Dear Ireland

Dear Ireland,

      How've you been? It's been over a month since I first met you, and I meant to write a long time ago. Oops. School just started for me and the mentality of the final stretch is setting in already. It's back to classroom setting learning for me, I'm afraid, but you began to teach me the importance of travel. To visit new places and make familiar those things which are foreign is more than an escape from the ordinary. Other ways of life are brilliant to dive into.

      Clichés aside, you were magnificent. I'm grateful just to taste what you, the little oft-forgotten island out on the edge of Europe, have been brewing the past few thousand years. And no, it wasn't whiskey (although I'm sure you guys mastered that too. They wouldn't let me confirm for myself). You became your own nation, tenacious and proud. You survived with some of your culture intact after almost a thousand years of English invasions and colonialism, so congratulations! You finally shed the title "British" and became "Irish" for good, except some fussy folks to the north, and for that I'm proud of you.

      It seems you're not so different from America. Dublin, at least - I didn't get to see the old blood that flows through Ireland, the farms in the middle and port cities of the west. The parts I did get to meet reminded me of home in New Orleans. You're a strange beast, filled with people who've been through a lot. Tired and proud. We're like that too. Besides, we both like ignoring the plentiful garbage cans around our fair (if cluttered) cities. We both take our sports seriously (Saints fans to the grave - and yet we'll never be as intense as your loyalty to county teams). We're both old and falling apart in places, but that adds to the local charm. Our streets don't make any sense to outsiders, but we locals don't get lost. Our streets curve around the river, and yours carry all the mad directions of cobblestone roads you've had for centuries.

It's been grand.

      This isn't goodbye - I'll be back one day. More than one day, if I'm lucky. Say hi to Dublin for me, and fuss at Northern Ireland for throwing a tantrum again.

                                Cheers,
                                          Marisa

Saying Goodbye Is Hard.

Coming home after eating our last dinner together was special.  It was our last bus ride all together.  The last time we sung songs in off-key unison. The last time we giggled and laughed at each others jokes. As amazing as I felt, we felt, it was bittersweet. 

     Getting off the bus we had a few minutes to freshen up then back out in front off the apartments to be given our certificates. As Connor, our playful academic advisor, passed the certificates out Luke ,our resident drama queen, started the waterworks. Thus leading to a domino effect, where half the group was left bawling the eyes out. Including me, the biggest mess of the group, having a very close to literal river running down my face into a pool of eyeliner and mascara that settled on the shoulder of whomever I was crying on.
    
      I couldn't say goodbye.  I feel in love hard and quick with Dublin.  The cobblestone streets and rolling green landscapes captured my heart and I wasn't ready to break up. Late that night I toyed with the idea of "missing" my flight and becoming a beggar near St.Stephen's green but I chickened out.

     Waking up Friday morning I fought back tears riding the bus to the airport.  The thought of leaving finally set in and I promise I was on the verge to a panic attack.  I couldn't leave, my life back at home sucked in comparison. My heart was breaking in my chest as we flew over New Orleans.  I saw the superdome and my European adventure was over. One tear escaped my eyes as I begged silently to myself  to go back, Ireland was now my unofficial home. I found a little part of who I was in Ireland.  I grew up. But I couldn't let go, not just yet.

    The moment I got home I took out a clover I picked on my first day and pinned it on my wall. It's a small token to represent something so much bigger. A life changing expirence that brought a whole new meaning to what Ireland really is.

Students are a Silly Bunch

Never have I come into contact with a sillier bunch than young people.

Everything is new to us, we don't have daily existential stress or taxes to worry about, and we've got more energy than anybody older than us. We're curious, we ask questions, and we like thinking that we can all do something revolutionary and create something original. Who knows? Maybe we can, I'm just one of the young and naive.

What I, the young and naive, do know is that random silliness crosses cultural barriers. I've said before that there were Italians all over the place on campus, but there were also Canadians, Russians, Spaniards, Britons, and even a few Irish students. That said, languages didn't matter. Almost all the other student groups were at UCD to learn English, but we all crossed over and made friends out of mutual interest in silliness.

