Megan and Chris

Here’s our wee car, a 1993 Peugeot 106:

There’s a lot of reasons why it makes sense to buy a car while on a working holiday makers permit in Ireland. It’s a small island, and it’s not really more than a days drive to get anywhere. The bus system, while generally better than Canada’s, still leaves a lot to be desired. Having a little car opens up a part of Ireland you’d usually never see, an endless maze of interesting little villages. And finally, there’s the financial side. By going just 10 minutes drive from the city you can save €200-300 on rent and you can buy a good little runabout for less than €500.

Here’s five tips based on our experience buying a car in Ireland during our year abroad.

1. Before you leave Canada, people will tell you to get an international drivers permit. Really, it’s a fairly useless $40 piece of paper unless you’re hiring (renting) a car or you’re in a smaller, less metropolitan town or country. 98% of the time it’s useless, but if you go somewhere non-english speaking, you might want it. No one has asked for it at all here and several people told us it was useless. Welcome to the 21st Century…they can Google where Alberta is.

2. Buying the car. Its easy to find a car for sale. As I write, Ireland is in a pretty decent recession and there’s lots of cheap small cars for sale. I bought a 1993 Peugot 106 for €400. There’s a couple things about buying a car here that differ from Canada. First, the license plate lives with the car. It’s also called the registration number. There’s a registration book the seller will fill out with your name and address (you need a mailing address that’s good for at least a week) that they will send to the registration place, and they’ll send it back to you. That’s all you have to do to be able to drive away. You’ll need insurance pretty quick, but first let’s talk about:

3. Tax, inspections and registration. Registration is done with a new car, and once the seller sends off the form, that’s taken care of. Car insurance is another issue, but you’ll also have to make sure the NCT (inspection) is up to date and that the road tax is paid. Anyone selling a car will be able to tell you how much is left on the NCT and road tax.First, road tax because it’s simple. This is paid at any post office and is based on the size of the engine. My 1.1L Peugot 106 costs €165 to tax for a year. When shopping, don’t worry if the tax is almost out because it’s easy to renew.The NCT is the tricky part, and on a used car can make about €200-400 on the sale price. You have to book the inspection and I’m not sure of the standards. We intentionally passed on a great little car (a 1995 Ford Fiesta for €250) because the NCT was expired.

4. Insurance. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Insurance in Ireland is sold by the year. Yes, we’ve heard that you can get it in 3 and 6 month packages, as had the lady at the three places we got quotes from. However, not one of them offers that package or knows where to get it.Now the scary part. Canadian driver’s licenses are valid in Ireland for 12 months before they’ll make you get an Irish one. Unfortunately, they are only counted as provisional licenses, so insurance is a killer. The insurance on our little Peugot 106 should have been €3-400, but ended up being just under €800. Now, considering all the costs it can still be a great deal and add to your experience. It let Megan and I get a great cottage in the countryside way cheaper than a flat in town. It lets me get great little towns with sketchy bus service (like Crosshaven, Kinsale, Cobh and Youghal) to go sailing.

5. Please Exit the Vehicle. Eventually your working holiday makers’ permit will expire, and you’ll have to go home. Then you’ll have to get rid of a car. If you have to rapidly leave the country, you’ll still have to get rid of the car. Plan ahead. Be prepared to sell it for less than you bought it for, and plan for that at the outset. I can afford a €400 disposable car. Just make sure you know what sort of disposal fees there might be if you have to take it to a scrapyard.

In retrospect, I’d do it again. The insurance was a shocker, but we love our car. The ability to live in the country, and do great little day-trips is worth it.

Here, finally, are some photos of our cottage!

First, let’s start with the living room photo, which best describes the whole place:

There are lots more, but in case you’re coming from a slow connection, I’ve put them under the link:
(Read on …)

We have a place to live! We are slowly settling in to our wee cottage on the farm, which I tried to describe in my last post. Pictures are coming, as soon as Chris puts them up. Despite the incredible wallpaper and random knicknacks, it really is a lovely place. I’m currently sitting in our glassed-in sun room, enjoying the blue sky that we apparently brought with us. Ireland has had one of the rainiest summers on record, but the weather is forecasted to be sunny for the next week to ten days, so we’ll enjoy it while it’s here! Our landlady is lovely and very enthusiastic. It’s the first time she’s had renters, and she seems very excited about everything. When we got here yesterday evening, she had even stocked our fridge with food for breakfast. She and her family live in the main house on the property, with our cottage is just behind it.

