Final Entry (finally!)

Since I left off with my Dublin adventures at the beginning of December, I felt like some sort of brief closure was due, even though it is now March...

Basically, my last two weeks in Ireland were crazy, due to the lovely combination of Trinity cramming all its assessments in at the end and my professors not realizing I was leaving the country in two weeks. One professor kindly assigned a 5000 word essay on the "analysis of the evolutionary adaptations of vertebrates" (riveting), but "generously" made it due, not on the last day of class, but on St. Patrick's Day (so appropriate). Finally finishing that 16-page essay for a pass-fail class about a month ago, I can now officially say I have finished my semester abroad!

I debated for a while as to whether or not that sentence was deserving of an exclamation point. While there are many joys of being back stateside - seeing family/friends, quality Mexican food, Wash U's predictable functioning as a cohesive institution (*cough*Trinity), driving a car, having it not rain every few hours, etc. etc. - there are definitely parts of last semester that I would have brought back with me if I could. Returning to America wasn't the culture shock some abroadees experience when coming back from places such as Chile or China. There's a lot of interaction between Ireland and the U.S. (a bunch of my Irish friends actually come the U.S. to work or vacation or shop over the holidays), which makes the cultures relatively similar. What I miss most about Ireland is actually not physically being in the country (though I loved it and would go back in a heartbeat), but the people there, non-Irelanders included. In fact, I feel like I gained just as much insight into American culture from my U.S. friends as I did about Ireland from my Irish ones. It's amazing to realize that Ireland, being its own country, is less than the size of Missouri (and only slightly more populated), and yet the diversity between it and other countries in Europe is so enormous - it would be like people in Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Arkansas all speaking different languages and using different currencies - though fortunately now they would now all use the Euro, or I guess in our case: the Americano.

Anyway, I'm back stateside now, enjoying the good ole' Midwest and the hecticness of American college life. Fortunately, Facebook has come to the rescue to fuel me with plenty of photos and status updates as to the wild going-ons of my abroad friends, Irish and American alike. And if that's not enough: my first legal American drink on my 21st last Thursday was a pint of Smithwicks at Molly Darcy's Irish Pub... in St. Louis, Missouri.

Maybe Ireland's not so far away after all.