always jealous when she gets to do this because I miss skiing a lot and look forward to my next opportunity to ski post-bball. Between the skiing and visiting with her family and friends Alisa was as busy as she always is. She also cleaned up on Christmas, probably due in part to her extremely large Irish family. Lucky!

We both arrived back in Dublin on the 31^st at the crack of dawn. Alisa was lucky because there was a massive blizzard in Boston and we were both fortunate to arrive at the same time...meeting before immigration. We took a minor five hour nap when we got home, and then packed our bags for our trip to Stockholm. For the new year we headed over to my coach’s house and just hung out. Our coach’s baby lasted longer than I did, as Alisa had to keep poking me keep me awake until midnight!

Alisa riding a swan. The church in the previous picture is in the background.

On the first we flew out to Stockholm. We arrived around midnight and had to take a bus into the city. Go figure Ryan air flies into this tiny airport 1.5hrs outside the city. We didn't get in until near 2 am so we ended up starting our vacation very unlike my family... sleeping in the next day! We probably didn't get out til about 11am (Alisa edit: omg!).

An area in the old part of Stockholm. This area is called Gamlastan.

First we walked around the city in search of a boat tour, which are usually pretty popular in Scandinavia. There were two winter options, a city tour and an archipelago islands tour. Alisa chose the latter, which was definitely the right choice. Outside the city the water turned into ice, and we were cruising along on an ice tour. It was pretty cool, the boat we were on was an old steamship that was built in 1906. It was a great time, but really cold. The city was about 10-12 degrees Fahrenheit, but outside on the water with the wind…it was easily below 0. After the tour we walked around the city and went to eat dinner at a Scandinavian restaurant. Alisa got some Swedish meatballs made of elk and they were absolutely………delicious!

Ice Cruise

The next day we walked around the old part of the city, which is situated on a separate island. Stockholm is made up of about 14 islands I believe. There was a cool castle/palace and some nice churches. Wherever we were people would speak Swedish to us. Probably because we are tall, very pale and exceedingly awesome. Another thing I loved about Sweden was the availability of large clothes sizes in the stores. I ended up with longjohns (can’t get those in the States) and a sweater and nice jacket (really hard to find in the States).

Wearing my nice new snow jacket Alisa got me for Christmas!

As mentioned Stockholm was very, very cold, and it snowed frequently. One of the stranger things we noticed in Sweden was a very specific, thriving job. Despite the apparent recession in other countries Stockholm was in fine form, and partially due to the good work of the roof snow removers. Throughout the downtown nearly every block had a small sectioned off area below which men were tied up on the roofs knocking the snow off. The first time we noticed it was a bit of a shock, and then it turned out to be totally common. I'd say they have great mountaineering skills in Stockholm!

Click on this picture, then look for the man clearing the snow off the roof. He is above the first window on the left. Crazy!

Overall our trip was great. The hotel we stayed in had a great location and excellent breakfast. Over the three days I ate so many Swedish meatballs that I think my body composition is now at least 50% meatball. The weather was cold and snowy, but it is a very clean, beautiful city. If I could pick any European city to live in Stockholm would certainly be in the top 3.

Updates!

Since we’ve been a bit delayed on the blogging I figured I’d just summarize a few things we’ve been up to in the past month or so.

Newgrange
In early November we spent a lovely (rainy) Saturday at Newgrange, an ancient burial site dating back to 3000BC (making it older than the Pyramids, Stonehenge, and probably the oldest thing I’ve ever seen!).

Appearing to be a giant dome-shaped mound of earth Newgrange isn’t overwhelmingly visually stimulating, but it does have some interesting tid-bits. The stone wall surrounding the site is quite unique in that the rocks used were sourced from 70 miles away, and this was well before the invention of the wheel, meaning that they were all somehow transported uphill from 70 miles away. Also, as you can see, there are certain stones which have the ‘swirly’ art on them, which no one really knows the meaning of, but it is interesting none-the-less.

The coolest part about Newgrange is the inner tomb, which is the purpose of its existence. The tour lead us inside the tiny opening, slightly uphill, into the inner chamber where the ashes of the dead were laid to rest. The construction was so precise that light only hits the tomb area once a year on the sunrise of the winter solstice for 17 minutes. Apparently there is a lottery and thousands of people apply to visit for that day.

Overall it was worth a visit, though if you do, hopefully you get a different tour guide than us - Brayden was not fancying him at all! He kept using the exact same really obnoxious phrases like ‘while we can not know the exact meaning of blah blah blah, we speculate that blah, because of blah, though this is just speculation and we can not truly know.’ And he literally used that set up for every element of the site. Otherwise, it was pretty cool!

