Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Dublin, Ireland...
When we first got to Ireland I was disappointed to find no red heads.  I finally saw one who was working at the TESCO.  I was asking him a question (where the cream was) when I noticed that he had an accent...He was Polish.  We went to the pub that night and I saw another red head guy.  I asked to get a photo of him with Morgan...He also had an accent...He was Belgian.  Anyway, we did finally find a lot of red heads (mostly in the smaller towns) but we ran into more and more non-Irish workers.  We started to keep track of nationalities:
Receptionist at the hotel - Transylvania
Waters in restaurants - Mongolian, Czech Republic, Poland, Brazil, Latvia
Phone Store - China
etc. 
We obviously didn't ask everyone but I was shocked by the number of non-EU nationalities working in Dublin, especially with the unemployment rate like 15%.  I talked to a girl at a pub who had a college degree but was unemployed and she said that she wanted to get a job, even a job that she was over qualified for but there were none.  We also talked to the girl at the car rental agency.  She had a degree in biochemistry but she could only find a job as the reservation clerk.  She is moving to Australia to look for work.  The cab driver said that during the Celtic Tiger period when the economy was going up, up, up, everyone had a job and so they had an influx of foreign nationals to do jobs like waitstaff.  Now with the down economy, people can't get jobs.  Sad...

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