I am just now realizing that my time in Dublin is coming to an end which is a very sad reality. This week I tried to make the most of my time with my friends and the city, trying new places and exploring more. During work this week we got to make a very fun Tiktok that was a part of the social media marketing plan for my company’s annual summit. We walked around the city of Dublin for almost three hours and stopped at almost all of the historic sites. This included the National Gallery, the Molly Malone Statue, Grafton Street, Trinity College, the Spire, and more. It was a gorgeous day and really made me appreciate everything the city has to offer. This week we also did a final farewell with all of my coworkers at a pub and beer garden. We sat outside and had beer with pizza from the Italian place next door and we spent a few hours just laughing and talking about what we liked in Ireland and more. It was so fun to connect more with them before having to leave at the end of this week and I still am finding out more about them. As for my friends, we all went out for dinner to a new place in a different area in the city centre. Afterward, we went to another pub to listen to some live music and it was so much fun. The local artist played new songs and old classics and we danced and has so much fun just enjoying ourselves and one of our final nights together in Dublin. We then went to another pub and met a ton of nice people from Dublin and other areas and just listened to the experiences of other people not from America as well.

Finally, this weekend it hit a record high in temperature in Dublin, hitting 83 degrees Fahrenheit, definitely not the hottest we’ve ever experienced but it was the perfect opportunity to live as the Irish do. We made our way to Dun Laoghaire and walked along the coast of the Irish Sea to Sandycove where something called the Forty Foot is. We thought this meant the cliff people jumped off of was forty feet tall but very shortly after arriving, we realized this was an exaggeration. Maybe the water was forty feet deep? We still haven’t figured it out. But we still jumped off multiple times and swam around the area in the freezing cold water that was actually very refreshing after walking in the heat for a while. Although I got scratched up on some rocks, it was so fun to swim for the first time this summer and just enjoy the sun. When we walked back we sat on a gorgeous patio along the pier, where boats were docked, and had some cocktails, enjoying more time together and the beautiful weather. I’m hoping this last week I’ll be able to enjoy Dublin just as much as I did this week before I, unfortunately, have to head home.

Since Ireland is a fairly low-context society like America when it comes to the workplace, there isn’t too much left up to interpretation when it comes to communication generally. However, there is more inference than I thought there would be when it comes to feedback and given tasks and responsibilities. I have to take a little more time to work out the tasks I am doing because the directions are not always clear or it is assumed that they will be inferred, instead of needing to be directly stated. I also did notice that as your coworkers get to know you they begin to tease you and find ways to make you feel part of the group. For example, a few weeks in we all did a superlative survey and they made fun of me for being an American and my accent, and my lack of knowledge of the layout of Dublin. It was all light-hearted and fun and there are things everyone was picked on for but I’ve noticed this is something important in the Irish workplace when it comes to communication and relationships. I haven’t had much miscommunication except for a few jokes or phrases that Americans are not familiar with but I usually just ask for clarity and they find it funny when I ask. My workplace is communicative and friendly and a lot of fun and set my expectations really high for the next job I have.