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During my junior year of college I studied abroad in
Ireland. Dublin to be exact. I am the daughter of a man who traveled to Ireland at least a hundred times.
I’m not really exaggerating here either. My father would go there every chance he got, and as an
United Airlines employee who enjoyed free airfare, he got a lot of
chances.
All of my friends were planning on studying abroad so in the
fall of our junior year we started mapping our adventures. Sarah would be studying in Nottingham,
Whit in Paris. Shan and Mal went
to Barcelona, Afeld to Madrid. I
waffled between Italy and Dublin ultimately choosing my Irish roots because I
didn’t want to have to deal with learning a foreign language. And because Guinness. Then I found out I could study acting
for a semester even though it wasn’t my major and I was sold. For four whole months I could pretend
to be the theater major I always dreamed of. And I could do it in Ireland with cute Irish boys with cute
Irish accents. Really, what more
did I need?
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I’ve found myself thinking a lot about this semester abroad
recently. Our friends Mary and
Niall came over for dinner one night last fall. Niall is Irish, born and raised outside of Dublin. Naturally the semester abroad photo
album had to be busted out. We
flipped through the pages, Niall knowing just about every spot with very few
clues in the details of the picture.
It had been a while since I perused the pages of this scrapbook.
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I remember the feeling of living in a city, the ways it
rejuvenated me every morning, stirring something deep in my bones. I remember dark pubs that turned into
weird nightclubs after a certain hour and an Irish boy named Tommy who tried to
kiss me in one. I panicked and put
my hand in front of his mouth. I’m
not known for my smooth moves.
I can picture the pubs and coffee shops where I studied and
read. The department store I
bought the one pair of black stretchy pants I would wear daily for the next
four months having not known to pack black “movement” clothes for theater
classes. I can hear the Irish
music radiating from Oliver St. John Goagarty’s and smell the cigarette smoke
that thickly filled that pub on that last day before the no cigarette ban went
into effect at midnight. My mind
wanders down the path to the Tesco where we bought our groceries, mine an
assortment of peanut butter, rice cakes, green peppers and nutella. Always nutella.
There are so many smells and sounds and images that Ireland
conjures up. Beyond that, the
greatest thing it invokes is a feeling.
It’s a feeling of excitement and happiness, energy and endless
possibility. Studying abroad was
four months of endless possibility.
Paris for the weekend?
Sure! Guinness for
breakfast? Absolutely! Every week held a new adventure and
when studying is done in a century old pub off of Grafton Street, even studying
is an awesome endeavor.
It is sometimes frustrating, in this season of small kids,
and cheerios and endless monotony, how far from my study abroad experience life
has taken me. I wish I could go
back and do it again. They don’t
tell you, when you’re in it, how once-in-a-lifetime this experience is. Or maybe they do and you’re just too
young and foolish to understand.
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I know I’ll be back.
It’s top of my bucket list to run the Dublin marathon and show Tommy (my
husband, not the poor Irish lad I rejected) the place that holds a piece of my
heart. And my siblings and I hope
to some day take a portion of my father’s remains there, certain he would want
a piece of him to reside in his favorite place on earth. In the meantime I’ll just stare
longingly at the pictures in the InstaIreland instagram feed and remind myself
that there’s still time. And maybe
Monster or Toots or Red will choose to study there in twenty years. In which case I better start saving now
for the airfare to visit them…
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