In order to be able to live out here, we had to get a car, which Chris posted some photos of on his Facebook. (Apologies if that doesn’t work… we’ll put the car photos up here when we do the house ones.) It is awfully strange driving on the right side of the car and the left side of the road, but Chris is getting pretty good. I haven’t done more than drive around the parking lot when we first bought the car, but I will practice more soon. Despite our research, we did end up paying more for car insurance than we expected, due to us having foreign licenses, which they automatically classify as provisional rather than full licenses. Oh well. You only live once.

This weekend, we are planning on going to Adore, a Catholic young adults conference. We’re hoping to meet some cool people there, since our online searches for youth ministry around here have turned up nothing.

Chris is off sailing at the Royal Cork Yacht Club tonight, and I am doing some much-needed laundry and putting things away. Though our place is furnished with all the basics (and a whole lot of extras), we are still in the stage of discovering all the other little things we need. Chris nearly went crazy making stir-fry for dinner last night because the only knife we have is a very dull serrated one. We will make lists and collect things. All shall be well.

Well we’ve been in Ireland a week now, so I suppose it’s time for another update.

We had booked two nights in our hotel in Cork, hoping that we might have found a place to live within that time. We didn’t get to Cork til after 2pm on the first day, though, and found that very few people (especially estate agents) are willing to show properties as soon as we call. The response is usually “sure I can show you… how’s 4 pm tomorrow?”. So we arrived on Tuesday afternoon, saw a few places in Cork City Center on Wednesday and several on Thursday, and by Thursday night we hadn’t seen anything that we really liked. Most of the places in our price range were much lower quality than we had expected or hoped for. The nice thing about city center is that it is, obviously, central, and we can get a lot of buses quite easily. However, with Chris working from home and me not having any idea where I’ll be working, we don’t really have any reason to need to be in the city center. So we decided to start looking out in the suburbs, particularly in an area called Douglas, which is only a five or ten minute bus ride out of city center. We quickly found that we can get waaaay more for our money there, but most of the available properties were outside of the center of Douglas, making them more difficult to get to by bus.

On Friday we met up with a property manager in Douglas named Mark, who showed us three places. One was directly in the center of Douglas village, one was a little further out but still fairly accessible by bus, and the third was a ten minute drive out of Douglas. This last one, instead of being part of an apartment complex, was a ‘granny flat’ at the back of a farmhouse, surrounded by fields, trees, gardens, horses, and so much space. At first we kind of wrote it off for being so far out of town, since we had no plans to have a car while we’re here. But of all the places we had looked at, none were so appealing that we said, “Yes, this is absolutely where we will live.” Also, most landlords seem fairly attached to the idea of a one-year lease, which would be a bit of a problem for us if I don’t get a decent job and we end up leaving before our one-year visas are up. The owners of this ‘granny flat’ apparently are very open to a six-month or indefinite contract, are asking less for this place than anyone else is, and seem super nice. Plus we can get a car for under 500 Euro. And yes, we’ve looked into insurance and taxes and if we get a small enough car, they seem quite reasonable. Nothing is official yet since things don’t happen over the weekend here, but we are 90% sure that we will end up living in this farmhouse/flat in semi-rural Ireland.

So that led us to start looking for a wee car to drive while we are here. The idea of driving a car in a country where everything road-related is backwards to Canada is somewhat terrifying to me, but I’ll learn. If my mom can do it, I can. We’ve found a couple of possibilities of very wee (i.e., 1.1L engines) cars for sale, but have had some minor issues getting to see them, as they tend to be located in tiny villages that only have semi-regular bus service. For example, today we went out to Carrigtwohill, which is actually rather large by Irish standards, but found once we got there that there had been a miscommunication and the person we were supposed to be meeting was not even home today. Being Sunday before noon, nothing except the local grocery store was open, so we spent two hours drinking tea in a bus shelter, since it was also pouring rain.

I feel like I need to describe the decor of the granny flat that we will likely be renting, but I really really cannot. I’ll post pictures when we can get them, but even that just won’t capture the essence of Irish granny-ness of the place. It was especially shocking after having seen the other two places in Douglas that were furnished in a very clean, modern, fairly minimalist way. Then we walk into this farmhouse, which probably has ten different wallpaper patterns, enough china to serve a family of twenty, knicknacks on every surface, and a stair lift (motorized chair to get you up the stairs if you can’t walk). That said, it’s very tidy, cozy and spacious (two bedrooms, three bathrooms, good-sized kitchen, living room and sun room!) and the farmland outside it is beautiful. Like I said, words do not do it justice. There will be photos. We are hoping to be in by Tuesday or Wednesday, if everything goes well.

