To clear things up front: I’m fine, I’ve settled in to Dublin and my work even more, and in Dütti got a first visitor from my hometown. I’ve survived my first Irish-weather-induced cold (altough suffering a lot and learning the term “mancold“) and am getting ready for new challenges at work, such as my first webinar (some kind of an online seminar for AdWords customers), that I’m going to conduct on the forthcoming Wednesday at 4.00pm CET (UTC+1) (also see the announcement in the Official German AdWords blog).

Just a couple of days after my last post, my flatmate Paul celebrated his 30th birthday in the nearby Ocean Bar. Since in this country, they throw you and your crowd out at half past twelve by brutally switching the lights on and the music off, we quickly changed the scene to our apartment, where the party would go on until half six in the morning.

The week after, I was in Hamburg again to visit Cristina, and to redeem her belated birthday present, and see A Fine Frenzy (Twitter) perform a just stunningly great show at Große Freiheit 36. What a lovely, talented and down-to-earth girl!

One of the major advantages of being a “young professional” (some may call it “Yuppie”) I’ve identified is that I always know somebody who knows somebody with free tickets for a venue, a concert or a free dinner. Some might see this as a freeloaderish approach, but until I’ve reached the status of getting this stuff myself and sharing it with others, I’ve decided to enjoy the generosity of the people around me.

This is also how I came to see Poland beating the s**t out of Ireland at Croke Park Stadium, having really nice seats up high in this awesome venue, which holds 82,500 people and is the fifth-biggest stadium in Europe. That day, it was incredibly packed with an impressive number of Polish fans.

And who would have thought that I would ever meet Giovanni Trappatoni, the man who aroused my interest in linguistics at a very early stage of my life? Anyway, this is probably the nearest I’ll ever get to him (taken out of a distance of approx. 500m, so please disregard the lousy quality):

And just a couple of days ago, my team from work attended an Italian Cooking School class in a Dublin suburb, creating some nice Lasagne, Saltimbocca a la Romana and original Tiramisu as a team building challenge.

As the end of the year is approaching, I get a bit homesick, of course. My other flatmate Tricia has announced to get our apartment’s christmas decoration started this weekend – the deal is: NO PINK whatsoever –, and Dublin’s streets and trees glimmer of their seasonal-acquired lighting since… September, I think. At least, that’s how it feels like.

In only two weeks, I’ll go home for the first time I’ve moved to Dublin, and I actually can’t wait to meet all the people I haven’t seen now in almost four months – some, of course, even longer. It’s a nice opportunity to meet all those people and share my experiences with them, and to listen to their stories of ’08.