Irish Easter Eggs

It’s a surprisingly cold Easter this year, but its absolutely wonderful to have a few days off!

This year it was a big challenge to find normal-sized Easter eggs to hide. With normal-sized I mean eggs that are smaller or the same size as an ordinary egg; well eggs really that you would be able to eat in one go, or maybe even have one or two of them with a nice cup of coffee.

I am still amazed with the Easter eggs here in Ireland. They come in a large square shaped cardboard box and on the package there are promises of a chocolate crunchy egg, or an Aero egg with nice little holes, but usually these packages contain one large dairy chocolate egg (not individually wrapped so it goes bad quite soon after you open the package, and really there is no hope to finish one of those in one go, even if you do share with your partner) and a chocolate bar or then a few miniature eggs (up to 4 eggs). So far I have not seen this kind of Easter egg tradition anywhere in the world, but lucky for us we did manage to get a few normal-sized creme eggs and a selection of yummy Lindor eggs.
The Easter egg hunt was a lot of fun (well it is a lot easier to hide many small eggs rather then one big square shaped package:)).

Leaving Finland – Reflections on Life in Ireland

This is a thoughtful weekend for me. Its now almost exactly two years since we emptied our flat in Helsinki, went through the mammoth task of re-organising tax, health insurance and the like and packed our bags in quite a hurry to leave Finland for good. I remember there was a lot of snow during our last week and we became masters in sliding down the icy courtyard, skillfully balancing moving boxes and pieces of furniture while avoiding the very slippery patches on the stone steps. We lived in an otherwise beautiful Jugendstil building with a gorgeous yard in the nice area of town, but it unfortunately proved to be rather difficult to move in and out of this flat, as cars would not be able to enter the courtyard and our flat was of course located in the stair case that was furthest away from the entrance of the yard, uphill and naturally on the top floor (no elevator).

After the moving ordeal we spent one last night a hotel excited that we soon would not have to put up with all the snow and cold any more and that moving into our furnished flat in Dublin should be a piece of cake. It actually was quite easy.

We arrived in Dublin just after the St Patrick’s weekend and lived out of the suitcase for the first month. Of course I had packed all the wrong things like a warm woolly coat: perfect for dry and very cold conditions, utterly useless for windy and moist weather;)
I think we learned our lesson fairly quickly. My wardrobe now solely consists of clothes that can be layered under waterproof jackets as the weather here changes every 5 minutes, which can be beautiful and sometimes annoying.

I am in love with the light here. Its light during the winter even on my way to and from work and we can be outside during every month of the year. We are happy with the move, but on weekends like today you come to realize that arriving might take a lot longer sometimes than just the physical move.

Oh and this is the second St Patrick’s weekend with dreadful weather. It seems to be part of the national celebration just like the fact that it almost always snows on May Day in Finland:).