For a few anecdotes:

On Luke's eighteenth birthday, our four Russian friends came up to him and asked him how old he was turning. Upon learning his new age, they pulled his earlobes eighteen times, simply because that is what you do when a friend has a birthday.

When we played Capture the Flag with a bunch of Italians, after a roughly translated explanation, none of them quite understood the point of the game. And yet they ran around tagging everybody anyway. Points for enthusiasm!

One evening, a new group of Spanish kids made a dramatic entrance through our little square of apartments. They paraded the Spanish flag and sang what I'm assuming was the national anthem. I never got their names or why they were at UCD, but they made abundantly clear that they were from Spain.

My second favorite story:

I was coming back from a walk when I saw a guy standing in front of a giant puddle of water. He stood in front of a bush at the foot of the facade of one of the three-story apartments, which had all its windows wide open. In the third floor window was a girl holding a cooking pot filled with water.

I paused to figure out what was going on when he lunged at the bush, and she dumped the water out the window, aiming at the guy on the ground. She ran out of sight giggling, refilled the pot, and returned to her spot at the window.

He saw me looking confused and explained that he'd lost a football in the bushes. The girl had decided to thwart his attempts by pouring water at him. By the looks of the puddle, she was succeeding.

(For closure, Mike, one of our group, came to the Irish guy's rescue and dove into the bush to get the football while the girl aimed water at the Irish guy. The football was recovered and John Wayne rode off into the sunset.)

And my first favorite story:

After visiting Dalkey Castle, we were given an hour to roam around the tourist area of the coastal town of Dalkey. I walked into a little grocery store with a butcher shop and tons of pickled vegetable combinations. One jar said "aubergine," and I asked the cashier guy what that was.

 "You're American, huh?"  Yep, how'd you guess?

We chatted a bit about some different words between Queen's English and American English. He said Americans use a different word for coriander, but he couldn't remember what it was. I had no idea either, so I said good day and wandered around Dalkey further along the same street.

When I was walking back towards the meeting spot along the street, Cashier Guy ran out of the store as I passed, shouted, "CILANTRO! It's cilantro," and returned to the store. I laughed and continued on my merry way.

So, naturally, I want to learn thirty languages now, so I can travel all over and have more experiences like these. Maybe not thirty languages, but I certainly don't want to stay in America all my life!

We're back home! But we're not quite done yet.

So we haven't posted in five or so days... Oops.

What those days have held is more than any of us could possibly type, but I'l try to clean up for what we're missing as best I can!

We have only a few posts left, but we'll keep it engaging for the four of you still reading after our absence.

More to come soon.

Shopping Burns 175 Calories a Hour....Right?

After days of lectures, they let us out of our cages. "They" being a term of endearment to our program organizers and "cage" as in the beautiful UCD campus. 

     Our day out began at Croke Park Stadium touring the museum and hitting balls in a mini version of Hurling and kicked around Gaelic footballs. Then we were given a quick tour during around the stadium. Our tour guide explained the different names for each section around the stadium and we ended our morning with the lunch upstairs, a zucchini and chicken sauce over rice with coffee or tea. After that we were on way to Dublin City center.

     Between the St. Stephens Green Shopping Centre, the Grafton street shops, and the Temple Bar outdoor book seller, I didn't know where to venture off first. Downtown Dublin held more than just shopping opportunities: the music performers on the sidewalks and break dancers changed the atmosphere around the group, shifting from the nostalgic awe we felt earlier that week, to a more modern feel. In groups of two or more our group ventured into the crowded streets, sprinting from store to store; squeezing in as many places as our relatively small time frame of two and a half hours. I speed shopped with my shopping buddy (and over the past days, really good friend) Emily, another UCD high school student from North Carolina.

