Greener Pastures
Galway, Ireland—At 8 a.m. a few Sundays ago, I heard a knock on my door. Having hit the pillow at 4 a.m. after clubbing in town, I moaned, turned over and tried to ignore the fact that it was time to get up. I heard the steady sound of rain on the window—something I hear nearly ever morning here.
After much loud self-debate about whether to actually get up, I joined my roommates, who had thoughtfully woken me, for an eight-hour bus tour of Western Ireland’s most stunning geographical features; the Burren, a dark group of hills rising up from the bay, and the Cliffs of Moher—the sheerest, most spectacular set of cliffs I’ve ever seen.
As I rambled along a hillside in the Burren, with jagged limestone rocks on the slope above me, a bay view unfolding in front of me, and the elusive sun beginning to beg me to take off my fleece, I grinned—this was the Ireland I had hoped for. This was why I had come abroad.
Well, that’s a lie. I came abroad because my roommates were going abroad and I’d be lonely at Harvard without them. It was a last minute, impulsive decision. But once I had made that choice, I justified it by acknowledging that I was getting into a routine at old H. I wanted a life experience challenge as opposed to an intellectual challenge. Plus, everyone says his or her time abroad was the “best of my life, man.” With beauty to be explored, pubs to be visited, literary pilgrimages to plan, I couldn’t understand any reasons NOT to go abroad.
But in the three weeks since I’ve arrived here, I’ve come up with plenty.
The pure pleasure I expected has been tangled with moments of discomfort and loneliness—the kind you experience Freshman Week. Remember Freshman Week? Would you ever want to go through that numbing mix of Cancun-like revelry and complete emotional isolation again? Because that’s of course what you inevitably get if you enroll in a university overseas, not to mention a healthy dose of being stared at because of your accent.
And then there’s the whole H-bomb problem. I’ve said “I go to Harvard” at least 150 times since I got here, and I hate the assumptions that people make when I say it—or the assumptions that I make about them making assumptions. I hate being asked my SAT scores by strangers. I understand now why Harvard students, much as we like to gripe about our lives, have traditionally avoided flying across the ocean for a semester or two. The world views us as nerdy freaks.
And that brings me to the number one life-affecting conclusion I’ve arrived at since I flew across the sea. The world is right. I’m a nerd.
One of the large inspirations behind my choice of Ireland was the poetic and literary tradition; another was the mythology. I keep Yeats; The Poems next to my pillow and have a Field Guide to Irish Faeries on my shelf. This does not make much sense to most of my fellow Americans abroad—all hardworking, motivated students—who came here for the Guinness and to reconnect with their Irish roots.
My roots, everyone is baffled to learn, are in some Shtetls on the Russian-Polish border. I want to explain that my soul has roots in the poetry that’s created here. But I keep my mouth shut, having concluded that behavior considered normal amongst devotees of Phil Fisher’s English 165: “Joyce, Modernism and Aestheticism” class is considered downright loony by everyone else.
But I’ve learned more fun and frivolous lessons here as well. I’ve learned that Irish men seem sexy until they get on the dance floor (keep them chatting at the bar, ladies, you don’t want to see them bust a move). It’s OK to go to the campus pub in between your 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. classes. To de-frizz my hair, “you’d best go back to New York” (that comes from the wise woman at the local hair salon). Irish youth prefer Budweiser to Guinness, and extracurricular activities in some colleges do not cause any stress whatsoever—they’re actually for fun—and they hold their meetings at pubs. Did I mention that pubs are central to life here?
And I’ve found a lot of the literary nourishment I came here craving. I’ve learned that the two-line gap toward the end of Joyce’s “the Dead” leaves open the possibility of sex between the two main characters (so the Harvard English department isn’t the only sex-obsessed one out there, shocking as it may seem). I’ve gone home to re-read Yeat’s “September, 1913” poem after learning in history class about the brutal crushing of a strike in Dublin that inspired the poem.
And ever the snobby New Yorker/Bostonian, I’ve come to appreciate that a city as tiny and intimate as Galway can be cosmopolitan in its way. This town attracts both the normal and the freakish from all over the world, melted together in a big love-fest of live music, dusty bookstores and drunken walks home over the quaint cobblestoned streets. I love Galway so much already, and I know by the time I go home and I’ve walked those streets infinite times, I’ll feel like it’s mine.
And leaving Galway has its pleasures, too. Last weekend I experienced again the inexhaustible thrill of being a young traveller, of getting off a bus in Dublin with a backpack on and trying to find my way to a hostel using a tiny Let’s Go map. When I stood (with a high school friend who had popped over from Oxford) at the gates of Trinity College for a “backpackers’ pub crawl” I heard the gorgeous sound of travel stories being exchanged in various accents—“We’ve just been in London,” “We’re heading to Amsterdam,” “Have you seen the Irish countryside?” It made me want to keep travelling forever.
But the most important lesson to be learned from time abroad curtails the wanderlust slightly; despite all the high-flying adventures of time abroad, I’ve learned again how terribly much my friends at home—or in Uganda, Paris and London—mean to me.
Because after an experience like the trip to the cliffs, or hearing an amazing band cover the Pixies at a local pub, I want to share it with my friends so badly I’m forced to take an extra picture or order another pint, and I think about the spring, when we’ll be reunited. And then the image of snow falling on the Lowell courtyard seems more appealing than it has in ages.
That’s the nicest thing about time away. I needed to leave Harvard badly and wouldn’t return a second early, but when I do get back I’ll actually be glad to be there. And my tolerance will be strengthened by hundreds of pints of Guinness. Two more good reasons to go abroad.
Sarah M. Seltzer ‘05 is an English concentrator who will return to Lowell House in the spring.