Glenn’s Parents Visit
Next up, Glenn’s parent came to visit the week before Thanksgiving. Not too much to say here, though we spent a nice Friday night with them, taking the Jameson Distillery tour (interesting but not quite as nice as Bushmills) and an amazing pub dinner (which confirmed my love for home-made pot-pies).

As you can see we were all very focussed at the Jameson tour (G’s parents to our right).

The highlight of the tour was when Brayden and Glenn’s mom were selected to do the Whiskey tasting test of a bunch of different Whiskeys. I’m sure they enjoyed!

Me Racing
There’s me racing again. Brayden came to cheer me on at the Dublin Intermediate (4K) Championship race. It was exciting because I won my 1st individual medal! A bronze, but still good! We got team gold for the overall once again so everyone was really happy (and cold!). I’m also setting the stage for Brayden to be Michael Phelps for Halloween sometime, as I’ve got 7 on the season so far, so just a few more to go for his costume!

Thanksgiving
This year was a very weird Thanksgiving as of course the Irish don’t celebrate our great holiday. It started out with the girls at work surprising me at lunchtime with an assortment of American snacks. Then, since the guys had bball practice we decided to cook breakfast for dinner and had bacon, eggs, and toast – weirdest. Thanksgiving. Din. ever. Luckily we were invited by their coach Dave, and his wife, Sue, to have a big Thanksgiving feast the next night, Friday. They actually out-did themselves and represented the Irish quite well (having 3 different kinds of potatoes). It was a great feast!

Me, Brayden, Glenn, and our friend Franzie. As you can see they, unlike us, get more than 4 tv channels, which means we could even watch football on our Thanksgiving!

The Bachelor Party!
A week or so ago we were graciously asked to host a bachelor party for one of Brayden and Glenn’s classmates, Jehan (French). Although it was my 1st bachelor party, I’m thinking it was quite atypical, as it was mostly girls! The group is so diverse because most of their class is international, so that always makes for an interesting mix. Glenn and I prepared the decorations, making cut out letters spelling ‘Congrats Jehan’ on our wall. Brayden and Glenn have taken a vow to leave it up all year... just a heads up for any visitors! Everyone had a great time at the party, and it culminated in an intense snowball fight!

Weather & Politics Update!
I wanted to touch briefly on the 2 topics that Irish people discuss the most, weather and politics (with potatoes a close 3rd). While I have been cold since the day I set foot here in August, the real icy weather really set in about a month ago. Apparently it was the coldest November in quite some time and they got maybe the most/earliest snow ever! It started snowing around Thanksgiving and lasted on and off for a week and a half. Overall they only got a few inches each time, but they are so unprepared for it- I have never seen roads so bad! There were literally miles of ice-skating rink roads! One positive side effect was getting a few days off from work (though we really couldn’t go anywhere). The negative side was that we have broken into a water shortage emergency. Apparently Irish people like to leave their water running to try and prevent their pipes from freezing (an interesting technique, especially since no one pays for water...). This led to the water ban that has been in effect from 7pm – 7am for the past few days... not cool. On to politics. I actually don’t have much to say here, but I’m sure you’ve all heard about whats going on here... the multi-billlion dollar bail out. It’s sort of sad because there is a real gloomy feeling because it’s literally everywhere in the news and radio etc. People are freaking out about it and there was a huge rally downtown the other weekend. Luckily in the midst of such a touch economical time we are able to find supporters for Habitat, and brought a nice little article to the Irish Times today, about yesterday’s launch of our new (my new!) renovation project. It went great, now down to work!

The Revival of the Local Programme!

As I previously mentioned the ‘local programme’ in Dublin has been dormant for the past few years. Habitat Ireland has instead been sending groups of volunteers abroad to spread the message and build homes in impoverished communities around the world. Meanwhile Ireland has felt the recession as much, if not more, than us in the States. In the 3 months I’ve been here I can say I have not witnessed any new construction in the greater Dublin area (pop 1.6mil). This is quite different from where I last worked in Bellevue, WA where there were at one time 14 cranes in a city of 120,000. Anyways, my job of course as the Local Programme Manager is to revitalize/bring back the Local Programme in Dublin. I am so happy to announce that we finally have our 1st “big” project! As you can see below I have my work cut out for me!

Being that Dublin is such an old developed city, renovations are much easier to come by than new building opportunities. This is why we have partnered with Dublin City Council to renovate derelict, abandoned properties that diminish the local neighbourhoods. This particular building is actually quite the find. I’ve looked at a lot of potential properties around the city ranging from a tiny 3 room cottage with an outhouse, to this historic-front old townhouse residence. The cost benefit is really amazing as there are no significant structural repairs necessary. With a lot of cosmetic work, a new kitchen, new bath, they will be really beautiful homes.

