I arrived in Dublin and spent two nights there. In Dublin I brought meaning to the name of this blog by falling over the cobblestones. After that I headed up to Belfast to visit a friend from school. Belfast was very cool. Not too busy and a lot of interesting recent history with some tenseness with the residual effect from some of these. After that I spent a few nights in Galway to register for uni before heading up to a small village called Arvagh with a friend from back home. His parents ran a hotel there and I was convinced it was fawlty towers, I tried Wakeboarding fro the first time there.. which was interesting. After that I headed to Sligo before heading back down to Galway to try and sort everything out.
Galway is a beautiful village. It is coastal with lots of canals which makes for lots of nice places to run. It has a latin quarter which is cobble stoned and packed with pubs and restaurants and a lot of buskers. It is a very vibrant city and very compact. Its population is only 75,000 but this is over quite a small landmass. I worked a shift at a night club on the first Monday that the students came back to town. The club opened at 11pm and there was over 150 people queued up before it had even opened! It was hectic. I have a flat sorted which I shift into tomorrow which I am very happy about. The flatting situation here is ridiculous and there is a lot of people desperate for flats and getting scammed by landlords so I was very lucky to find a place a few weeks ago.
I have now been in Ireland for nearly two weeks and my main observations are:
1. Irish people are friendly - people say NZers are friendly, and we are, but the Irish are a different kind of friendly. People in pubs and bus stations will strike up conversation with you and invite them round for dinner at their aunt's nieces brothers. People are profusely apologetic if they are even the smallest inconvenience and cars will stop in the middle of the street just so you can get across the road.
2. No one understands me when I say what my name is - this has become such a common occurrence that I genuinely have this internal debate when I introduce myself which goes something along the lines of 'Oh crap.. Do I say it with an English accent? Or do I say Jessica, or do I...' by this stage I have paused for so long that it gets a bit awkward so I then have to explain this whole story which I have just done now so that it doesn't seem like I have social anxiety, or don't know my name or something. Yeah, I'm working on that.
3. Paperwork to be able to live in a country sucks - I have been in Galway on and off for the past week and am slowly getting closer to getting through all the paperwork to be properly registered. It's the kind of situation where person A says you need this from person B then person C says you need this from person Q then person A is only open during these hours then person Q doesn't want the integration to go smoothly and person C just has a vendetta against you.
4. People know quite little about New Zealand - A lot of people assume that NZ is a tropical paradise... even though we are very close to Antarctica, but figuring out where on the globe we are is a whole different kettle of fish. My personal favourite though was being asked if we are called kiwis because we eat a lot of kiwifruit. My response was, well yes, and that's why they call you potatoes isn't it?
Anyway, things are gradually falling into place. Uni starts next week.
Hope you're all well
Much love
Jess xo
