I’m back home. My last week wasn’t terribly eventful compared to my other weeks of the program. Things were mostly the same besides the fact that things were coming to an end.
The program held an ending reception on the Wednesday of our last week. I was accidentally the first one there out of everyone in our entire program, which I thought was incredible (since I was only ten minutes early). It took about an hour before the food came out (to the dismay of many attendees), but the mood changed pretty quickly once it finally did. My perception might be skewed on account of how much more excited I was than other people about the platters, but my jubilation was objectively justified.
They brought platters of various meats and finger foods to different tables. Some platters had ribs, some had sliders, some had chicken wings, most of them had fries, and so on. The thing I loved most about the way it was set up was that after the platter at my table was finished, I just walked over to another table of people I knew and did the whole thing again. Between all the people scattered around the room that were from Pitt, I must’ve eaten from at least 3 platters that night. Anyways, I had a marvelous time.
I (mostly) finished the Ebook I was working on all Summer. I had a section on return on investments that I got some direction on in the last hour of my last shift. I refined it as much as possible before my time was up, but I’m afraid I left a little bit of work for at least one of my fellow interns.
I spent the last 30 minutes of my last break retrieving donuts for the people in the office. I had an hour-long break, so I ate for the first 30 minutes and then walked 30 minutes there and back. I was inspired by one of the other interns I had worked with who brought muffins on their last day. I also thought back to the fourth of July when somebody got all the American interns 3 balloons in the colors of the American flag. In any case, I wanted to say thank you to them for the Summer. The walk was interesting because I ended up walking to a transportation center I had already been to before. The first time I was there was when my friends and I were returning from a trip to Galway. I hadn’t realized at the time that that building was within walking distance of my work, so I was somewhat pleasantly surprised. If it didn’t go without saying, I say “Pleasantly” because it’s nice being able to connect one part of a city with another. Knowing how to get around a place is a crucial element of feeling a connection to it in my opinion.
This would be a good place to segway into a paragraph about Dublin and feeling connected to places in general.
I don’t think I’ve ever been in love with a city. I’ve loved places and people in cities before, but never a city itself. A big part of me going to Dublin was trying to figure out what it means to feel connected to a place, let alone love it. (I also want to be clear that I’m not building up to a declaration of love for Dublin because I feel like it sounds like I am.)
For some reason, I’ve always conflated loving a place with having a connection to a place. My hometown, for example, is a place I’ll always be connected to that I don’t love at all. The only reason I wanted to live in a city after high school was because I wanted to live in a place that was as opposite as possible from the area I grew up in. For that reason, I used to say I didn’t have a connection with the town. After my time in Dublin, I know that that’s not the case.
When I consider the places that I feel connected to, they’re the places that I’ve spent a lot of time in. I can’t speak for everybody when I say this, but time might just be the most important factor for me when it comes to feeling connected to a place. Even if I don’t love living in the place I grew up, I can’t pretend like those 18 years didn’t count for something.
I might have digressed (a lot) but all of that is to say that I don’t feel like I’m done with Dublin. I feel like between figuring out how to get around, meeting people, and just living in the city, I was starting to build a connection to it.
I’m going to go back someday if I can.
In a professional sense, I believe my host culture defines success as a job well done. I don’t think that’s too different from American work culture, besides the fact that people in America seem more stressed out about it. Despite the differences in the pace of the average workday (America being a little more fast-paced), I’d say that a successful employee in both cultures is someone who feels passionate about the work, puts in discretionary effort, and could be described as an engaged employee.