     The variety of stores me and Emily visited were endless. We visited stateside staples like clothing store American Apparel and beauty haven LUSH, while also spending time in local chains and small boutiques. After two hours in heaven but my feet were in hell! But you know what they say, No pain, No gain and I definitely gained a new wardrobe and a few new cultural experiences throughout that day.

Thirty Minutes Early

This evening on the 24th of July, I was thirty minutes early to our evening study session. The Global Lounge, our principal meeting spot, was closed, as there was no supervisor or student group in there yet. So I sat outside of it in one of the chairs next to the second cafeteria global center building and took in one of the last days of idle time on this trip.

The global building (not sure of its name) is set up as three floors. The top floor is one cafeteria, the one our group eats at. The middle floor is filled with functional things: computers for registered students to use, a post office, a UCD merchandise shop, bathrooms, and vending machines. The lowest floor, where I was, had both a second cafeteria and the Global Lounge (essentially a recreation room and meeting place for international students). The cafeteria is an open room, and the Global Lounge has doors to offices of study abroad coordinators and the lounge itself. Outside it are a few chairs next to the cafeteria, where I sat to take in the cafeteria chatter and relax a bit to record the experience.

This cafeteria was assigned to all the groups from Spain and the new Italian groups that came in soon after our first group left. Their counselors (both Irish UCD grads and supervisors from whichever country they came from) also ate here. This created a trilingual smoothie of hearty chatter which echoed throughout the building up the open stairs in the middle of the whole building.

Someone dropped a fork or cutlery of some kind. The particulars aren't important. What's funny is that as soon as the clatter occurred, everyone in the cafeteria burst into applause in an act of collective sarcasm. It was the best group response I've seen all week.

There are Spanish kids living across the way from the apartment I'm in, but they're quite shy. We've tried to talk to them a couple times, but with no success. The Italian fifteen year olds, on the other hand, will go out of their way to ask you for a cigarette. Ahh, cultural differences. Disappointingly, there are cigarette butts all over campus near curbs and such places of informal teenage gathering. 

Now the meeting is about to start, so I have to end this here. We're working on the late posts presently.

A Day of PR and IN-NOLA Business (with link to radio show podcast!)

Thursday, July 18, 2013

This was the second time we were pulled out of normal program scheduling for weird IN-NOLA things.

First thing in the morning, we had warp ten breakfast thinking we'd leave to meet the Tanaiste  (position is kind of like Irish version of vice president) again and tour Leinster House. We were so wrong.

Turns out there was an entire day of PR in store for us, escorted about and accompanied by Enda Carroll of UCD, Dermot Moloney, and his son Devon again. 

First, we went to city center to Kildare Street to meet Jimmy Deenihan, the Irish Minister for the Arts, Heritage, and Gaeltacht. The meeting was brief, mainly to introduce us to one of the people whose help allowed our scholarship and passage into Ireland. He seemed very curious about us and what sort of people we were to earn such an honor, but he didn't have much time. He gave us each a gift of a book of Irish poetry too.

Second, we did go to Leinster House (home of the Irish government) and got a tour of the place, but we did not get to shake hands again with the Tanaiste. That's okay though, because we got to watch people ask him political questions and him answer awkwardly. Irish politicians are hilariously blunt ("I was relieved when you got removed from your position of power as blah blah blah..."). We sat up on a balcony type thing 

Third, we came back to UCD to eat lunch and meet Gill (pronounced like Jill) from Education in Ireland, another person and organization which allowed us to get into this program. She was actually ecstatic to meet us, and we talked to her about our experiences here and thanked their for all her behind the scenes help.

Last, we went back into Dublin City for a radio interview recording at local Dublin station Newstalk 106-108FM. The podcast is available to listen to online at any time right here:

          http://www.newstalk.ie/player/podcasts/Global_Village/Global_Village_Highlights/27785/1/2007gv_nolan_kids_education_program_exchange_ucd

That night we got back tired and excited because we'd been recorded for our surprise radio debut! 

One heck of a résumé item if you ask me.