I had another good week in Dublin. Work was a bit slow at the beginning of the week. The main work that my supervisors wanted me to do, I’ve pretty much completed already. Now I mostly scan papers to upload into the computer. After I scan them the scanner sends them straight to my email and I save them into the correct files. This weekend was a fun one. On Saturday me and my friends went on a tour in Northern Ireland. The tour showed us all the places that were filmed in Northern Ireland on Game of Thrones. I am a huge Game of Thrones fan, it is my favorite show. I’ve watched it a bunch of times, so when I found out they filmed it here and that there was a tour that I could go on to see all the locations I was in. We had to get up at 6:30 though so that we could bus into the city to go to our pickup point for the tour. I realized that I actually booked the tickets for the wrong weekend while we were waiting. I actually bought them for the 13th and not the 6th, but the tour guide was cool about it and I got on without and problems. The bus ride wasn’t took bad, they played Game of Thrones clips which were fun to watch. On the way we played a trivia game on the bus and I ended up winning it , so I became the king for the day which was funny. The tour itself was great. The first place we stopped in was this really cool forest and there were a lot of pretty sights to see while walking. We went to three different locations that were filmed in the show. It was really cool to actually stand in these places that I’ve seen so many times while watching the show. The whole tour was twelve hours in total, it was a long one. It was definitely worth it though we had a great time.
On Sunday we did a couple things. First we went on a Viking tour of the city. It was like the ducky tours back home. They are these bus types things that can go into the water and become a bought. It was a cool enough tour, the tour guide was funny and going on the water was nice too. That only lasted about a hour though. After that we went to lunch at an Italian restaurant. After that, we went to a hurling game which was awesome. I’ve wanted to do that the whole time we’ve been here. It was a semi-final game with Limerick vs. Cork. The stadium was completely packed, they had 80,000 people in attendance. It was a really fun sport to watch, just with how fast they play and with how often the teams score. It ended up being a close game, thirty one to twenty nine, and Cork ended up winning. It was a really cool thing to get to experience. It took awhile to get back from the game though. With all the people leaving the stadium, it made it pretty much impossible for the buses to go down the road, so we had to walk closer to the city center to get a bus that would take us back to UCD. It was a long weekend, but it was a really fun one. I had a great time doing all of that stuff in Dublin, since next weekend I will be in Scotland which I am also excited for.
There are definitely some differences between the way that people communicate here than they do at home. The people here are definitely more low-context than they are at home. Most of the time my boss just hands me stuff to do and asks if I can do that and that’s most of the work that I do. Not much of it really gets explained in much detail though. I kind of like that more though I think then when people get really contextual with how to do something. I like to try and figure it out on my own and if I need help then I ask for it, so I’ve had a pretty good time with that during my internship. I haven’t had many miscommunications, but there was one time that I had one with my boss. I forget the phrase that she used, but apparently it meant that I was busy doing work, so she asked if I was busy but it sounded like she was asking if I wasn’t busy so I said yes. So then I was just waiting around for a bit until I asked her for work and then she was confused because she thought that I was busy. It all worked out though and I still got all my work done for the day.
