It’s our last week in Dublin! It’s hard to believe how fast the time flew by. I feel like it was only yesterday that I was playing solitaire during the plane landing while fighting off the motion sickness.

I’m pretty sad to be going home, but there are also a few things about America that I’m excited to get back to. The snacks are a little better in America in my opinion. It was a culture shock not being able to find cheetos, slim-jims, or super blow pops in this country. Another thing I’m excited to get back to are the 24 hour convenience stores. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this before in an earlier blog post, but I’m gonna hammer this point home just in case: after living next to a 24-hour Wawa in High School and then a 24-hour Rite Aid in College, my body has started expecting snacks around 2am. I think part of the reason I got sick when I got here is because my body lacked the sugar it craved at odd times of the early morning. In any case, I’ll be eager to get back to my routine.

I’m also excited to get back to my family and friends. I’ve been pretty good at keeping in touch with some people, but there are a lot of others that I haven’t talked to as much. I’m expecting that people are going to ask me a lot about my experiences and adventures, but I feel like I don’t have too much to say. It’s a little hard to put into words, but I think that people expect me to say that this experience was life changing or that the experience was unforgettable or something. I’ll probably always remember that I went to Ireland, but as far as the places or the memories, I expect them to fade over time. Maybe that’s depressing to say but I don’t feel sad when I say it. Ireland feels like part of my story in a sense. By that I mean that if I make it to 64 years old and somebody asks me to tell them about my life, at some point I’d say that I spent some time in Ireland. Nothing super crazy happened and I don’t really have any wild stories that altered the trajectory of my life, but that doesn’t make the experience any less valuable. I think if I’ve learned anything on this trip, it’s that important moments don’t have to be singular revelations or epiphanies you have after a late night conversation. I feel like I’ve started looking at living as a learning process more than I did when I was back home. That’s why if I don’t come to some major realization at the end of this trip, I won’t be upset or disappointed or anything. It’s all just a part of the process.

Something that makes me kind of nervous to go home is how I’m going to feel about the trip in retrospect. By that I mean that I hope this trip feels like it was worth it once I’m back home. A part of my anxiety is that I mostly feel like the same person I was when I landed in Ireland. That makes sense considering that I am still me, but I think it’s hard to gauge whether or not I’ve grown or changed until I’m back in the environment I left from. I can list a few ways that I think I’ve changed, but that could just be because I’m in a new place with different people. I’m kind of rambling at this point, but I think that makes sense. That fear is mitigated by the fact that people don’t need to come to Ireland to grow as individuals, but then I also wonder if I should’ve spent the money to come here in the first place. 

At some point I think I’m going to arrive at the conclusion that there’s no reason to worry about what I would’ve been like if I hadn’t come here, but until then I’ll have something to dwell on. 

I hope those last 2 paragraphs weren’t too abstract. I didn’t do anything interesting all week and I want to make sure I meet the word count.

I haven’t had any serious issues communicating with people over here. A friend and I took a trip to Derry one weekend and it was hard to understand a few of their accents, but those were the only issues I really came across. As far as what I did to overcome the issues, I asked them to repeat themselves and gave up if I didn’t get it after the second or third repetition.