Unfortunately, the time has come to say goodbye to Dublin. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in Dublin and have come to love the city for its greenery and the environmentally friendly efforts the city takes on. Most stores in Ireland make you pay for bags in an effort to encourage people to bring their own reusable bags. Many places give out paper bags instead of plastic bags, or have paper take out boxes instead of styrofoam boxes. I have seen customers in cafes bring their own reusable cups. It is so interesting to see the effort city people take to stay environmentally friendly. I hope one day Philadelphia can take the steps to become this eco friendly as well.
Philadelphia is honestly very similar to Dublin in that they both are very historical cities and are big tourist spots. This made it easy to adjust to Dublin when I first got here. In general, Irish people are very nice. My professors at the Dublin Business School were great at teaching and laid back with classwork. They really focused on teaching the course material thoroughly rather than bombard us with homework that we would be less enthusiastic about doing. The grading system here is entirely different. A 80% in Ireland is equivalent to an A in America. As nice as Drexel’s campus is in the city, the campus at Trinity College looks like it came straight out of the Harry Potter novels. Trinity College is one of the oldest universities and holds the famous library, the Book of Kells.
Ireland itself is a gorgeous country that is surprisingly small. Pennsylvania is larger than the country of Ireland. One thing that surprised me about coming to Ireland was that there is no such thing as an ‘irish accent,’ because there are so many different accents in Ireland. The Dublin accent is generally easy to understand, as it’s more of a slight accent. My favorite accent is the Cork accent, as it is so interesting to hear and honestly hard to understand. The Irish language, Gaelic, is a very beautifully spoken language to hear, but seems terribly hard to learn. It is a complicated language. Most people in Ireland, if not all of Ireland, speak English. Traveling is so easy in Ireland since everyone speaks English the signs are in English as well, it is hard to get lost here. There has been a large attempt to revive the Irish language, as it is slowly dying. Now many schools are reteaching children to speak Irish regularly. On the Aron Islands, they all speak solely Irish.
I genuinely hope to visit Ireland in the future. I was lucky enough to visit all four provinces of this country, but still have so much more to explore! My favorite area in Ireland is probably Galway. It is a small quaint and quiet city, but has a vibrant nightlife scene. The live music there is phenomenal and a mix of traditional Irish and modern pop music is played.
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