Journal for cmeiners

One of the things about studying abroad that I can't get used to is that I feel like whenever something goes right, then other things immediately start going wrong. This week, I had a great first meeting of my English seminar, and my first cooking class, which was a lot of fun. Even the weather was nice. But I had a crazy week of flatmate troubles.

I have three flatmates, and one roommate. We all share the same common room in our apartment, which is both a kitchen and a living room area with a TV. My roommate is another Willamette student, and my flatmate who lives next door is named John. I get along with both of them fine; they are neat, they clean up after themselves, and they are quiet and friendly. But the two girls that live upstairs, Tanya and Emma, I have some problems with.

On Monday night, Tanya and Emma had a bunch of friends over for a "Grey's Anatomy" watching party. They were a little loud, but I managed to fall asleep. However, on Tuesday morning, I found the common room trashed. There was some kind of clear liquid - possibly vodka - all over the floor. The phone had been pulled out of the wall. Every cupboard door was open, and the table was covered in dirty glasses and empty vodka bottles. My roommate and I were having a dinner party on Tuesday night. When the mess hadn't been cleaned up by 5 pm on Tuesday, we had no choice but to clean up our flatmates' mess ourselves.

Then, on Wednesday night, there was a big dance. Tanya, Emma, and their friends spent all afternoon and evening in our common room getting ready. Then, all eight of them NEVER LEFT the common room on Thursday. They just stayed there, eating, watching TV, and not giving anyone else in the flat a chance to hang out in there and relax. The few times I went down to get food, I could smell cigarette smoke in the air, as though someone had been smoking in there.

Then last night, they went out again, and came back at around 4 am. They were so loud downstairs that they woke me up, and i had to come down and ask them to be quiet. This morning, the room was trashed again, and there was even broken glass on the floor.

I'm not really sure how to deal with this situation. I don't know if I should use the tack that I would use with an American roommate, and just try to have a straight forward conversation with them about the things that are bothering me, or whether there is a better way to do it. I also don't know if most Irish students just put up with noisy and sloppy roommates, or whether they try to fix the situation.

I do know one thing. I deserve to live in a quiet, safe environment, and I deserve to be able to use my own common room and to not be woken up at 4:30 am.

I also know that the big problem here is all the drinking. Nine times out of ten, the gatherings in our common room involve excessive amounts of alcohol. The drinking culture here is very insidious, and I don't like it at all. It makes people behave really, really disrespectfully towards other people.

I think I'll probably have to ask someone in the international office on campus about the best way to deal with this. All I know is, as much as I dislike confrontation, I need to have a conversation with these girls about this, because I can't live like this anymore.

Posted by Celia Meiners-Wilson at 06:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone knows that, due to the excessive amount of rain that falls here, it is quite green in Ireland. But Ireland is also "green" in another way,an environmental way. The Irish are quite clever about conserving energy.

First off, every electrical outlet here has an on-off switch. When the outlet is off, there is no electrical current, which definitely helps save energy. There is also very little central heating here; in my apartment, every room has it's own heater, and so when you're not in a room, you can leave the heat off in that room, and only heat the rooms you are using. At the same time, these heaters heat up quickly and are quite effective, so when you enter a room, you don't have to stay cold for too long. All the doors swing shut on their own, to keep heat inside the rooms that are being heated. When I stayed with a host family in Connemara for a few days, I was always leaving the doors to the living room and dining room open, and my host mother would come along behind me and politely shut the door behind me. It's something I don't even think about, being from the US where most homes have central heating, but it's a very important way of conserving energy here, since electricity and natural gas prices are through the roof.

At every supermarket you visit in Ireland, if you ask for a plastic bag for your groceries, you will be charged 22 cents. It's a governmental effort to discourage the use of plastic bags, and to encourage reusable bags. If you look around at the other shoppers at Dunnes or Tesco, you will notice that everyone carries old plastic bags or reusable bags. I think this would be a great thing to implement in the US, but I can also imagine American shoppers throwing a stink over that. Although, perhaps the Irish initially were upset about this new regulation in the beginning, and simply got used to it. I'm still having a hard time remembering to bring old bags with me to the store when I go shopping.

While the Irish seem quite concerned with conserving electricity, they do not seems to care about littering. The Irish Business Against Litter alliance voted Galway "clean by European standards" this year.. That's hard for me to accept, because all around the NUI Galway campus and around my apartment complex, there is litter everywhere. There are also these small areas that look like impromptu garbage dump sights, with a high concentration of pop bottles and potato chip bags everywhere. In the River Corrib, if you stand on one of it's many bridges and look down into the water, you can see old bikes and car parts, sometimes even the odd bed head. It's crazy. If this is a clean city, I shutter to think of what Cobh looks like (it was voted "seriously littered").

Obviously, the Irish and Americans have different priorities when it comes to the environment. I think we Americans could learn a lot from the easy, simple ways in which the Irish conserve...but I'm grateful for our significantly less littered cities.

Posted by Celia Meiners-Wilson at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today marks the beginning of my third week in Ireland. Things are getting better. If I had written this a week and a half ago, this would have been a much different entry. Suffice it to say, I think I am still definitely going through culture shock. I feel like I never got to experience the 'honeymoon period'.

The fact that I left behind a significant other in the US is definitely contributing to my culture shock, I think. I do worry a lot about our relationship, and I miss him a lot. But I also miss my family; they live close to Salem, and I am used to seeing them at least once a month. And I miss the US, because everything is different, and solving problems is twice as hard here.

Here's an example of a situation that spiraled out of control: all North American students must register with the Irish government, and because there are so many of us, they made us all appointments, so we don't have to wait in line. But on Sunday night, I found out that on Wednesday of this week we are leaving for Connemara, and we won't be back until Saturday. That means I miss my immigration appointment, so I was told to go on Monday or Tuesday instead. So I tried to go today, only to find out that because other students had appointments today, I couldn't register. So I have to go back tomorrow morning at 7:30, so that I can register before class.

Mostly, I'm worried that it will take me a long time to adjust to being here. I hated Willamette for over half of my first semester there, and my greatest fear is that it will take a whole semester for me to get used to being here, and by that time, it will be time to go home.

So, to summarize, right now I am counting down the weeks until I can go home. I am still deep into culture shock. I am still homesick, and heartsick. But I am hoping it will get better. I am hoping the time will go fast, and I won't even want to count down the weeks anymore.

Posted by Celia Meiners-Wilson at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)