Arrival

“So, yer with the tour bus, are ye?”

It was a fair question. Parked outside the café where I was buying a cup of coffee stood one of the many giant tourist buses that ply the winding roads of Ireland’s enchanting villages. My baseball cap, shorts, sandals, and Yankee accent no doubt gave a few indications as well.

“No, I have just moved here, to live and work. Actually, my grandparents were from Ireland.”

“Well then, welcome home.”

There it was. Another stranger welcoming me home. This was really happening.

Of course, “this” had been a half year in the making, beginning with a relentless job search that finally bore fruit with only four days remaining on my contract with the United Nations. It came in the form of a job proposal by phone on a Friday that caught me by surprise, with a written offer received the following Monday, from a company I had been pursuing for months. This would certainly help make for a smooth post-UN landing.

Plenty of research had accompanied this process. What would the legal implications and requirements be for my wife and children? Where in Ireland might be the best place to settle? What kinds of jobs were available, and where, and how much did they pay? What would schooling options be for my children? And: could we bring our beloved dog with us?

These last two questions would prove the greatest challenges, and warrant their own journal entries.
In the meantime, suffice it to say “so far, so good”.

We arrived in the midst of what most people would call “Summer”, but which the Irish were calling a “heatwave”, with cloudless sunny skies and temperatures around 27 degrees Celsius/80 degrees Fahrenheit. I had forgotten how late the sun sets during the Summer here, due to Ireland’s northerly location, which is fortunately tempered by Gulf Stream temperatures. In fact, right now, it seems that the sun never fully sets, with a few hours of twilight bridging night and morning. It has wreaked havoc on our internal clocks, and more than once we have suddenly realized that it was 11 pm and that the kids should have been in bed hours ago.

Speaking of our two daughters, we enrolled them in a Summer camp to keep them active and to meet other children. And to allow my wife and me to focus on getting settled: finding longer-term accommodation (we found a small furnished house to rent for a couple of months to get started), getting our legal status sorted, finding a school for the next academic year … and, no doubt, facing some challenges we never anticipated.