While studying abroad, it seemed like I had a surreal experience almost every week. I was finally in Ireland after looking forward to it since high school. I was standing in front of the Eiffel Tower after seeing countless pictures of it throughout my life. I was at the top of the mountains in Austria like Maria von Trapp was in The Sound of Music. To travel, however, many carefully thought-out logistical puzzle pieces must fall together. The part of studying abroad that isn’t posted on social media is when things go wrong and aren’t picture perfect. Here are a few times that things didn’t go quite as planned for me:
- Fresh off the plane
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My first ever solo plane ride was the one I took to get to Ireland. I had carefully crafted a travel itinerary that consisted of a plane ride to Dublin, a bus ride to my study abroad city (Cork), and a walk from the bus stop to my apartment. Things went smoothly for the first two legs of my journey but began to crumble when I tried to navigate the 14-minute walk from the bus stop to my apartment. There are two things important to note here: I am notoriously bad at directions and I had no cellular service because I was in a foreign country. I had screenshotted Google Maps directions saved to my photos but when it came time to execute, I was unable to locate a single street sign (I would later learn this was because streets are labeled on building walls, not on stand-alone signs). After miserably dragging my luggage around the cobble streets without a clue where I was going, I came to the conclusion that I needed help. I called my mom using the limited international minutes we bought to see if she could help. She could not. I asked a stranger for the number of a cab service only to wait there for 30 minutes and have the driver unable to locate me. Finally, I ran up to a taxi waiting at a stop light, knocked on his window, and asked if he could give me a ride. I think he recognized the desperation in my face because he pulled up onto the curb and let me in.
- Out of a Movie
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During UMass spring break, one of my college friends paid me a visit. Unsure of where to go, we naturally googled “Ireland tourist attractions” and the town of Glengarriff popped up. Quickly glancing at the town’s visitor website, I saw many options for us to explore: an island only a ferry ride away, an exotic garden, and a nature reserve. At the conclusion of a long bus ride, however, we quickly realized it wasn’t the tourist attraction we thought it was, at least not during March. Convenient stores were not open, never mind souvenir shops or ferry rides. I had bought tickets for a 4:30 bus home but we spontaneously decided to stay another hour and a half. This turned out to be our fatal mistake because there is no six p.m. bus back to Cork on Sundays. Finding a ride or taking a taxi was not an option as we were three hours away and didn’t know anyone with a car. A moment of panic set in when I remembered how abandoned the town was and wondered if there was even a bed and breakfast open that we could stay overnight in.
Somebody was looking over us that day because we did find one bed and breakfast open for business. If you have ever seen the movie Leap Year, the scene of Amy Adams stranded in a small Irish town, walking into a B+B looking for a place to spend the night is the exact same experience we had. We walked up to the owner standing behind the bar while all the locals having a beer looked over their shoulders at the interaction. We admitted that we missed the last bus home and he responded, “Oh, yup. First bus out is 8 a.m. tomorrow.” Of course, it left at 8 a.m. the next day, so cliché. The empty state of this town becomes further relevant because no stores were open. We had to ration phone charges and sleep in the clothes on our backs. We ended up enjoying a “nice” dinner as drunk locals interrupted us every once in a while to make conversation. As each part of this disastrous story unfolded, I could almost predict what would come next because it was literally something out of a movie.
- Off to a Great Start
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A friend and I planned an elaborate two-week trip around Europe during our own spring break. We spent weeks organizing train rides, hostels, and tourist attractions in eight different countries. Our first stop was London and the only leg of the trip getting there that went right was catching the bus from our apartment to the Cork airport. Our flight was delayed. When we got to the London Luton airport, the staff told us that one day a week the trains to downtown London don’t run and that day was today. After many hopeless conversations, we found one more bus that was going to downtown London for the night. Of course, however, the payment system was broken. There were crowds of people all fighting for the last couple of spots on this bus. My friend sprinted inside the airport to buy tickets from the kiosk and got back one minute before the bus left. On the walk from the underground to our hostel, I realized my purse that contained ALL my important documents for the entire trip (passport, money, ID, etc.) was no longer around my shoulder. I was so vigilant of pickpocketers after all the Facebook posts my mom sent me and was distraught over the idea that I was robbed three hours into our trip. We started backtracking and found a group of people holding said purse. Not sensing the potential danger of the situation, I ran up and profusely thanked them for finding my bag (turns out the strap of the bag had broken and slipped off). At this point, it was the middle of the night, almost morning, and the only thing keeping us going was the thought of our beds. We open the door to our room and….there is a single twin bed. We slept head to toe that night with the sound of dripping water from the broken faucet lulling us to sleep.
The moral of the story is that everything works out in the end. The parts of my time abroad that went according to plan were a dream come true and gave me pretty pictures to look back at, but the parts that went wrong are the stories I tell others and are arguably more precious.
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