Thursday this past week we all went to the Stag’s Head Pub for a storytelling night. The combination of low lighting, worn wooden panels, and the majestic taxidermy stag on the wall above the bar makes this a place I want to come back to at some point during the next month. We then all headed into the basement event space, which although less visually appealing, was also very charming. After around 90 minutes of folklore and fairies, we all headed to the Merchant’s Arch in Temple Bar for dinner. This restaurant is stunning, with a spiral staircase that reminds me of the grand stairwell in Hogwarts, with all the photos on the walls. After dinner, a group of us felt like we should visit Temple Bar, if for no other reason than to be able to say we went. Other people warned us about the drink prices though, so we just walked through and took some photos before heading out.
Bright and early on Saturday morning we hopped on a bus down South. Our first stop was the Rock of Cashel, an old capital of the ancient Irish kings. Now mostly in ruins, it was still visually stunning, and after a while, I spotted another ruin in a field down the hill and decided to make the adventure. I learned later that this other site is called Hoare Abbey, and I wasn’t technically supposed to get up close to it, as there’s no official way for tourists to visit, and it’s in the middle of a cow field. In my defense, there wasn’t any sign saying I couldn’t, and given how great some of the photos turned out, I’m glad I did. The view back up the hill to the Rock of Cashel was fantastic, and my favorite of the photos I took is below. Next stop on this trip was down in Cork, at Blarney Castle. While a bunch of people lined up to kiss the Blarney Stone (for the ‘gift of gab’), Anthony and I decided spending the entire 2 hours we had at the castle waiting to kiss a rock was a bad idea, so we walked around the grounds instead. I’m glad we did, as I think we had more fun than most people did. We began by walking through a cave in the cliff below the castle, and then we did a loop of the entire castle grounds, touring the manor house, rock garden, and kitchen garden (the paths outside of which were littered with wild berry bushes). We also walked all the way down to the lake where we saw dozens of cows and their babies. In the rock garden I found some inspiration and took some great macro photos of some of the plants that I’m decently proud of. The best of which is below. We then headed back towards Dublin, with one final stop at Cahir Castle, which was in impressively good condition. It even still had some cannonballs stuck in the walls from a siege in 1599, which was very cool. The town of Cahir is also very pretty, and one photo I took in the town is below.
Monday this week, Max and I left work early to head into Dublin for a tour of the Guiness Storehouse. The tour was more interesting than I had anticipated, and the section about the history of the company’s marketing was both impressive and dystopian somehow. It just struck me as a bit odd that a company was running a private museum about their corporate and marketing history. Once the tour finished, we all got pints up at the top floor bar, which had full 360-degree views of the city.
Back at Carraighill, the CEO finally returned from back-to-back-to-back trips around Europe and the US. That Friday night, he took Max and me out for Nando’s with other members of the team, and then we headed out for some drinks in the city. It was a good time, but Irish people (at least my coworkers) are competitive drinkers , and I could not, nor tried to, keep up with their pace.
This week I powered through the rest of the Brazil and Mexico report, and I dove into a newer report on Eastern European banking. This report took a lot longer than I was expecting, and was more tedious, but I learned a lot about the quirks of ECB policy and data publishing. I also spotted a few more places where the calculations just didn’t look quite right, and it turns out that due to some aspects of the report being copied from other reports, while one line should’ve been calculating 30-year mortgage rates, it actually calculated for 25-year mortgages. If anyone was curious, it turns out that monthly payments on 30-year mortgages in Slovenia are about €200 less than the monthly payment on 25-year mortgages. Thrilling stuff right?