The Honeymoon Phase

People will tell you that the first year in a new country is the best time - exciting, challenging, different. What they forget to tell you is how lonely it will be. When I first moved to Ireland, it WAS exciting, challenging, and different. But, I didn't have my cats, I didn't have easy access to my friends or family except when I went to a talk shop to use the phone. I didn't have the comfort of my personal belongings around me. I didn't have the familiarity of my daily routine and the life I'd led in Vancouver for 13 years.

What I ALSO didn't have was the restrictions and limitations imposed by myself, my former life, and other people who knew me as being a certain way, based on years of the same behaviours, thoughts, beliefs, and habits. I had a chance to start fresh and reinvent myself as much as I dared.

I was in a rut and felt myself getting more afraid of life and becoming set in my ways. I needed to shake the tree. Galway City on the west coast of Ireland has been a place of much tree shaking.

Almost the second I set foot in Ireland, I started losing some of the excess weight I had been carrying around since I moved to Vancouver. No TV dinners here! I still get annoyed by the bar fridge-sized fridges that are the standard in most apartments. The ice box takes up 1/4 of the space, so there's not a lot you can keep in there. On the plus side, I eat fresher food more often because I can't store a lot of stuff.

I arrived in Galway at the beginning of June with my big suitcase and other bags of clothes and shoes. Stayed at a B&B for a few days. One of the down sides of moving to Ireland BEFORE getting a job is that I paid my own way. If the company I work for had hired me while I was still in Canada, I would have been given a bit of help with moving and accommodation. But they wouldn't have paid to ship me over. They were only hiring locally. Oh well. C'est la vie. It was a gamble moving without a job, but it paid off.

I stayed at the University's student residences up Newcastle Road for about 10 days. The night before I moved out, the boys upstairs left the kitchen tap running all night into a full, plugged sink, which leaked water through the ceiling into my bedroom in the wee hours!

I moved into the granny flat (converted garage) in Claddagh which was to be my first hovel, I mean home, in Galway. I nicknamed the flat "The Shoebox" because it was long and narrow and had a dividing wall down the middle between the living room/bedroom space and kitchen. The bathroom had an electric shower that was so small I had to squeeze into the corner opening sideways. The power box for it was in the kitchen by the outside door - 7 feet up the wall - I measured it! I had to use a stool to turn the power on and off. The place was so damp, even in the middle of July, that less than 3 weeks after my stuff arrived, my vitamins were moldy. Yuck! And I had far more 8-legged guests than I could stand. I stayed 3 months there, then broke the lease and moved into an apartment at the docks in Galway's city centre.

A drier apartment with a roomier shower, but I now had to acquire a roommate since I couldn't afford to live there on my own. Now, I had not lived with anyone for more than 15 years, so it was a helluva shock to the system. My roommate was a Canadian guy, nice enough, but it turned out he was a serious smoker. He fibbed about that. He paid his rent and bills on time and was quiet, but we didn't really click as roommates, so he moved out after a few months.

The apartment was nicer looking but badly built as so many things are here. I had to take a lot of time off work to let in guys to repair leaks in sinks, doors that didn't hang/close right, immersion heater timer, water pump, window lock. The worst thing was the window in my bedroom. The flashing (thing that keeps rain off the window frame) had come off the window frame sometime in the months before I moved in. Because the frame (wood, oh so practical in Galway) kept getting wet, it rotted. The window was on the verge of falling out, so the guy who came to fix it, nailed it open a crack because he couldn't close it all the way for fear of breaking the frame, and covered the gap with packing tape. I spent the winter with my window open like that. Brrr! Big heating bills, and I was still cold. Whine and moan.

Yeah, so who cares, right? I started my job as a technical writer, and I was in heaven! Spent my days talking about grammar and punctuation. Haggled over words and definitions. Wrote and edited documents. And I finally made some friends. Other writers like me who had moved to Galway for the job and were making a fresh start in a new place. A little social pod developed including a cinema club, book exchange, and regular weekend activities like hanging at the pub or going dancing.

I had my birthday in Italy, a two-week trip to Germany in July for work, and a trip to France in November. For Christmas, two cool gals made the hike to the wilds of western Ireland from England and Italy, and we had a girls' long weekend for the holidays.

But all was not well. In the new year, I started having a recurring ache in my upper left abdomen. So began the year of pain. Very cryptic, non?