The building is comprised of 6 units: 3 two-story 3-bedroom townhomes, with 3 daylight basement 1-bedroom apartments below. The unit on the left (and apt below it) has already been privately renovated and is actually a lovely home. I now have the other 4 units to renovate and turn into HFH homes. One of the main initial hurdles is that the townhome on the right side has been completely over-run by pigeons for the past 2 years; meaning that there is pigeon excrement, feathers, and corpses on almost every inch of the interior.

House of Horrors!

This presents a number of health and safety issues however after professional fumigation and cleaning services it will be ready for volunteers, tradesman, and the families to begin work on site. The Family Selection Process and the Family Training Programme are also on my plate. This means finding compatible low-income families from the city housing waiting list who want to partner with Habitat (i.e. contribute 250hrs) and qualify for our pre-arranged no-interest bank loan. It is a really great opportunity for families who would otherwise never be able to become homeowners. These homes in particular, in a great location in Dublin, will be a huge asset.

Note the high ceiling moulding... so much potential!

I am sooo excited about starting this project, but for the purposes of contrast/irony I thought I would display for anyone who hasn’t seen, my last 2 projects.

Quite different...

Halloween

First sorry for the lack of posts recently. Who knew doing a masters program and playing for two basketball teams would take up so much time?!?! I'll try to be better about the posting.

Anybody who knows Alisa knows she won't let Halloween pass quietly into the night. We started out by carving pumpkins. I improved quite a bit from last year. In fact I didn't even have to get Alisa to finish mine for me this year! It's funny, we always think our pumpkins are good until our friends (read: Alisa's friends) start posting theirs on facebook. Here are ours:

Alisa's has the menacing eye brows, while mine looks like Cartman.

The week leading up to Halloween was a bit hectic as Alisa was trying to figure out costumes for Sat/Sun nights for the both of us. Thursday afternoon she came up with a great idea, deciding to be a lumberjack. This of course entailed me being a tree. Although I do suppose it's a rather fitting costume.

For my costume Alisa went to a fabrics store and purchased a couple yards of plastic, brown, tarp-like fabric. I was quite skeptical of my costume to begin with, but Alisa did a great job creating it. She fashioned a hat out of the leftover fabric and taped scrunched up napkins all over it. It turned out pretty well, and several people attempted to climb me during the night. Yes, it was as awkward as it sounds.

Alisa's costume was pretty good as well. She wore her work boots, some borrowed jean shorts and a flannel shirt. Then she made an ax from scratch with a pole, some cardboard and tin foil.

While we weren't quite as scary as we were last year...

Last year

It was pretty terrifying when Alisa axed me down!

Before going out we invited my coach and bunch of my teammates over. It was a great time. !

Clockwise from upper left: Construction worker (teammate), Joe Jonas (teammate), tree, lumberjack, nurse (coach's wife), lifeguard (coach), Bruno Mars (Glenn - roommate/teammate), Little Red Riding Hood (team physio).

10.10.10

Apologies for this being way overdue, I actually wrote it right after 10/10 but forgot to post it... anyways:

So 10/10 rolled around and overnight I got a year older. Ridiculous how that works, but none-the-less it was written and said to be the big 10/10/10 all around the world (here they do day/month/year). Anyways now begins the unfortunate month when Brayden absolutely relishes in being “2 years younger” than me. He will go out of his way to mention our ages as many times as possible before his birthday next month. Anyways this year was quite special being a once in a lifetime birthday. Since 10/10 was on a Sunday I took the liberty of having a “birth-weekend” instead of a “birthday” which is fair really.

Friday night we stayed in and watched that comedy ‘Date Night’ which was pretty funny. Saturday was a beautiful and sunny day and started with my track club workout in the park. Though really tough, a great way to start the day! Afterwards Brayden and Glenn (our new roommate and Bs long lost twin/best friend separated a birth - probly deserved a post but short story he's from western MA, went to Amherst, really nice and awesome etc) made a big brunch for us, it was grand. Then we did some errands, relaxed, they had practice, I watched my favorite new show ‘The X-Factor’ (yes I gladly admit that) and then the celebrating began! Our good Irish friend Tina came over so it was an intimate group of the 4 of us celebrating. This was perfect for me because I really really hate making a big deal over my birthday. We had a lovely night out on the town in Dublin as. (Don't ask why the guys have their shirts off, it has something to do with this Jersey Shore clip, I've accepted this is what I have to live with).



Sunday, the actual 10.10.10 was another beautiful day! And after another great homemade brunch the 4 of us went to this nice fishing village on a cliffy peninsula called Howth, north of Dublin. It was very lovely. We walked around and got some fish. It was grand. Then later Brayden took me out to dinner and we watched the X-Factor results show. Now that’s what I call a grand birthday!