Painting Pumpkins!

(placeholder for Halloween update)

The FrED Forum

(placeholder for the update on my week in London, including tours of the Churchill War Rooms & the London Eye)

Adapting to Ireland: Using Electricity

My good friend Christen and I spent the first two weeks mostly either eating out or cooking together in her apartment since it was closer to the grocery stores than mine and had a larger kitchen. So the first time I tried to use my stove and oven was about 3 weeks after I moved in. It’s not that I dislike cooking, I just rarely make the effort if I’m only cooking for myself, but without a microwave oven to make single-serving frozen dinners, I’m now learning.

Lesson 1: to use the stove, you have to turn on the electricity. In Ireland, in an effort to save energy and probably as a bit of a safety measure too, you have to flip the large red switch in the kitchen to get power flowing to the stove or oven. This fun fact took me only twenty minutes to figure out as I pondered why not one of the burner on my stove top heated up when turned on (laugh all you want).

Lesson 2: to use the oven, you not only have to turn on the electricity and set the oven to the temperature you desire, but you also have to turn on the timer. Note that when the timer expires, the oven turns itself off even if the temperature is still set. I learned this lesson when I gave my brownies 10 more minutes to cook in my head, but not on the timer, and twenty minutes later, still had brownies that were really more like brownie batter at the center. Luckily, brownie batter tastes just as good as cooked brownies in its own way.

Lesson 3: just like heating the oven requires turning on the electricity, heating the shower requires flipping a switch as well. I have taken waay too many cold showers (not so bad in the summer, less pleasant in the fall after you’ve come in from the rain and all you want is a hot shower to warm you up). Empowered with this new knowledge, I aim to change this in the near future.

Adapting to Ireland: Doing Laundry

I’m not sure that I’ve met anyone who actually likes to do laundry, myself included. But when it’s in your home or apartment, it’s not so bad, because at least you don’t have to lug it to a Laundromat or down to the bottom floor of your dorm building like you did in college, right? That’s what I thought too when I moved into an apartment on the ground floor, just a few steps away from the laundry machine. After the standard three weeks, it occurred to me that I desperately needed to do laundry and waiting until I go home to my parents’ house (in May) was out of the question.

When I moved in, my leasing agent told me that there was a washer and dryer in the shed in the courtyard (it seems to be quite common in Ireland to have a shed built in the backyard or courtyard of a building for the washer/dryer). Lovely. Yet when I first went to do laundry, I found only one unit: washer only.

Luckily, the morning that I got up bright and early at 8am, I was 15 minutes too late and one of the other tenants had beaten me to it. I say luckily, because had she not, I wouldn’t have had any idea how to operate the machine. She showed me how to go inside to the hallway, insert a 2 euro coin into a box under the cabinet, and turn the knob to turn on power/water to the machine. She also explained that we only get cold water to wash the clothes, so don’t bother setting it on anything other than 30 degrees Celsius.

No problem. What hadn’t occurred to me was that I had better start praying to the weather gods for no rain because without a drying machine, and without sufficient space in my room to put a drying rack even if I owned one, hanging my clothes on the line to dry was the only option. I’d never done this before. It’s really not common in the States – usually you either hang dry clothes in a laundry room or dry them in the machine.

After two hours and three loads of laundry, most of the clothes that I own were hanging in the courtyard on an incredibly windy day. It turns out, that’s great laundry weather so long as it doesn’t rain (luckily, it didn’t), and your clothes don’t blow away to Wales (they didn’t, though I was concerned). And so, my first laundry experience was a success.

(Note: my second was an epic failure due to torrential rain for days on end. Also, it turns out that my washer also functions as a dryer, but only in the sense that it has a spin cycle that you can run until you’re blue in the face and your clothes are damp instead of wet. I’m grateful that I don’t have to wash my clothes by hand, but I may need to find some friends with drying machines for the winter months when line drying may result in freezing my t-shirts solid.)

Homesick - but not for too long

I recall when I interviewed with the District 6000 Rotary Scholarship Selection Committee in June 2010 and they asked me what I expected my greatest challenge would be, were I selected. I responded: culture shock and homesickness. Yes, I’ve lived abroad before, but I’ve never lived in Ireland, and missing your family isn’t something you just get over, it’s something you get used to, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. It’d be something I’d have to deal with and wouldn’t be easy, but I’d make it through and certainly still enjoy the overall experience.

So here I am a year later, interrupting my 3-part blog series this week on adapting to Ireland to admit that I had a severe bout of homesickness this weekend. It’s one of those things that hits when you least expect it, and hits hard, but it’s also part of the reason I’m so glad I’m here as a Rotary Scholar.

Before I came to Ireland, I worked for two years in the field of study abroad, working with US students as they prepared to study abroad outside of the US, and international students as they came to the US. We always told them that regardless of how much they love the experience, they’ll probably have some level of culture shock and homesickness, and when they do, to be sure to get out and do something and have fun, rather than calling home and staying in – you’ll adjust faster and be happier in the long run, even if it’s not the easiest to do in practice.

My friend Christen was amazing on Friday when my homesickness really hit. We left the library and went to dinner and just had a nice cozy night in hanging out and watching movies. Exactly what the doctor ordered. The next night, we went out to dinner with her father who was in town on business (admittedly, even though I was happy for her to have her father in town, I was a bit jealous wishing my dad’s company would send him to Dublin on business – though as a real estate investor, that seems unlikely now) and we all had a great time together as expected.

But today is why Rotary is so great. Matt, a member of the Dublin Central club that’s hosting me, had e-introduced me to his wife, whose mother was originally from Ogden, Iowa, and she had welcomed me and invited me over for dinner (gotta love the Iowa connections – my friends in DC often made fun of them, but we sick together!). On Friday as I sought ways to calm myself down, I asked if I might them up on that generous offer, and today Matt picked me up with his two boys, we drove around Howth, a scenic fishing village (that's me and Sean on the dock), took the boys to the playground, and then all had dinner together at their house. It wasn’t a big production by any means, but I am so grateful for their hospitality and that small act just made me feel so at home.

And this week, another Rotarian, Melanie, has offered to take me to Ikea to get a few things to make my place a little homier and more livable since carrying it all on the bus and Luas (tram) is a bit of a hassle. Again, it’s out of her way for a few hours, but is going to make my everyday life for the next year so much nicer and I’m so excited!

In a nutshell: Rotarians are pretty amazing, and I’m one lucky gal.