It was raining in Dublin. Raining again. It always rained, and no one seemed to be bothered. Grafton Street was still filled with musicians and puppeteers, all hoping for a few cents from fascinated tourists. Disheveled Irishmen stood beneath the doorways of local pubs breathing in their tobacco and nicotine. The flower markets colored each side of the street; their petals freckled with glistening drops of water. And the parks were a brilliant green and everything was blooming for spring. And Hemingway echoed in my mind…
“Paris with the snow falling. Paris with thebig charcoal braziers outside the cafes, glowing red. At the café tables, men huddled, their coat collarsturned up, while they finger glasses of grogAmericain and the newsboys shout the evening papers.”
Rickshaws carrying two passengers at a time moved up and down the street, its brick road covered by a sheath of rain. She could hear the city. Blue and yellow double-decker buses hissed at their stops. The sound of a guitar accompanied by the voice of a young boy, covers of U2 songs; they were Dublin’s background music. And the streets were full of laughing people. That was what was wonderful about Dublin, everyone seemed content. The city had a unique charm about it, even under a grey sky. I thought of what Hemingway said about Paris in the winter…
“The buses rumble like green juggernauts through the snow that sifts down in the dusk. White house walls rise through the dusky snow. Snow is never more beautiful than in the city. It is wonderful in Paris to stand on a bridge across the Seine looking up through the softly curtaining snow past the grey bulk of the Louvre, up the river spanned by many bridges and bordered by the grey houses of old Paris to where Notre Dame squats in the dusk.”
I sat alone on the second floor of the Oriental Café. It was decorated with stained glass windows, dark wood and deep redwalls. My tabletop was covered by a mug filled with a hot mocha, a buttery croissant and my lime-green Kindle. I had gone to the coffee shop to relax, to get away from our paper-thin-walled apartment. But I was unsettled. I had been an ocean away from my home for four months. I had put my life on hold to spend a semester of my college career overseas. What was once a foreign city was now so familiar to me that I could picture it with my eyes closed. I knew the streets, even the backstreets. I knew the best places to shop or eat or drink. But however familiar I was with Dublin there was still a nostalgic loneliness that lived inside me. I remembered what Hemingwaysaid about Paris during Christmas…
“It wasvery beautiful in Paris and very lonely at Christmas time.
The young man and his girl walk up the Rue Bonaparte from the Quai in the shadow ofthe tall houses to the brightly lighted little Rue Jacob. In the little second floor restaurant, TheVeritable Restaurant of the Third Republic, which has two rooms, four tiny tables and a cat, there is a special Christmas dinner being served.”
I missed my family. I missed my dog. I missed the warm sunny days at the beginning of spring, driving my car, going to lunch with my friends, the skyscrapers. I was sick of my heavy wallet weighed down by European coins. I missed paying in dollars. It was simple things that got to me the most. I was tired of being singled out as an American. I had begun to feel claustrophobic in the congested and narrow streets of the city. What seemed the same was different, too. Starbucks didn’t serve iced coffee, Subway didn’t have bacon, and I didn’t know more than five people I could call from my cell phone. Even the mocha I was drinking was different than what I was used to. And I thought of the young boy and girl in Hemingway’s story.
“’I miss the cranberries,’ said the young man.
They attack the special Christmas dinner. The turkey is cut into a particular sort of geometrical formation that seems to include a small taste of meat, a great deal of gristle, and a large piece of bone.
‘Do you remember the turkey at home?’ asks the young girl.
‘Don’t talk about it,’ says the boy.
They attack the potatoes which are fried with too much grease.”
Two weeks after Christmas I arrived in Dublin, anxious and eager for new experiences. Everything was different, and it excited me. It seemed like a dream, like an alternate life I was going to live. Each culturel difference was a sensational discovery, and I was the only one who discovered it. I welcomed the challenge of adapting to and accepting another culture. Home became uninteresting and routine, and I was too distracted to think of it. I fell in love with Dublin. But after four months the excitement and novelty started to ware off. The city became familiar, and once I began to feel at home in Dublin I realized how far and different from my home it was.
