It's (not) like riding a bicycle.

Dia duit o Gaillimh. Hi from Galway! (I seriously hope Google Translate didn’t fail me here, because my Gaelic skills aren’t quite up to this yet.)

I’m normally an ace with languages, and I’ve started to pick up on some common words and the sentence structure, but the pronunciation is totally beyond me. English is the main language here, but signs are often in both English and Gaelic, and some university buildings have Gaelic names. Working in the lab has added an interesting, if not especially useful, assortment of phrases to my vocabulary: chemical waste disposal protocol, Freshers Orientation Week, evacuation in case of fire. I’m going to stash those ones under ‘things to pull out to fill a lull in conversation.’

Since my last post detailing all the ways in which things had gone off the rails, plenty more things have gone wrong and right. That piece of diving equipment was delivered on time, and I made my flight without incident. I landed in Dublin Friday morning, jet-lagged out of my mind, and was immediately met by Minor Disaster #2: a nonfunctioning phone. Fortunately, the guy at the airport store that sold SIM cards seemed to recognize how panicked and exhausted I was, and was kind enough to help me get through my technophobia and get cell service. After what felt like forever sitting on the floor of the Dublin airport, I boarded a bus for the three-hour ride to Galway, stayed awake long enough to snap a photo of the road and make my first cheesy Instagram post…and then fell asleep so hard that I woke up with bruises from where my hip was pressed against the armrest.

One photo for the road before passing out.

It’s been eight days, and I’m starting (starting!) to get into the swing of things. It happened a lot more quickly than I expected, I think in large part because I made establishing normalcy here a priority. After I fell into my bed and didn’t move for approximately 14 hours, we set out to do some legitimate errands—buying credit for the gas and electric meters, grocery shopping (I bought not only potatoes, but two kinds of carrots), renting bikes for the semester. I scoped out a couple of potential running routes and we more or less found our way around the university campus. (Challenging: there are no straight roads in Ireland. The campus is no exception).

 

It looks like Hogwarts, though. 

I’ll end on a practical note, with the most important thing I’ve learned so far. I got used to biking on the left side of the road pretty quickly. Biking in the city is pretty much the same everywhere: a constant exercise in terror, but efficient and weirdly fun. But there’s another left-right reversal here that I was unaware of. On American bikes, the left hand brake controls the front wheel, and the right hand brake the back wheel. It’s the opposite here. As anyone who’s ever ridden a bike or has a rudimentary understanding of physics knows, if you brake with just the back wheel, the entire bike stops; if you break with the front wheel, the back of the bike goes from moving forward to moving upward, and very efficiently catapults the rider over the handlebars. Just food for thought.