Dublin , Ferry, and arrival in Leicester

Ok, here is post #2 from our journey over here! We were lucky to get on the flight to Dublin, and almost did not make it! We were the last 2 standby passengers to get seats and the only reason that we did was because a few people did not show up last minute. But we made it and even got to sit across the isle from each other. I always say that I am going to sleep on flights, but I never do, so the jet lag hit pretty hard, and when we got to our Hotel in Dublin we crashed and slept from 1pm till 9pm! Then we tried to find something to eat in the city and could not sleep the entire night so we stayed up watching British comedies until our taxi picked us up at 7am to catch the ferry. My pictures here are a little out of order, but here are some pics from those first few days.

This is me in line to get on the ferry. This ferry was HUGE! I was picturing it to be like other ferry's i have been on, but it was complete with a Movie Theatre, full restaurant, shopping, a casino, and bar. It was huge, and felt more like a cruise ship.
Kev and I getting a picture together on the ferry. He is so handsome :)

In Dublin we found a place where everybody knew our name......
This picture was taken at about 5am. We left the hotel and went to walk around while the sun came up. It was pretty neat, the city was really quiet and it was pretty to watch the sun rise in the city.

Me in front of our Hotel. I wish I would have taken a picture of our room. It had 3 queen size beds! In order to get the lights to work we had to stick our hotel key into a little slot on the wall. It took us awhile to figure out that you had to keep the key inside the slot and not just slide it in and then take it out. I would slide the key in and out and then the lights would only stay on for about 4 min, and then shut off. I did this for about half an hour until I finally called the front desk and was told to just leave the key in the slot. Once we figured that out we had electricity!

This is Kev on the ferry, it's about 8am and the jet lag is hitting him. He could not stay awake.

We got ourselves a full Irish breakfast in the restaurant on the ferry.

The ferry took us all the way to Holyhead Wales where we rented this car. We got the biggest one that they had, but when you move to a new country you have a lot of luggage, Kev did some arranging and was able to fit all the bags in, but when we went to Ikea to get the rest of the things that we needed to furnish our flat, we were both sitting in the front with packages resting on our heads and crouching down while I tried to hold things above Kevin's head so that he could see enough to drive. It's tough to explain, but we laughed the whole way home, and were so happy when we made it from Ikea back to our flat that night.

I will include some better pictures of our flat in another post, but here is how it looked when we first arrived. This is our kitchen. It's what you walk into when you open the front door. The other door on the left side is our bathroom. You can sort of see the shower in this picture. The bathroom is too small to take a decent picture off.

This is another picture of the kitchen but shows the front door, that is the washing machine under the sink. We didn't think that we would have a washing machine but the previous tenants left it there so we got it for free! I have been grateful for that.

We had some of our furniture delivered from Ikea a few weeks before we got here. So this is what was waiting for us when we got to the flat. It took us about a week and a half to get all the furniture assembled and the flat feeling like a home. But we were able to stay within our budget, and we feel like it is home now.

I have so many more posts to do, and feel like there is not enough pictures or words to describe what has been going on here, or how we are feeling. We have been so grateful how smoothly the move went, and feel strongly that this is where we are meant to be right now. The University is beautiful and Kevin started classes this week. The first two weeks at the University were for international students to get to know each other. They had socials and classes to teach international students about living and studying in the UK. Kevin's program has a lot of international students and in one of his classes every student is from a different country. We have learned that in China the Utah Jazz are very popular because all the Chinese students rave about the Jazz when they find out we are from Utah. There are also a lot of students from the US and Canada. It's amazing to meet so many different people and get to know them. We are so grateful that we have this opportunity, and are excited to see where it leads us!