I watched the sky turn from light grey to charcoal as I looked out the window. The sun began to set. I gathered my things and threw them into my bag, then picked up the bill. Seven euro for a coffee and a croissant, almost ten dollars, but I didn’t think twice. I was used to the inflated costs by then. I counted out exact change from my wallet, set it on top of the bill, and left. Rain poured. I walked down Grafton Street, past the dim-lit pubs with live Celtic music blaring through the doors, past the famous statue of the tart and her cart, past Trinity College where Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift studied. I knew the magnificence of Dublin was all around me, but I had become indifferent. Dublin had become like Paris during Christmastime.
“They ate the dessert, and neither one mentioned the fact that it was slightly burned. Then they paid the bill and walked downstairs and out into the street. The snow was still falling. And they walked out into the streets of old Paris that had known the prowling of wolves and the hunting of men and the tall old houses that had looked down on it all and were stark and unmoved by Christmas.”
I was homesick. I had never been so far away from home for so long. I had never been incapable of calling my parents whenever I wanted. I felt isolated. Everything that made my home what it was didn’t exist in Dublin. I was homesick for my parents’ faces, for the quiet pitter-patter of my dog’s feet when she walked on our hardwood floors, for the familiar smell of my house, for groove I had made in my bed from years of sleeping in the exact center of it.
I remember thinking of Hemingway when I sat in the Oriental Café. I thought of him as a young boy growing up in a suburb of Chicago, a suburb that was only thirty minutes away from the one in which I grew up. I pictured him at my age travelling through Europe. He was like the young boy and girl in his story, and so was I. They were in Paris, and I was in Dublin, but we all experienced the same thing.
“The boy and girl were homesick. It was their first Christmas away from their own land. You do not know what Christmas is until you lose it in some foreign land.”
Before I went to Dublin I never thought much about the idea of home. I lived in the same town and in the same house my entire life. College was a five hour drive away, and breaks allowed me to return home several times during the semester. Homesickness never affected me. Even the first few months in Dublin were too exciting and eye-opening for me to think about what I left behind. My home didn’t offer new experiences, and I didn’t want to be there.
But eventually the novelty of Dublin began to wear off. I got used to the differences in the culture and the way of life. They were no longer exciting, and, as soon as the excitement wore off, I started to realize that there were things I missed. The once boring familiarities of my home consoled me. Dublin was beautiful, adventurous and exciting, but it lacked the familiar comforts that were what defined the idea of home for me. I had not known what home was until I lost it in some foreign land.
(Quotes from Ernest Hemingway,“Christmas in Paris” from “Christmas on the Roof of the World” The Toronto Star, 1923)
“Paris with the snow falling. Paris with thebig charcoal braziers outside the cafes, glowing red. At the café tables, men huddled, their coat collarsturned up, while they finger glasses of grogAmericain and the newsboys shout the evening papers.”
Rickshaws carrying two passengers at a time moved up and down the street, its brick road covered by a sheath of rain. She could hear the city. Blue and yellow double-decker buses hissed at their stops. The sound of a guitar accompanied by the voice of a young boy, covers of U2 songs; they were Dublin’s background music. And the streets were full of laughing people. That was what was wonderful about Dublin, everyone seemed content. The city had a unique charm about it, even under a grey sky. I thought of what Hemingway said about Paris in the winter…
“The buses rumble like green juggernauts through the snow that sifts down in the dusk. White house walls rise through the dusky snow. Snow is never more beautiful than in the city. It is wonderful in Paris to stand on a bridge across the Seine looking up through the softly curtaining snow past the grey bulk of the Louvre, up the river spanned by many bridges and bordered by the grey houses of old Paris to where Notre Dame squats in the dusk.”
I sat alone on the second floor of the Oriental Café. It was decorated with stained glass windows, dark wood and deep redwalls. My tabletop was covered by a mug filled with a hot mocha, a buttery croissant and my lime-green Kindle. I had gone to the coffee shop to relax, to get away from our paper-thin-walled apartment. But I was unsettled. I had been an ocean away from my home for four months. I had put my life on hold to spend a semester of my college career overseas. What was once a foreign city was now so familiar to me that I could picture it with my eyes closed. I knew the streets, even the backstreets. I knew the best places to shop or eat or drink. But however familiar I was with Dublin there was still a nostalgic loneliness that lived inside me. I remembered what Hemingwaysaid about Paris during Christmas…
“It wasvery beautiful in Paris and very lonely at Christmas time.
