Work Experience Week 2 (The Woollen Mills)

I decided to carry out my second week of work experience in 'The Woollen Mills', a restaurant in town. It's a very nice restaurant right next to the ha'penny bridge, in which James Joyce apparently once worked. My uncle's friend is the executive chef there, and he got me a spot in the bakery. I got up at around 5:30 each day in order to get the 7:00 DART from Greystones into Tara Street.

When I arrived at the restaurant each day, I put on an apron, and began working in the bakery, from 8 until 12:00, which I quite enjoyed. My favourite dish which I prepared was bread and butter pudding (apparently a long-time favourite of my parents), although I also made chocolate cherry brownies, shaped scones from dough and chopped rhubarb.

Apart from the bread itself being a sliced white loaf bought in to the bakery (from 'Pat the Baker', if I remember correctly), the bread and butter pudding was one of the things which I made relatively from scratch. It was made in very large batches,whereby I often made two batches at a time. The first thing I made was the sauce, which, if I recall correctly, contained eggs, butter, cream, vanilla pods and possibly sugar. I also had to cut the crusts from the slices of bread, which took some time, given the amount of bread I had to work with. I did about five slices at a time, in small five-slice stacks, with a large breadknife. I then had to lay out these slices of bread in five layers in a large basin, drenching them in the sauce as I did so, and distributing raisins over each layer, apart from the top one. The remaining sauce would then be drizzled over the entire batch of pudding.

By twelve O'clock each day, when I was finished with my work in the bakery for the day, I was, as can likely be imagined, quite hungry, so I went out to find some food. I usually just got something to eat around templebar. I enjoyed the independence and being able to walk around and explore things in Dublin. I usually got the DART home shortly after eating. On the last day that I was working there, I went on a walk and went up Grafton street before going to Dawson Street and buying some records and my parents came into town on the DART and we all ate in the restaurant together, each member of my family ordering the bread and butter pudding for dessert, which was really quite exciting because I had made it. Thankfully, they enjoyed it.

I really found it to be a great experience, and although perhaps not leaning very heavily that way in terms of a career, I think that cooking and baking are hobbies that I am quite interested in getting into.

I would definitely recommend the woollen mills restaurant for eating, as well as it's sister restaurants, the washerwoman and the winding stair, all three of which I have been in. The winding stair is probably my favourite. It's right next to the woollen mills and is also a bookshop.
More information about these restaurants can be found at these links:
http://thewoollenmills.com/
http://winding-stair.com/
http://thewasherwoman.ie/menus.htm

Darkness into light walk

On the night of Friday, the 6th of May, 2016, I went to bed sometime roughly between the hours of 11 and 12 PM. 

On Saturday, the 7th of May, I got up at 3 Am, got dressed and got into a car with my friend Nicholas Pochinkov, heading for a pub in Wicklow town to meet a larger group of friends, Rian,  .

Why?

Because at 4:15 am, hundreds of people (actually, apparently over 120,000 this year in Ireland alone) at different locations around Ireland would set off for 5 km on foot to mark the beginning of the 8th Annual 'Darkness Into Light' run/walk (of which two verbs, it was admittedly the latter in which my friends and I engaged) in aid of Pieta House, a charity for suicide prevention.

When My friends Nicholas, Rian , John , Gabriel, Evelyn, Katherine, Mia, Jane, and Caroline and I myself arrived at the 'Leitrim Lounge' pub in Wicklow town, the area was decorated with lovely little electric candles, provided by Electric Ireland, the main sponsor for the event.

Some of these candles were arranged on the grass, to spell out the word 'Hope', the main message of the event. 

For registering and paying our donations online, we received a sheet to print out as a ticket of sorts, which we could hand in at the venue in exchange for a t-shirt. Due to popular demand for these t-shirts, and especially the 'medium' sized ones, when I arrived with my friend Nicky, they had them in only 'small' and 'large'. I got one in the latter size and will hopefully grow into it.  
The girls all arrived together and a bit later than expected, as often seems to be the case and were disappointed to find that they were out of shirts, especially since many of the dogs were wearing them who would be par were wearing them, and had themselves not likely purchased a ticket.

The walk itself was very nice, despite being quite cold and the rain which started right as we began. It was about five kilometers in length and took only around one hour to complete.
I did, however, experience, shortly before commencing the walk, a sharp pain in my head, which translated itself during the walk as a worrying headache, tension and lightheadedness, exacerbated when I moved my head to the left. However, confident in the knowledge that I most likely would not pass out or die or do something otherwise terrible and dramatic like that, and that ambulances were parked at regular intervals should this actually occur, I simply continued the walk with my friends.

