If you've ever gone on an Erasmus year, you'll know that in the weeks running up to your big continental adventure, you’ll find yourself imagining the various ways that this new European culture will enrich your life.
Oh, you’ll still pop your head into an Irish pub every now and again – You couldn’t miss the All Ireland, sure – but that is definitely it.
The bad habits and questionable routines you picked up and employed in your first two years of college will take a back seat to the array of worldly customs which you’ll ultimately adopt as your own.
And then you’ll arrive.
And the morning espressos never materialise, and the journal entries don’t make it past the first week, and the barman in The Shamrock knows your name by October, and the lecturers in your host university most definitely do not.
And this is because living abroad is not easy.
While you may have assumed your new city would give you the shot of adrenaline your home town failed to, you’ll soon realise the shot you received upon landing was more akin to a tranquiliser dart.
Unless, you’re incredibly lucky, that is.
And that’s because the Erasmus year is, in many ways, completely and utterly exhausting.
In fact, there comes a point in each and every Erasmus student’s journey where even the simplest of tasks seem insurmountable, and a month in bed becomes the obvious choice.
Whether it’s because you’ve been washing your clothes in fabric conditioner for a month, your flatmate is the type to count their pasta shells or your money management leaves you questioning basic arithmetic, you’ll often find yourself retreating to your bedroom, eating cereal out of the box and avoiding emails from the International Office until the end of time.
No matter how exhilarating the Erasmus year seemed once you’re firmly back in the bosom of your family, there is no denying the exhaustion that accompanies even the most mundane of tasks or straightforward of exchanges when attempting to carve out a life in a foreign language country.
When the woman in the bank doesn’t stick to the script you had prepared in your head, you'll wonder how much a flight home would cost.
When the ‘I’m an Erasmus student’ excuse doesn’t fly with a host lecturer who's seen your type before, you'll wonder who let you fill out the CAO form unsupervised.
And when you try and fail to keep up with a conversation in a language you’re supposedly a year away from having a degree in, you’ll quickly realise the only thing for it is a week in bed with – if you can afford it – your favourite new-found foreign snack.
But as life has a way of doing, it’s these supposed failures which allow you to find pleasure in the smallest of daily things.
Discovering a shortcut in a city whose geography had you slack-jawed upon arrival and realising the new word came quicker than the native is a moment for the folk at home.
Mastering the mechanics of a foreign washing machine and finding your way into a pub that doesn’t have a Guinness is Good For You sign is a definitely worthy of a status update.
And the moment you learn how to cheat the host college’s credit system is the moment you realise a – and this is the important part – GUILT-FREE week in bed is definitely on the horizon.
And when those moments come, you’ll smugly turn them over and over in your mind and quietly – almost nervously – allow yourself to think that morning espressos and journal entries are just around the corner.
They’re not, of course.
Because they were notions, and you knew it.
