On February 18th 2023, I started my journey to Ireland, along with my friend Milan. To begin with, we took the bus in the evening and drove until around 4 am. This bus got on a ferry to cross the sea, and there we had some time to chill on sofas. Then we got in another bus for a few hours, before taking the train in Chester to get to Holyhead, a town in Wales. There we got ourselves a nice room in an Airbnb, and ate at McDonald's. It was actually a pretty cool experience since they had some food you wouldn’t find in France. In the morning, we took the ferry to Dublin, it was great until I spilled all of my
breakfast on myself !

We arrived in Dublin at 11 am and immediately got in a cab to our hosts' house. We met Sean and Christine, they were very welcoming and friendly. We had dinner together at 4 pm ! Irish people usually eat early (around 18:30 pm), but they knew how hungry we were. Sean showed us around and bought us tickets for Dublin's bus. By the way, I should mention that the house was great, with two separate bedrooms, two bathrooms, a nice kitchen, and a room to watch TV, with Netflix on it. Milan and I went for a walk in the evening and then we watched TV back home.

In the morning, we took the bus to school for the first time. It's always funny to get in a double-decker bus, also we found out that they have usb sockets to charge your phone on the second floor ! After about 30 minutes, we got to Atlas language school. We took a very quick test in order to define our level and assign us to classes, I got in the same class as Milan ! Our classmates were from several countries, such as Mexico, Spain, South Korea, Brazil, China and Germany. What I liked about the course is that its main point was to make us practice our english, mostly by speaking in pair work but also by answering questions and interacting with the teacher. Moreover, it felt good to know that the first goal of my course was to make sure I was ready for the IELTS exam at the end of the two weeks.

During the first week, most of our days went like this : we woke up every morning around 7 am, had some breakfast and went to the bus stop, which by the way was only 2 minutes away from the house. Then we would get to school, have class in the morning, including a break to eat our lunch, then a little bit more work until 2 pm. During the afternoon, we had two choices : going to the activity organized by Atlas or going for something else by ourselves. And so, some days we went with the school and visited museums, and other days we chose to chill outside or play basketball on courts we found on Google Maps. We've also been to Dundrum Town Centre once, which is the largest shopping centre in Ireland. Besides, I love to try out new foods, so that's what we
did sometimes instead of going to the cafeteria or the supermarket. In the evening we didn't go out really often during the first week, but still we've been outside with the other French students to watch a football game and to go to the restaurant.

Our routine changed a little bit during the second week though. I met Milan's cousin, who works in Dublin and he showed us around his company's building. Later on he took us to a beautiful city on the coast, not too far from Dublin. We had a delicious fish and chips, and then went for a 3 hour walk, which was worth the effort, because of the amazing view. In the evening, he took us to a Gaelic football game, the atmosphere was immaculate ! We also finally met people from our class (we were too shy before), and they introduced us to other people. And just like this, we had friends from Mexico, Spain, Türkiye and Germany. We had lunch with them, and went outside several nights, including to the restaurant once again. The last two days, we went to a friend's place,
which was a student building. We played ping-pong, pool, and had dinner together.

The next day, we left Dublin with a lot of memories and new friends. The trip was pretty much the same, but backwards. As it always does, it felt a bit shorter.