Upon arriving back at the site where we'd begun, which had been set up to happen just as dawn was breaking, symbolising hope and redemption, we were invited to sign the banner of hope, which we did. There was a small reception including coffee, tea and some biscuits in the pub. Me and Nicholas, whilst waiting for my Dad to pick us up, being the lase remaining two in the pub, ended up being given a tray and several packets of leftover biscuits which were seemingly quite desperately handed to us by the organisers who had layed them out.

It was a great experience and I would definitely like to do it again next year if I get the chance.

Music project (progressive rock)

In Music, one of our assignments was to prepare a project on a topic of interest to us which we may not have covered specifically in class, but which ties in to what we have studied.

I chose to do my project on 'progressive rock', one of my favourite genres, which I hoped to tie in with the 'history of rock and roll' module on our course. I am surprised that we did not cover this topic in greater detail in class, as I feel that it was a very influential movement in music in general.

Since it is a topic of great interest and passion to me, I had already accumulated a great deal of knowledge about it, and did not need to do a large amount of research in order to do the project.
In fact, I found it more difficult to limit the amount of information I wrote on the topic.
I will put it here:

Literary magazine launch

This year, I was invited to attend the official launch of our school's literary magazine (which was a bit unusual because the magazine had already been sent out to everybody last summer).

This is because I am very proud to have a poem in the literary magazine which I wrote myself, called 'a letter to hope', which I think is possibly the greatest poem I've ever written.

The event took place in the school library, and had a very nice and calm atmosphere, especially since it was attended mostly by a very small gathering, made up of mostly the students, their parents, some teachers and the headmaster.
I was very happy to see my Dad and brother there for me.
Tea and coffee, water, sandwiches and some nice, fancy biscuits were available.
There were some nice words said by Mr Carr and the students were given the chance to read out their writing. The standard of the writing was very good. There were a lot of essays, debates, poems and pieces of short fiction.

Unfortunately, I was kind of nervous, and after being asked several times if I was sure I wanted to read out my poem myself (which I was initially determined to do), I eventually let Sam Shepard read out my piece on my behalf.
Although he seemed to do a very good job reading it out (especially since he hadn't really gone through it before hand and it was sort of a last minute thing), I really feel that I would have loved to read it out myself, as I was extremely proud of it and I didn't really know when I was going to write anything like it again.

It was still a very enjoyable experience and I was very proud and honored to be there.

Eagle's Flight Workshop

This was a beneficial and enjoyable workshop, in which a man came into our school from a company called 'Eagle's Flight Ireland', in order to show us their board game, 'Gold of the Desert Kings'.

This board game was actually intended to subconsciously teach us valuable tips and advice about effective project management, and did so through a lot of clever symbolism, which I enjoyed attempting to decipher.

The aim of the game was to collect as much gold as possible without dying (within the theoretical world of the game) with limited resources, including time.

There were various risks and many rewards and complicated rules for the teams to play by.

Luckily, none of the teams perished,

and afterwards, we were interested to hear the man explain what the symbols in the game represented and how we could apply them to projects throughout our whole lives.

I would be interested to see more games like this.

Garda Síochána Drugs talk.

This year, a Gard came in to talk to us about drugs.

However, although I expected this talk to attempt to persuade us against using drugs, the talk didn't really focus exceptionally heavily on this.

In fact, his talk only briefly touched on the possible negative effects.

Instead, he described how the drug scene works, how people get drugs at parties, how to grow cannabis and how various drugs are taken.

He also went into great detail to describe his job, and how he goes about it. 

I don't think this part was as relevant to us as young people unless he was trying to sell his job, but although he spent a very large amount of time on this aspect of the presentation, the way in which he described it didn't seem to suggest that.

Dublin Zoo trip

This trip was organised by the biology department in the school, and was originally planned to be open only to biology students, but it was later opened up to the entire year, and I'm glad that it was.

When we arrived at the zoo, we were given the opportunity to walk around the zoo, which we did mostly in groups, in order to see the animals which we wanted to see. 

Thankfully, there was a lot of interesting information to read about the animals.

We were advised to bring a packed lunch, as the restaurant food was quite expensive.

At one point, we regrouped beside the zoo's ecology house in order to take guided tours and to learn about the importance of preserving the natural environment and it's animal habitants.

All in all, it was a great experience and I feel it was a great way to spend the day.