Admittedly, I have let time slip away from me in a ‘close my eyes and two weeks have passed – oops closed my eyes again’ kind of way. Ireland has brought a lot of stress out of me, but I’ve also gotten to see many beautiful places.
Upon arriving, I’d been conscious for upwards of 48 hours and then had to wait another five hours for the dorms to open. The delightful combination of sleep deprivation, rain, homesickness, and the fact hot water only runs in the showers during certain hours that do not include two in the afternoon led to a miserable introduction to the Emerald Isle – but it’s only been up from there, don’t worry.
Maynooth, the town where the university is, is nice and easy to navigate, and the campus, while bigger than Rollins, is less intimidating than at first appearance – especially since my classes are only on one half of it. And while I can’t tell you the name and purpose of every building, drop me anywhere on campus and I’ll know where I am.
There are a few grocery stores right there off campus and, while I keep referring to euros as dollars, there are no real problems in that department. It’s mainly just a matter of trying to find equivalents to things I buy back home, which hasn’t been too bad.
There has been an unspoken pressure from both my family and fellow international students to do Something, go Somewhere, every weekend. I’m a homebody by nature, so this has been challenging and actually kinda stressful, but I’ve been trying. My first two weekends I went into Dublin – I went on a walking tour, saw Trinity College, and just explored the city.
Dublin’s probably one of the busiest city’s I’ve ever walked around in – especially alone. Jay-walking isn’t illegal and I fear for everyone who just unflinchingly walks right into traffic. Also, people can and will just smoke everywhere, and with many places leaving windows or doors open it’s hard to escape the smell even from inside. But the city is beautiful – lots of gorgeous old stone buildings, many churches.
My third weekend I took a bus day-tour to Wicklow and Kilkenny. Here I got to visit some monastic ruins and stunning churches – we even drove through Hollywood! A cute little town complete with a sign up on the hillside.
My grandmother and her friend came to see me that fourth weekend and we walked around Dublin together. And let me tell you, there is nothing more stressful than walking around such a busy city with two older women walking at a third of the speed of everyone else and stopping to take photos or talk to everyone. I was so worried that I’d lose them in the crowd in a city where none of us have cell service or that they’d have something stolen off them. If anything though, my constant starting and stopping and frantically looking around probably made me a larger target than the two of them combined.
For my fifth weekend I took a bus up into Northern Ireland, worried that I wouldn’t get another chance due to the possibility of a border being put up because of Brexit. While I believe the vote has been delayed again, at the time the vote was supposed to be held that weekend, so it very well could have been my last chance to get up there. Going to the coast of Northern Ireland has been my favorite outing so far. The coast was absolutely stunning, and thankfully the weather cooperated – aquamarine waters and white cliffs all under clear blue skies. I was able to see a couple locations where Game of Thrones was filmed, and got to cross the Carrick-A-Rede rope bridge. But the best part was Giant’s Causeway by far – where years and years of volcanic deposits caused the rocks along the shoreline to form near-perfect hexagons. At the Causeway they’ll let you just climb all over those rocks (allegedly there’s some sort of lifeguard equivalent watching to keep people from climbing too high, but there were some people up pretty high and no one stopping them). While I didn’t climb to the parts hundreds of feet high, I did climb all around and had a delightful time – felt like a little kid again.
Other than these outings, I’ve been haunting the paths between classes and my dorm, but I’ll talk about classes in another entry.
Currently, Maynooth is under a boil water notice ‘cause the water plant in Leixlip wasn’t filtering bacteria out correctly – which is super fun! Also there’s a student on campus with measles! Yay!
Obviously though, the goods outweigh the bads and while my hypochondriac self will probably never touch the water again, I’ve just gotta look past that. And while I feel as though I showed up here and haven’t had a chance to breathe since, I know this will be an experience I’ll remember forever.