First off, I would like to start by apologizing for the extremely late publication of this blog post. I thought I had completed all of my blogs except for my last blog, but I was mistaken. Along with this, I also answered the week 8 question on my week 7 blog, so that I will be answering my week 7 blog question within this blog. The question for week 7 was about the differences in communication between the United States, known for its very high context style, and Dublin, where I was, known for its low context communication style. Although I am completing this prompt behind schedule, I do believe that it may assist me in providing a better answer than I would have provided if I answered the question in week 7. I say this because I have been back in the United States for just over 2 weeks, and I think I am again becoming accustomed to the style of communication in the United States. After coming back to the United States, I have noticed the greater need for explanation that we have in America compared to Ireland. When I was in Ireland for my internship, I was (in most cases) just simply told to perform a task and achieve a goal, but nothing besides that. I was never really given an outline or shown what to do, which was good in most situations, but in the few situations where I needed assistance, it was a slight pain to ask follow-up questions then. This style of communication is significantly different from that in the United States. In my experience, it always seems as if someone is watching over you and wanting you to perform a task in a certain way, and also always repeating themselves and sometimes overexplaining.

Personally, if I were familiar with the tasks that I was to perform and what the expectations were, I would prefer the low-context style of communication in Ireland. Still, if I were completely unfamiliar with the task and was lost on how to achieve it, I believe the high-context style of communication that we use in the United States would be more beneficial. In my time in Ireland, there were a couple of situations where I would get calls or emails from the secretary who was not in the same building as me. I was told to perform tasks that I was unfamiliar with, so to overcome this, I asked her to explain and clarify what she would like me to do. This same situation would also apply to me while I was working remotely on Mondays and Fridays because it was difficult to determine whether I was on the correct path.

Now that I have finished talking about the question, I would like to talk about my experience trying to get back home to the States and how miserably it failed. Although the last day I was in for the intership was Thursday, the plan was for me to wait for my family to fly back from Spain to Dublin and then take a flight to the United States altogether. I packed up and left the dorm on Saturday morning and made my way to the hotel that my parents and I were going to stay in for the night, only to find out that I had gone to the wrong hotel. Now, although it was a pain, I just went to the other hotel and then went to the airport to meet my parents. My parents were travelling with 4 of my aunts and uncles (who live in Ireland), and when we all got back to the hotel, and my aunts and uncles were about to make their way home, their car would not unlock. We are still unsure how that even happened, but after about 4 hours, we finally got into the car.

Now, it was just my parents and me, and our flight was scheduled to take off at noon the next day, and everything was going to plan. We got through security with no issues and got boarded onto the plane. We then taxied to the runway and attempted to take off, but failed. I assumed that something did not go as planned, so we tried again, but it didn’t take off. United Airlines attempted to reset the plane multiple times and attempted to fix it, but to no success; our plane never even left the ground. We sat on that plane for 3.5 hours, and by the time we got off the plane, there were no other planes to the United States available for that Sunday and Monday. We ended up staying in Dublin for another two nights, and we made the most of it. Luckily, our flight on Tuesday had no issues, and we got back into the United States.