Otherwise, we’ve wandered the city a bunch, been out to a few yacht clubs, and we visited the heritage museum in Cobh today, for lack of anything better to do. It was actually pretty interesting. We are looking forward to buying groceries and not having to find a restaurant to eat in three times a day.

… not so much actually live, as the train itself did not have wireless. We’re in the foyer of our hotel in Cork, availing ourselves of the wi-fi. This post was written on the train though, so it’s almost the same.

Now it’s my turn to post with more details of our last few days, since I know that will please at least one of our fair readers (hi, mom!).

Our flight was incredibly uneventful. There was a snoring man on the flight to Chicago, nothing to do for seven hours at O’Hare (especially as we didn’t feel like carting our luggage around the interesting terminals) and a mostly-sleepless flight over the Atlantic. We did have the nice seat-back TVs where you can choose when to start your movie, but the sound didn’t work on mine so I read The Time Traveler’s Wife. We actually had a pretty solid tail-wind and ended up arriving an hour ahead of schedule. We made up that hour standing in line at Customs, especially since we arrived right around shift-change time and had to wait for their glacially slow computers to re-start.

Anyway, made it through all that and got on our shuttle bus into Dublin, where the first music we experienced in Ireland was ‘9 to 5’ by Dolly Parton. Ah, feel that Irish authenticity. We dragged our combined eight pieces of luggage towards our hotel, and stowed it away there as our room wouldn’t be ready til 2:00. We wandered a little and then got tickets for the hop-on/hop-off bus tour. We took that completely around the loop twice, stopping for lunch at a sweet café on one of the pedestrian shopping streets. For a randomly chosen place, it had some very impressive food and the best iced tea I’ve ever had in my life. That’s Bewley’s on Grafton Street, if you’re keeping track at home. Highly recommended.

After the bus tour (which we didn’t really hop on or off of, but it was a good way to fill the time we had), our room was ready so we very happily had good long naps, and then found a food court to grab some dinner before Mass. One thing we’ve noticed, as Mom and I did in Scotland, is that it’s hard to find anywhere to eat after 8:00 at night. We’ve managed both nights, but it’s been kind of a tight squeeze and we’re rather looking forward to having our own place and eating when/what we want.

I had previously found a little chapel right next to our hotel that advertised a youth Mass at 8 pm, so we headed over there. Turned out to not really be a youth Mass, but it was Mass nonetheless, and well appreciated. Having slept for several hours in the afternoon, we both managed to stay awake throughout but went almost straight back to bed afterwards. Unfortunately jet lag caused me to be fully awake from 3:30 to 5:30 am, and Chris from about 6:00 onwards.

Monday morning we attended our required orientation in Dublin and learned about fun things like taxes. It was helpful though, and it seems like we can call or email the office anytime if we’re stuck on anything related to living in Ireland. We were hoping to meet some fellow travelers, but everyone kind of just disappeared right away when we were done. Everyone else was planning either on staying in Dublin or going to Galway, but it still might have been nice to get to know them a little.

We wandered in the rain a little after the orientation, thought about going to the Guinness storehouse and decided on a movie instead. We’ll do the Guinness tour another time when we’re slightly more alert. We saw The Time Traveler’s Wife (having just finished the book, I didn’t find it terribly exciting, but Chris enjoyed it), After the movie Chris had a quick nap (I avoided napping in hopes that I would sleep through the night but it didn’t work anyway) and then we went for a walk, had dinner and went to bed. Both of us were up again from about 4:00-6:00, and we’re hoping that we can stop that from happening very soon. It’s not that it’s a big problem to be up and wide awake in the middle of the night, but it makes it rather difficult to be functional in the morning.

We tried to register with the immigration office this morning, but were told we have to do so in Cork. We are given a month after arrival to register, so it’s not super-urgent, but we were told in orientation yesterday that it was easier to do in Dublin. I guess we’ll find out. We taxied to the train station as the idea of eight pieces of luggage on the bus was not appealing. Had a bit of difficulty picking up our pre-booked tickets, but we got everything together in time. There’s nowhere to store large luggage on the train, so we’ve kind of placed it out of the way and hope we don’t get yelled at like we did on the Edinburgh to London train last summer.

So that’s us now. We’re on the train on the way to Cork, where we should arrive just before 2 pm. Our thrilling plan for the day includes finding our hotel, and probably getting cell phones. Woohoo!