Welcome back everyone, this past week was filled with travel and cool experiences. At this point last week, I was planning a trip to Dublin for this weekend which turned into a reality. But, before I talk about the trip I would like to talk about Monday-Thursday in Berlin. My familiarity at my host company and getting around time continues to improve. On Wednesday, the company I am working for approached me with a chance to have VIP tickets to a Berlin handball game. They told me that it was their last game of the season and that it was an experience I would enjoy because they knew I was into sports and they get tickets every once in a while because the team is one of our clients. Well, let me tell you that I will definitely be watching handball when it comes on at the Olympics because it was very entertaining watching it in person. There were about 8,000 fans in the stadium and every was passionate about the team they had in Berlin. This was once again a display of the cultural background of the people in Berlin, they care a lot about things that they participate in. Our group then took Thursday as a chance to go to a local park called Gleisdreieck Park with our program advisor and catch up about our past couple of weeks. The weather was beautiful and we ended up playing a couple of intense games of beach volleyball which we are looking forward to playing some more at least once a week for the rest of our time here. Now onto the biggest part of my week… Traveling to Dublin, Ireland.

First, I would like to talk a bit about my current attitudes and beliefs toward travel. Most times I wish teleportation was an option because I strongly dislike heights so flying is something I do not enjoy. Yet the thing that gets me through it most of the time is thinking about how much fun I will have once I land. I have traveled by myself and with other people before and I kind of enjoy traveling by myself more because I do not have to worry about waiting for other people and I can do my own thing. In terms of traveling locally, Berlin has been very easy to navigate around and am confident that I would be able to find places with little difficulty, but once I arrived in Dublin, I was back to where I started having no clue where I was.

I took the opportunity to travel because we have Monday off from work so I was ablt to also take a day off from work on Friday and visit one of my friends doing the IIP in Dublin. The past couple days have been a lot of traveling around and truly appreciating another culture. As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, my family is from Europe so I want to be able to compare how I was raised to how other European people treat others. We were able to see some interesting spots like the Guinness Storehouse and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I am glad I took this first opportunity to travel because I was able to compare my time in Berlin to my time in Dublin a lot like how people in Dublin drive on the left side of the road which really threw me off. With that I could continue to talk about my travel experience, but I have an early flight back to Berlin tomorrow so it is time to get some rest and look forward to getting back to work on Tuesday.