Dublin: Day 2

Note: Day 2 is a few days late so bear with me since a lot of sad and shocking things has happened and I wasn't in the mood to update. I'll try to post Day 3 soon when I have more energy and hopefully I will catch up with my updates. 

 Day 2 was the first day of work at DCU lab. The walk from our apartments was only about a 5 minute walk into the university and then we have to maneuver our way around buildings to get to the last building, the Chemical Sciences X building which is another 1.5 minutes. Not bad, huh? Its great to be able to do that and not worry about parking or waking up early to beat traffic. 

We met everyone else in Mirek's lab and ran around the campus with Tom doing administrative stuff. Of course the registry was situated opposite to our building so there was a lot of walking back and forth going on. We then had an informal meeting with another professor, Dr. Nolan and a few other postdocs to discuss having a PDMS Chips for Beginners workshop led by Mirek, me, Marisol and Fernando (who is familiar with PDMS and suggested the idea). They seemed pretty excited about having a 3-day workshop with the first day going over theory and the other 2 days consisting of hands-on training. 

Good thing I brought my presentation slides from my lab so I can add onto them since it seems like it's going to be a long discussion. Since the labs are much smaller compared to our labs back home, our desks will be in Dr. Nolan's organic chem lab for the next 2 months.

Marisol in Dr. Nolan's lab filling out registry forms.

They have very clean and *working* fume hoods compared to ours back home that warranted a photo.

After work, we walked to the Omni shopping center nearby our apartments. Mind you, we are staying in a residential neighborhood and we were the only minorities in that shopping center. People often stare whether in a good, bad or very curious way.We were starving so had lunch at Pizza Hut. When I was in London many years back I also had Pizza Hut a couple of times since it was down the street from the hotel I stayed at in Earl's Court. Well, the Pizza Hut here is a dine-in restaurant with a buffet so I guess it's like that everywhere else. We should have a dine-in Pizza Hut in L.A. too! I'm sure there would be tons of people. I wish we weren't so tired and jet lagged because they had tons of cute stores with brands I love but are not carried in the US like Kookai, Miss Selfridge, Warehouse, and Morgan de toi (there used to be one at the Santa Anita many years back though) that I wanted to check out but was too beat to do. What I did get to purchase was a Vodafone prepaid SIM card so all I need to do is call T-mobile so they can unlock my phone. From the information I gathered, T-mobile will happily unlock your phone for free as long as you have had the phone for at least 90 days. 

Afterwards, we went to Tesco to buy some groceries. What I have observed here in Ireland is how very green they are. For one, at our local convenience store next door, they charge you for plastic bags. So I opted for the free paper bag instead since I need to be a penny pincher here since things are so expensive and the bag was roughly half the size of a Trader Joe's bag, which might as well be a sandwich bag! My necessities like paper towels, hand soap, bread, toilet paper, etc. and all my other purchases were overflowing! Luckily I only had a few feet to walk! At Tesco, we were given one little flimsy plastic bag (we were even lucky to get one!) for groceries for 2 people! We were just dumping things into our "trolley" (aka shopping cart) and then noticed everyone putting in all their groceries into their 3-4 bags (tote bags, recycled shopping bags, purses, backpacks, you name it) they carry around like mad at the register. It was hilarious and downright LOL. At least we know what to do now from here on, like save EVERY plastic bag and paper bag given to us and carry extra bags just in case we may buy something. Americans are so wasteful. Maybe these people are forced to be appear green since they limit plastic bags for one.

Also, we always need to turn on a switch before plugging in our electrical appliances. Kind of annoying but I just leave it on. I know,  I know... I am wasteful, capitalist American pig, no? But I honestly do forget to turn it off when you have so many switches to turn off before leaving the apartment. The annoying part is that I have to get a chair to stand on to turn on my bathroom fan when I take a shower. Why would they put those switches over the door?! Maybe they expected an average height of 6'2" or 5'8" with long limbs to be renting here. 

Must remind myself: "Don't forget to turn on the swtich first!"

Well, we are still learning since it has only been day 2 of our trip. I'm sure I will get used to all this and probably come back home and take these habits home with me. Umm... I don't think so!