I am sitting down to write my check-in from Chicago, this year’s most popular J1 destination, in true J1 fashion; that is having just been handed an eviction warning and trying to brainstorm a way to blag myself into Lollapalooza tomorrow for free.
As a third year BESS student, an internship of some sorts is the implied the route you should be taking with your last four months of freedom before the final hurdle of that one more year in college. However, having missed all the deadlines and not fancying a long summer at home without a job, I acted upon impulse the night before my first exam and booked my flights and my visa to Chi-town.
Arriving a few weeks after my soon-to-be housemates, I naïvely thought I’d be set with a house and just have a job to find. How wrong I was. The accommodation search in Chicago this summer didn’t just stump us, but also affected a rumoured 300 Irish J1ers who had bid this city adieu within only a few weeks of arrival due to accommodation and job woes. Luckily, we landed on our feet, and when I arrived my friends had been taken in by another J1er and his welcoming nine unknown friends. Within minutes of my arrival, I was taken into the family home and despite weeks of rough sleeping on the floor, when we finally moved out it was bittersweet to say the least; these once unknown characters were now our closest friends and just part of the furniture of our everyday life.
I naïvely thought I’d be set with a house and just have a job to find.
The realities of finding a job with some longevity here is also an issue as many serving jobs, which J1 students opt for, sees you relying almost entirely on tips and teetering on the edge of being fired for any offense even as small as having the slightest amount of stubble. My job hunt was about as successful as our house-hunting attempts. Having landed a job in a Brown Thomas-esque department store within a week, I was told after three hours that my contract would have to be terminated due to visa issues. Surely a new record in any respect?
Despite my flailing attempts in the job and accommodation markets, Chicago was certainly living up to the high standards which my friends had set for me from the previous year. In my opinion, any place is only as great as the people you meet there, hence our group’s No.1 rule: ‘Avoid Irish Rotbags’. If you do any stereotypical college summer experience anywhere in the world whether it be inter-railing, J1ing or trekking through Asia, you will meet a stereotypical ‘Irish rotbag’. In Chicago, these are the people who ruin the experience for everyone and give Irish students a bad name with employers, landlords and the general population. They hang out in bars run by promoters as reputable as their clientele, which are in one way similar to Coppers on a Saturday night, but in most ways, worse. Now this isn’t to say I’m not partial to the Coppers dancefloor, but that’s an Irish cultural experience, not an American one.
Through our attempts to branch out and meet Americans, we’ve encountered the weird and the wonderful. Whether it be tequila taking and salsa dancing with Tom Hanks’ personal chef, or being handed $100 for having nice makeup by a stranger during the day, each brief encounter has given us another reason to love Chicago more.
Chicago itself is impossible not to love; a city of skyscrapers and a spectacular lake with a vast amount of fork lightning, nevermind wind. Each Chicagoan you’ll meet has an Irish background and trust me, they can trace back their family tree farther than anyone else I’ve ever met upon questioning. This makes for a handy distraction from work when you are incredibly hungover; nearly every customer has the potential for hours of conversation once you get them started.
Being the token Irish is also pretty handy when it comes to blagging. It has been central to my J1 experience after somehow picking up a free ticket to see M.I.A and R. Kelly, amongst others, at a festival more alternative than the Arts Block smoking area; talking my way in to see my idol, Taylor Swift, at her sold out arena tour, riding in limos around the city after a baseball game, and couchsurfing our way from Chicago to Nashville via Louisville, Kentucky. So let the lesson be learned: if you don’t have any dollahs let your beautiful Irish charm kick in and sure ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’.
Reflecting upon a summer spent working fifty-hour weeks and taking in the best of a spectacular city at every other time is incredibly difficult to sum up through the eyes of anyone reading this but no matter where you check in from in the world, each experience is what you make of it; whether it be your bedroom in Dublin or a beach in Thailand. I can only say that I hope my last two weeks will be as fulfilling as those that I’ve had in the past three months.
