Hiya!
Thanks for landing on my site. The intent is to share some of my experiences and new-found knowledge for your entertainment and for your possible decisions to move to Ireland yourself. Here is the quick chronological tour of how I got to Ireland, and then launched this blog.
In 1988, my parents didn’t know what to do with me so they shipped my 19 year old self back to the old country, to live with my granddaddy and auntie (a nice little nun on sabbatical, caring for my elderly granddaddy). I spent the summer of ’88 in Dublin, celebrating the millenium. And got to experience the craic in the midlands like a proper culchie.
In 2014, divorced twice over, 4 daughters later, I contemplated my future and decided that it must include living in Ireland. At least for a bit.
In 2016, I decided that I wasn’t going to wait until my kids had completed their rearing. I was headed to Ireland with my last teen. 15 year old daughters hate their moms. She was going to hate me from Ireland.
June 2018, I landed in Dublin just in time for James Joyce’s Bloomsday. Spent the hottest summer of my life in Dublin and on busses traveling across the Emerald Isle. More on that another day. 3 of my 4 daughters joined me. Our intention was for the craic, and to see if it really made sense to move here (for myself and the one daughter I left in the States). It did.
February 5, 2019 – I hopped on an early flight to Seattle with my youngest. We spent the day finalizing our Global Entry applications and completing the interviews. Then we were off for a few hours visiting my oldest daughter. And then the red eye to Dublin.
February 6, we landed. Bleary eyed, we made it to our Airbnb. Spent a few days in Dublin as daughter 4 had never been here. Then we scampered to my Auntie’s house near Limerick with all our luggage, dropped the said luggage off after catching up on sleep. Then headed to Galway. A friend of a friend was waiting to host us for a week. We fell in love with Galway, and moved in.
It was just for a year, or really 1.5 years. Long enough to experience the culture, the people, and a new world. Short enough that we wouldn’t miss our family and friends too much.
Summer of 2023, we are still here with no intention of returning.
While we love it here, we quickly discovered something huge. We couldn’t not understand anyone. And it wasn’t the language… we were all speaking english. But we had no idea what they meant. And most of the time, we had not idea that we didn’t know
