Journal for tbrounst

Well, I’m in Ireland. The trip to National University of Ireland was a little…long. Let me put it this way: I left my house at 5:00 on Monday. I arrived at NUI at 2:00 on Tuesday. To be fair, I arrived in Ireland at 8:00 on Monday (just in time to see the sunrise from the small single window in customs), and there is an eight hour time difference, so really it only took me 19 hours to get to Ireland. After that, we had a lay over in Dublin before finally getting on a plane to Shannon, where we stayed the night. The next morning we boarded the shuttle and finally got to NUI.

I should say, that night in Shannon was pretty great. None of us had slept in over a day, I was awake for 27 hours at one point, and I only had four hours of sleep the night before. To avoid screwing with our sleeping schedules too much we decided to try and fall asleep at 8:00, which would give us 12 or 13 hours of sleep before boarding the shuttle. I made it until 5:00 before I fell asleep. That was pretty typical of us.

Despite all the exhaustion, there was something I noticed that stuck out to me. It was in the Dublin airport, as we were walking to our gate we passed one of those airport bookstores, the kind that sells cheap fiction novels and magazines telling me 100 ways to please my man and some celebrity’s dirty little secret. I glanced at it out of the corner of my eye, but moved on. I came back later, after having found the gate and stowed my baggage with some fellow Willamette students, to investigate.

Something just didn’t seem right about it to me but it took me a minute to place my finger on it. It was exactly like one in America. Everything about it seemed exactly the same as one of those bookstores I would find in Sea-Tac, or LAX, or whatever that airport in Boston is called. The books might be different, I’m not sure (I don’t follow cheap fiction closely), but they looked the same. The magazines were the same. The layout of the store even felt similar.

I guided myself over to the wall of candy. I hadn’t seen one, yet, but I knew exactly where it was and what it would look like, simply because I was so familiar with this kind of place. I stood there, looking at all the chocolate, and I couldn’t help but feel it was exactly the same as back home.

Then I started looking at the names of the candies. To my surprise they were different. I didn’t recognize any of the names. I shouldn’t have been surprised, obviously, yet I was. Everything else about this place was the same; by now I had just assumed the candy would be as well. And, yet, here it was, a stark difference from America. Something completely new and foreign: all sorts of candies I had never heard of. After seeing so much that was like America, it was nice to see something different, no matter how small.

Take away from this story what you will. Perhaps it’s a metaphor: other cultures may look the same but it’s the details that set them apart, it’s the details you need to pay attention to. Or perhaps it shows America’s incredible influence. The only difference between this place and a place in America is the names on the candy, one of the most insignificant things possible. Or perhaps it was nothing more than an surreal moment created by being awake for nearly a day. I don’t know, but something about it stuck out to me.