Shona McGarry | Contributing Writer
It’s that time of year again, when some of us bid goodbye/good riddance to Dublin, and head off to Scandinavia, Paris, or scorching California. In my case, it is St. Andrews, Scotland.
It’s cold by day and freezing by night, this home of golf and the birthplace of royal love affairs. Sure, the only real differences involve sterling, BBC iPlayer (more traumatically, BBC Scotland, which shows highlights of the SPL whenever possible) and college merchandise you actually want. But it’s new, and a little break away from everything I’m used to. A little time on my own to meditate and figure it all out. A little bit of difference.
The above exemplifies the kind of rubbish you tell yourself before you land on not-so-distant shores. It’s all wistful nonsense that vanishes into the coastal air once you arrive in a dingy, lime-green room and discover that the only people in your kitchen to talk to are, well, non-existent. When you put down your case and sit on the bare mattress, that’s when you’ve arrived. Well, you’re on your own now, Shona. And, worse: this is what you wanted, right?
Week one was weird, tear-inducing awkwardness. There are creatures in the kitchen, Americans everywhere and they don’t sell Marque de Leon. I had stern conversations with myself. I want to live in the pretty building. The societies are lame. I don’t want to eat dinner on my own every night and then cry on Skype for hours while watching five episodes of the Great British Bake Off and screaming at the contestants because IT’S JUST NOT A GOOD BAKE, MARY. Why am I here? Can I scuttle back to Trinity and into the warm, fluffy arms of Front Square? My first impressions: I want to go home.
Week one was weird, tear-inducing awkwardness
Nevertheless, I decided to give the week a shot. Wandering the three streets of town I wondered if I should turn up to any society events and get this party started. With no Freshers’ Fayre until Sunday and no kitchen mates to make friends with, on Tuesday I decided to join the hall pub crawl. When I came downstairs, everyone was already in groups. I felt like Mildred from The Worst Witch (minus the cat to keep me company). It was too late to go back, though, so I had no choice but to wander up to a clique. That’s when I met my first friend – Nat, a Canadian who introduced me to what is now my alternative kitchen, better known as the lovely, normal people you can meet in the daily course of your life, Kitchen 4.6.
Mornings are the worst – a whole day of no class and no society stretches out menacingly, and you have no idea what to do with yourself. I decided to solve that problem by going to one of those society things where the event says: ‘Come along to meet new people!’ And then you go, only all the people seem to already have met and don’t really want to meet you, so you end up talking to someone called Horatio while taking advantage of the red and the white wine. After that, I spent another day doing what everybody ends up doing at some point – wandering around a graveyard by myself. By the time Sunday came I was ready to flee to the outer Hebrides, or at least back home. I thought, maybe this place doesn’t suit me. Maybe the fact that there’s a Jack Wills and not a Topshop is indicative of the fact that I do not belong here with these gilet-wearing folk. Maybe the fact that I want to yell at the next American who says ‘Oh my Gawd, it’s just like Hogwarts!’ means that I’m not quite ready to embrace the mythical St. Andrews conjured up by wistful Yanks. Or maybe I am just being self-indulgent.
It turns out that the latter is true. I was just being self-indulgent. I was doing the ‘I’m a privileged college student who got the opportunity to go to St. Andrews, my life is so hard’ act. When I stopped strewing tissues around my room like a tepid Hamlet and banging on the walls about missing my life, I realised that because you’re spending a lot of time in your own delirious company – despite your new friends – being on Erasmus alone gives you a unique sense of self. Something about being away from everything you know is coolly liberating. Or lonely. Package deal.
But it’s not all solitaire and dinners for one. Since those dark days of pop-tart-inhaling and moping to the accompaniment of every single Father Ted episode ever (it happened, I regret nothing), my alternative kitchen and I have been out and about in the wee hours (wee, being a Scottish thing, is a word I am now adopting for general use), to The Vic, a place that looks and feels and tastes like Workman’s, but is full of red-trouser-wearing posh boys instead of square-glasses-wearing hipsters. 4.6 have made those hours in my room trying to wrangle my way home seem like a lifetime ago. I still miss home, though. I still walk past the bus station on the way to town and sort of (sort of) long to go back to Dublin and my friends and everything there was last year and years before.
Maybe it’s not so scary here.
