GALWAY, IRELAND: The Introduction

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June-July 2017

AT the Shannon Airport in Ireland there was one last checkpoint to pass before the wanderer was home free. The Irishman behind the counter offered her a friendly greeting as she handed him her passport. As he looked over her passport he asked what brought her to Ireland.
"I'm here to study abroad," the girl replied.
Smiling, he stamped her passport and passed it back to her. "Don't study too hard," he said.
This was the wanderer's first interaction with an Irish person in Ireland, and, looking back, she can't help but feel that it rather encapsulates the aura and attitude of the Emerald Isle.

THE wanderer's first day in Ireland passed by in a blur, juxtaposed by a clear, bright, hot (by Ireland standards), un-Irish day. It was a day of introductions: She was introduced to Ireland as a whole (getting her first taste of Ireland's rolling-green, stone-walled, sheep-scattered landscape); to Galway city, the city she'd be living in for a month; to the house and bedroom she'd call home during that time; to her first Irish pub and her first taste of Irish soup and soda bread; to the long Irish summer days, where the sun seemed to never want to set and to never take long in returning the next day; to the three girls who would become her friends during her time studying abroad in Ireland . . .
Her first impressions of Ireland were saturated with brightness and sunshine. And this brightness and sunshine, if rather absent in the literal Irish atmosphere, would continue to figuratively follow her wherever she went in the Emerald Isle.

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