Dublin - Week 1

The weirdest thing about being in Dublin is hearing English.

When you're in a country where you don't speak the language, you tune out conversations that go on around you. Incomprehensible to you, they become white noise. But your ear becomes fine-tuned to languages that you recognize. In Switzerland, if anyone within a one-block radius was speaking English, French or Spanish, I knew. It was like a homing beacon.

Even in Spain, where I understood the conversation around me, English conversation reverberated at a particular pitch in my ear. Usually, it made me cross the street to get away, but the point is that I could always pick it out.

So imagine the feeling when I walked down O'Connell Street a few days ago. At first, I heard the people next to me, and thought, Hey, I understand them! How cool is that? And of course, I had to remind myself that I am in an English-speaking country. Just like that, my natural tendency to eavesdrop was turned up to 11. Suddenly I could hear every conversation, every uttered word, all at once. A bit overwhelming, I must say.

You know in the movies, when a character suddenly gets the power to hear people's thoughts, and all of the thoughts come rushing in all at once, indistinguishably, chaotically, and the character feels like they might go mad? That’s the way I feel right now. There is way too much noise in my head. It's going to take a little time to get used to.

Now, as long as I don't get crushed by a car driving on the left side of the road, I'll be just fine.

No pictures yet, but I will put some up as soon as I've got them....