Checking in From the Emerald Isle

 Hello everyone!

Sorry I have been lax in updating you. I'm in Europe now, after a brief sojourn home to celebrate my Mom's birthday. There aren't too many pictures to show you - between my work schedule and the jet lag which is only just starting to lift, I haven't ventured much beyond my little neighborhood. I am right in the heart of Dublin, though, so it's not a bad neighborhood to stick to! 

Since there aren't any wild tales to tell right now, here's a smattering of things I've learned or noticed:

• This is a wildly international city. I can probably count on my fingers the number of actual Irish accents I have heard! Almost everyone here, myself included, seems to be from somewhere else. Maybe that's just my neighborhood (see "haven't been anywhere else," above), but it has certainly been a surprise. 
• Fireworks are a Halloween thing. I gather they are illegal in Ireland but legal in Northern Ireland, and with the open border you basically get fireworks going off all over Dublin for a solid month leading up to Halloween. On Halloween itself it was nonstop for hours. When I went out that evening, the whole city smelled of that unique smoke/ash that they generate. 
• Churches EVERYWHERE. 
• Frustrating but also supremely useful: they don't have American junk food here. Junk food aplenty, to be sure, but it's not American brands and even the ones that seem like they will be straight dupes actually taste quite different, and not usually in a way I enjoy. So my eating habits are being kept in check whether I want them to or not! My kingdom for a bag of plain unflavored potato chips. 
• Also on the subject of potato chips: they come in every flavor I've never even thought of - Balsamic vinegar. Curry. Shrimp. Cheddar and onion. And if it looks like a big US-style bag, it's not - it's actually a big bag filled with six mini bags. 

Double rainbow, as seen from my window

My time in Dublin is wrapping up here shortly, and from this point on I actually hop around quite a bit for the next couple of months - a week on the other side of Ireland in a tiny little town, staying over a pub, then a couple of weeks in London and a couple of weeks in Paris, then home for the holidays (again, a couple of weeks), and then I join my first Chapter with the WiFi Tribe! I'll talk more about them in another post, but in short it's a really neat digital nomad group full of people doing just what I'm doing - traveling while working remotely full-time - that sets up shop in various places around the world for a month or so at a time. I'll be spending January with them in Dahab, Egypt!