Week four in Dublin has been great! My week started off with a nice and exciting adventure! Luiza, Amanda, and I went to Bray, which is another coastal town. One of my coworkers told me about it after I told them I went to Howth the weekend before.
We got up on Sunday and took the bus from UCD to the city center to go to the train station and take the Dart to Bray. Getting to the city center was fine and dandy, but once we were there, we could not find the train station! Google maps kept telling us we were there, but there was no train station. We could see the train tracks, but not the station itself. We wander around the block trying to see if we could find the entrance. After a while, we finally found one, but it said it was closed on Sundays and that we had to use a different entrance. Thankfully, a nice woman could tell we were lost and confused and told us how to get to the station. It was just around the corner, which was great! Once we made it to the train station and got on the train, we had about an hour ride to get to Bray.
The train was quite lovely. It was spacious and relatively smooth with big windows that showed beautiful sights as we made our way to the coast.
Once we made it to Bray, we went down to the beach and walked along the water and found pretty rocks! Amanda very kindly found one shell that she let me keep.
After the beach we went to get food. I got fried scampi (shrimp) and chips (fries), both of which were quite delicious!
From there, we headed to the Bray Head walk. The walk that ended up being a whole hike. We took one path that ended up being blocked off so we Googled the walk and it said we had to take these man made stairs up. We found the stairs and saw they were very steep, but we figured it was just to get us up there. We were very wrong.
Our walk up to the top was very steep and rocky. It was truly a hike, one we were not dressed for. I was in jeans and a sweater vest. Luiza had on boots. But we made it! We referenced several songs on our way as encouragement like “The Climb” from Hannah Montana: The Movie. It was tiring and a little scary, but once we made it to the top, it was all worth it! The views were absolutely stunning. We took photos and hung out up there before making our way back down the mountain.
We got gelato back down at the town and then took the Dart to Dún Laoghaire and ate at a restaurant where I got a spice bag. The spice bag was just okay in comparison to the one I had my first week in Dublin, but it was still decent.
My work week went pretty well! Another intern arrived, also from the United States and through EUSA which was cool. This week in the office was kind of a weird limbo because we’re prepping for Pride which is from June 20th to June 29th but we’re also not right at Pride. Each day was still quite busy. I had a daily piece I did this week on Dolly Parton and I also had my banked piece on Sally Ride published. In addition, I had two pieces published as part of GCN’s “Pride content”. One was a list of queer owned Irish businesses to shop and the other was a list of movies to watch for Pride.
One challenge that I faced this week, however, was with a piece I wrote. They did not need me for daily content that day, but my supervisor asked me to work on a piece that needed to go out soon. It was an interview with an LGBTQ+ veterans support group that had reached out to GCN a while back. GCN had sent them questions to answer and they just needed me to use the interview to turn into an article. I did as told and the next day, it was put in the lineup for that day’s published content. At the end of the day, I noticed that the piece didn’t get published, but I figured they just needed to shift around content. The next day during the content meeting, however, my piece was a topic to discuss. Not because of anything I did wrong, but they were worried about publishing the piece because it was on a group supporting LGBTQ+ veterans living in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
You would think this would be fine and a good group to support and platform, but the issue was that these veterans were in the UK army. Due to Ireland’s contentious history with the UK and with Northern Ireland, GCN was nervous about publishing my piece. I was frustrated. Didn’t they know the history before they agreed to send the group questions? Why now, after the piece has been written are they deciding to debate whether it should be shared? The other thing was that I was not fully understanding why the history between nations meant this piece couldn’t be shared. The group is not the UK army. They are a group trying to help LGBTQ+ veterans get the support they need. What I had to recognize was that I am not well educated on the history and even if I was, it is not my place to understand or not understand. But it was definitely a bit of culture shock to me because living in the US, there isn’t as strong of an adversity to the army to the point of debating whether to platform an LGBTQ+ veteran support group. It was a good learning moment for me, though. As a Black queer woman, I often find myself as the party in a situation that other people can’t fully understand or relate to what I’m going through or dealing with, but this experience put me in the position of the party that needs to just listen. While I am still bummed about my article because I put time and effort into it, I can also recognize that it’s a difficult situation that I as an American need to take a backseat to.
As a whole, my week has been full of great learning experiences while also being fun and exciting!