In Which I Attempt To Be Concise and Fail.

A little over a week ago, the question seemed to be, “Are you ready?” The dental hygienist asked me right before she sabotaged my mouth with sharp, metallic tools. My parents asked me more times than I care to remember. I answered, “I don’t know.” I thought, How do you even begin to respond to a question like that? Being ready—what does that even mean, especially in times of transition? Of course I was excited. There is no doubt about it: every time I thought about hopping on a plane and landing overseas, my heart beat just a little faster. But I’ll be the first to admit to my anxiety, sometimes crippling, not for fear that I’d have a hellish experience, that I’d kick and scream my way back to the United States. Nothing so melodramatic as that. But I suppose I was fearful of change, of what it would be like to not be back at Sarah Lawrence for a full semester, to not see some of my closest friends for months, to have to (in a way) redefine myself for a whole new group of people. This is common, I know, I wasn’t singular or special in any way. But the nervousness still remained. No matter how many times someone said, “You’re going to have the most amazing time,” the little voice came back strong, chiding, alarming, Safety first: have you looked both ways before crossing the street?

Well, you know what? Fuck the little voice. I’ve been here slightly less than 48 hours, and it's brought me some of the most eye-opening fun I’ve had in my entire life. Forgive the cliché, but it’s true: I really do feel like a little kid in a store full of candy and toys.

The plane touched down in Dublin at 6:50 in the morning, before the sun had even come up. During the seven-hour flight, I watched The Bourne Ultimatum (such a hard-on for Joan Allen, even if the movie was your typical adrenaline-infused action fest), ate a stew of meat, potatoes, carrots, and peas, partook in the tea service, and read Portnoy’s Complaint, which, if there’s anywhere to read that delicacy of a novel, it’s not on an airplane. (Having to stifle laughter of that magnitude is, if anything, painful.) I went through customs, no problem, got my luggage, no problem, grabbed a taxi, no problem, and made it to my flat in Temple Bar (a neighborhood reminiscent of SoHo and parts of the Village), where I settled in and took a brief nap. Then, after meeting my roommate, I made a decision that I still have no regrets about, even if it left my legs feeling as though they had been detached from my body, beaten with a baton, and then reattached for the sheer humor of it. Map tucked away in my cargo bag (just in case), I decided to challenge my navigational skills by purposely getting lost. For three-and-a-half hours, I walked down streets I didn’t know the names of, past shops and restaurants and a woman howling (not singing, howling) something in Gaelic. I wandered through an outdoor market and bought oranges. I strode down the quays by the Liffey. I passed slews of double-decker buses, City Hall, the Bank of Ireland. I watched a verbal argument break out between anti-abortion protestors and some passersby. I detoured down cobblestone corridors with hanging string lights, into arcades that must have once been churches, the ceilings were so high. I didn’t take pictures. It was cold and wet, and my second goal (aside from eventually winding up back at home) was to keep my fingers warm. My third goal—to keep my ears warm—led me back to Temple Bar, where I walked into a vintage shop called The Eager Beaver (yes, yes) and wound up briefly chatting with the salesman about my being from Chicago and his having a mate who likes to go to the Taste every year. I should’ve known not getting my fuzzy hat (an Eskimo-like winter hat I ordered two weeks ago, one that still hasn’t made it to my house) would lead to good things.

Flash forward several hours: all eighteen members of my abroad program, after consuming various greasy delights from Leo Burdock’s Fish and Chips, decided to further a self-made meet-and-greet by going to (of all places) a two-level Australian sports bar called The Wool Shed: Baa and Grill (really). Because a fire-spinning, hula-hooping, circus-inclined actor in the program also turned out to be an American football fan, we (of all things) watched the Green Bay Packers go head-to-head with the Seattle Seahawks. I hate football, but we were in the company of a bunch of Irish people who seemed pleased to be watching the game, and besides, a pint of Guinness can do wonders for conversation. During the course of the evening, the following things were revealed to me: there is a girl in the program whose family members had to flee Ireland because of ties with the IRA; the same girl and the fire-spinning, hula-hooping, circus-inclined actor were both in a History Channel special about Irish immigrants, playing, respectively, an Irish prostitute and a gambling drunkard; everyone seems to like Lost, HBO, or both; and I am alone in my dislike for Juno. When this last bit was revealed, a guy in my program looked at me like I had no soul. This matters not. The more I think about the movie and its contrivances, the more my detestation grows.

So as not to end on a sour note: today began with orientation and grocery shopping, and ended with more pub-going. I experienced my first real bout of culture shock when, in search of a power adaptor, I found myself in Argos—or, as some people in my program joked, “the store where nothing can be stolen.” Argos looks a lot like an Internet café: there are terminals everywhere, but instead of computers, there are catalogues with the store’s entire inventory. A purchasing customer flips through the catalogue, finds the product of his or her choosing, writes down the product number on a special small-sized form, and then takes a number. When the number is called, the piece of paper is given to the sales associate, who then finds the item in an extensive inventory room that, to my knowledge, must be in the back somewhere, as most inventory rooms are. The catalogue is hundreds of pages long (maybe even a thousand), and there were gobs of people everywhere, so the whole time I felt quite overwhelmed. It was like going to Macy’s the day after Thanksgiving, except all the products were on pieces of laminated paper everyone fought and shoved their way to get at.

After this harrowing journey into the unknown, we all decided to go to Tesco, which, I think, was even more harrowing. Tesco is a combination grocery store and goods store. It is like IKEA in its hugeness. It was unbelievably crowded (as these places tend to be on Sundays), and the layout was a lot different than an American supermarket. This, of course, is fine, until you realize you are at a loss when it comes to finding things. Also, when you realize you can’t buy much anyway, because you’ll be walking your groceries home for ten to fifteen minutes, and because you have to buy your own bags anyway, so you don’t buy many. Yes, in an effort to be conservationists, the Irish charge for plastic…how amazing is that? Later, the roommate and I decided to leave our flat and attempt to socialize. This, of course, meant venturing back to The Wool Shed, where we knew the fire-spinning, hula-hooping, circus-inclined actor would be. Between the three of us, there were a few pints to go around while we watched the Seahawks take down the Cowboys and talked about cinematic theatre, having faith in directors and actors, and the Absurdists. The night concluded with peanut butter sandwiches, True Lies, and a BBC special on clashing religions, complete with both subtitles and sign language. And a man in our courtyard, spunk drunk, shouting, and being told, repeatedly, to “feck off” by our neighbors.