The young man and his girl walk up the Rue Bonaparte from the Quai in the shadow ofthe tall houses to the brightly lighted little Rue Jacob. In the little second floor restaurant, TheVeritable Restaurant of the Third Republic, which has two rooms, four tiny tables and a cat, there is a special Christmas dinner being served.”
I missed my family. I missed my dog. I missed the warm sunny days at the beginning of spring, driving my car, going to lunch with my friends, the skyscrapers. I was sick of my heavy wallet weighed down by European coins. I missed paying in dollars. It was simple things that got to me the most. I was tired of being singled out as an American. I had begun to feel claustrophobic in the congested and narrow streets of the city. What seemed the same was different, too. Starbucks didn’t serve iced coffee, Subway didn’t have bacon, and I didn’t know more than five people I could call from my cell phone. Even the mocha I was drinking was different than what I was used to. And I thought of the young boy and girl in Hemingway’s story.
“’I miss the cranberries,’ said the young man.
They attack the special Christmas dinner. The turkey is cut into a particular sort of geometrical formation that seems to include a small taste of meat, a great deal of gristle, and a large piece of bone.
‘Do you remember the turkey at home?’ asks the young girl.
‘Don’t talk about it,’ says the boy.
They attack the potatoes which are fried with too much grease.”
Two weeks after Christmas I arrived in Dublin, anxious and eager for new experiences. Everything was different, and it excited me. It seemed like a dream, like an alternate life I was going to live. Each culturel difference was a sensational discovery, and I was the only one who discovered it. I welcomed the challenge of adapting to and accepting another culture. Home became uninteresting and routine, and I was too distracted to think of it. I fell in love with Dublin. But after four months the excitement and novelty started to ware off. The city became familiar, and once I began to feel at home in Dublin I realized how far and different from my home it was.
I watched the sky turn from light grey to charcoal as I looked out the window. The sun began to set. I gathered my things and threw them into my bag, then picked up the bill. Seven euro for a coffee and a croissant, almost ten dollars, but I didn’t think twice. I was used to the inflated costs by then. I counted out exact change from my wallet, set it on top of the bill, and left. Rain poured. I walked down Grafton Street, past the dim-lit pubs with live Celtic music blaring through the doors, past the famous statue of the tart and her cart, past Trinity College where Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift studied. I knew the magnificence of Dublin was all around me, but I had become indifferent. Dublin had become like Paris during Christmastime.
“They ate the dessert, and neither one mentioned the fact that it was slightly burned. Then they paid the bill and walked downstairs and out into the street. The snow was still falling. And they walked out into the streets of old Paris that had known the prowling of wolves and the hunting of men and the tall old houses that had looked down on it all and were stark and unmoved by Christmas.”
I was homesick. I had never been so far away from home for so long. I had never been incapable of calling my parents whenever I wanted. I felt isolated. Everything that made my home what it was didn’t exist in Dublin. I was homesick for my parents’ faces, for the quiet pitter-patter of my dog’s feet when she walked on our hardwood floors, for the familiar smell of my house, for groove I had made in my bed from years of sleeping in the exact center of it.
I remember thinking of Hemingway when I sat in the Oriental Café. I thought of him as a young boy growing up in a suburb of Chicago, a suburb that was only thirty minutes away from the one in which I grew up. I pictured him at my age travelling through Europe. He was like the young boy and girl in his story, and so was I. They were in Paris, and I was in Dublin, but we all experienced the same thing.
“The boy and girl were homesick. It was their first Christmas away from their own land. You do not know what Christmas is until you lose it in some foreign land.”
Before I went to Dublin I never thought much about the idea of home. I lived in the same town and in the same house my entire life. College was a five hour drive away, and breaks allowed me to return home several times during the semester. Homesickness never affected me. Even the first few months in Dublin were too exciting and eye-opening for me to think about what I left behind. My home didn’t offer new experiences, and I didn’t want to be there.
But eventually the novelty of Dublin began to wear off. I got used to the differences in the culture and the way of life. They were no longer exciting, and, as soon as the excitement wore off, I started to realize that there were things I missed. The once boring familiarities of my home consoled me. Dublin was beautiful, adventurous and exciting, but it lacked the familiar comforts that were what defined the idea of home for me. I had not known what home was until I lost it in some foreign land.
(Quotes from Ernest Hemingway,“Christmas in Paris” from “Christmas on the Roof of the World” The Toronto Star, 1923)
