Rain, Tea, and Surfing

It rained pretty much all day today, varying from a steady light drizzle to a rather steady downpour from when I woke up until 6 or 6.30. As the French postdoc in my lab put it, "welcome to Ireland". The view from the window of my lab is rather incredible. It looks out over the attractive part of the UCC campus and on to the town itself, including the City Centre Center and Cathedral. the portion of the window directly next to the desk that my mentor and I share has a number of haikus written on it, many of them relating to rain. Go figure.

As luck would have it, the rain was hardest as I was walking home. The rain actually made me decide to put off my planned trip to the bank to finalize my bank account, which is turning into much more of an ordeal than I expected it to be. To open an account at the Bank of Ireland you need to have a letter confirming an Irish address and two forms of photo ID. Evidently you must live in Ireland to hold a bank account here. I personally find this absolutely bizarre, I don't know why a bank would care about where you live. The other thing I found strange about the process was that when I gave them my California Driver's License as my first form of ID they said it was no good because it had my American address and not my Irish one on it. The lady who helped me then asked to see my passport. She either didn't understand my explanation that my passport would have the same address because it is my permanent address or didn't get that because I'm living here for 10 weeks I'm not going to have any ID with my address here on it. Either way, I thought it was strange.

Today was the first day I was asked to come into work at a relatively normal time. They decided to ease me into it by asking me to get there at 12 on Monday and 11 on Tuesday. Today I got in at 9.30 and did a bit of preparation with my mentor for the day's experiments. Then at right around 10 or 10.15 everyone in the lab went off for tea. My mentor and I were among the first people in the lab, so most people were at work for 15-20 minutes or so before tea, which lasted until about 10.45 or 11. Then most people worked until 12ish, when they went off for lunch for roughly an hour. Not me, though. Mixing and stirring chemicals until 12.30 and then a lecture at 1, lunch in between. I'm not sure when most people leave though, my mentor and I left early because of a screwy reaction that we ended up leaving overnight. Not having anything else to do we left around 4 or 4.15. In any case though, the pace of work and mentality is far more relaxed than in America.

During some down time in the lab today I was talking to one of the grad student and it turns out that she surfs. I was rather shocked, I suppose I knew that there were surfers in Ireland but I had always assumed that they were transplanted Americans making the best of a gorgeous, if not stereotypically surf-friendly, coastline. Evidently I was wrong though, my coworker is from somewhere in County Kerry and her accent demonstrates that she's lived in Ireland for a long time. It does seem like it would be rather cold though.