This blog is a continuation to my hugely successful squiggly colorful underlinings blog I had in University of Helsinki. Since I've now got my PhD and finished drawing red underlines, not to mention that the University of Helsinki will more or less likely remove my access now that I don't live there anymore. Ok, so this first blog post is not going to contain science, much linguistics or anything, so you are expecting that you can skip to the rest of this. Just a rant of the good and the bad in moving from (a University job in) Finland to (a University job in) Ireland. I'll resume the normal order once I get back to doing science, not to worry.
Alright, so I got my PhD, and flew here 2 days later, got into a hostel and started seriously hanging in daft.ie and calling the agents and landlords. I wish I could tell a good story to help find an apartment here, but it's a bloody lottery quite equivalent to applying for academic funding. I got rather good at writing the applications though, I wrote approx. 50 of them and the last ones had much higher reply rate. Here's some keywords: "well-paid academic researcher position", "letters of recommendation from employee", "move in immediately". Including Irish phone number has a great impact, though most non-agent landlords require immediate follow-up calls anyways. Also, you'd need a PPS number for most agencies. Guess what; in order to apply for a PPSN you need an apartment. It gets better: to prove that you have an address you'll need an utility bill from your apartment. To get utility bill you need Irish bank account (although all banks will advertise SEPA blah blah here, no one actually understands it at all). To get a bank account you need–you guessed it, a proof of permanent residence in Ireland! Yeah, it's actually impossible to play by rules here. In the end though, I got apartment from the worse web messages I sent before even getting here. From nice agency called Forbes & Doyle it was. I mention the name cause many agencies here are really rubbish, Lisney for example sent me a message to come to a showing, and failed to show themselves. the number they gave me was for central office, where the guy at the phone lied to me that there was no showing, and promised to call back, which they never did. Though I had a nice 5 minute discussion about how I cannot afford for it since I am a "student", which I tried to correct some dozen of times to researcher before giving up, I suppose they haven't heard university has paid researcher positions. Oh well, I wouldn't believe in well-paid university jobs either did I not know better ;-)
After hassling through all that in really 10 days no less–I had a hard deadline not only because of work but because St. Patrick's day started to make working off hostels increasingly uncomfortable. With permanent address all rest is more or less your familiar everyday bureaucracy. PPS can be acquired by queuing to PPSN office, bank account from bank, and proper tax rates by sending form 12A to tax office in time. I've applied for electricity online but the form told me there's 14 days processing time, that's quite typical Ireland it seems, everything is slow but you can get stuff done faster if you bother people at least two three times over the phone or in person. This is gonna annoy me to no end, I still hate phoning to people. I still don't know what to do with "domestic waste" though, there are garbage bins in garage but the garage doors say something like "no dumping! 20000 € fine CCTV is watching you" wtf. I tried to sign up for magical garbage bags that cost a fortune but can possibly be thrown curbside but I haven't got a reply from the webform in like 5 days, but then again, that's Ireland, I'm starting to learn.
What else is cool in here? A lot of things in everyday living is like going back... I don't know if there is a time to go back for when thinking of Finland or so, has it been this bad even 100 years ago? All water taps are these delightful dual tap things where one is supposed to be cold and other is warm and what the heck are you supposed to be doing with it if you want to use warm water for, say everything? That's a moot though, since only way to get warm water is to turn a water heater on, like, 2 hours before you need any warm water. (Ok, you can set it to heat water twice a day for 3 hours or something but that's just absurd waste). It's never this bad anywhere else. It'd be easier to heat water manually like at summer cottage and all that. There's also not enough water pressure for the shower to work, you have to use extra device to suck more power to get anything from the shower but it's still rather bad. Then we have single-glazed windows, double-glazed is a sign of luxury rent. And dozen of heaters glaring off all the time. Meanwhile some people in other places of the world think they save the world from energy crisis by changing light bulbs -_-
Also, the weather is always bad. And it all don't matter a bit, since people are nice, the bars are nice, the food is awesome, I'm slowly piecing a home together.
The name of the blog, is a machine translation thing. That's what the rest of the posts will more likely be about. Thank you for reading and good night.
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