A Love-ly Turn of Events

My working holiday in Ireland wasn’t part of the plan, but I unexpectedly got off the waitlist. On the day I left, I felt more excited and happy than sad to go. I wanted so badly to hike the Camino de Santiago in Spain, one of the places on my bucket list, so I took the advice of someone who had been before and applied for Ireland. It seemed like a convenient base in Europe: I could save time and money, and travel with less pressure. In the end, I couldn’t do the hike because of an injured foot, but I ended up doing many other things and making lots of good friends. Even now, I still miss those nine short months working at a café!

I remember arriving in Dublin on a grey, gloomy day. The cold wind outside the airport nearly froze me! I took the airport bus into the city, then checked into a hostel for ten days. The next task was to work through the usual checklist of things to do whenever you start over somewhere new. Dublin’s streets were very different from the Europe I had imagined: seagulls and pigeons everywhere, broken glass on the ground, the smell of cannabis in the air, people talking to themselves, and people in red clothes asking for money. But isn’t the gap between what we imagine and what we find often what makes a place surprising? Before I left, I found Taiwanese people arriving on the same day through a LINE group, and we arranged to meet at the hostel. Once we got to know each other, it became an adventure for the three of us! We arrived just after Christmas, with New Year’s Eve around the corner, so the city was full of sparkling lights. The Temple Bar area in Dublin 2 was covered in Christmas decorations, even on the side streets. For our first meal after arriving, we went out for hot pot to warm up for the winter! After finding a place to live and taking care of all the necessary tasks, we went to Howth to watch the fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Friends I didn’t know very well yet, a country that was new to me, and a fresh start in a new year—there was so much to look forward to!

The hard part was that we arrived just after the Christmas holidays, and winter in Dublin meant either rain or freezing temperatures. It was also a very quiet season for work. In a way, we were lucky: my landlord ran a bubble tea shop, and working there helped ease some of the financial pressure while we looked for other jobs. (We have a few landlord horror stories. We’re grateful for the work, but wouldn’t recommend them.) Later, I found a job at a Chinese restaurant called Fu Man Lou to pick up a few more hours. We managed like this for about a month. Most of the CVs we handed in in person or sent online never got a response. I went through a low, helpless spell, but I don’t think I ever regretted coming here. For nearly six years, my life in Taiwan had been stable and on track, but that wasn’t what I wanted from life. Feeling the contrast so deeply helped me understand myself better. Maybe I wasn’t quite where I needed to be yet, or maybe life was leading me somewhere even better—that’s what I told myself at the time. I couldn’t stay down for too long. I had to keep moving forward. The point of a working holiday in Ireland was never just to save money; it was about the experiences, the spontaneous trips, and the joy of finding cheap flights! So, before I found a full-time job with proper paperwork, Tien and I took a trip to Edinburgh. That was how I turned my luck around.

Back in Dublin, I got a job as a waitress at a casino, and after only about three or four weeks there I received an offer from a café: Butler's Chocolate Cafe, the chocolate shop where I'd had some of the best drinks in Dublin! I stayed at the café right up until I left Ireland. This working holiday also took me to so many places I never imagined I'd go in my life, and I even planned lots of spur-of-the-moment two-day trips! That year I seemed to find so many more opportunities and ideas, about the future and about life, so I loved every experience to the full. I'll slowly share my life in Ireland and each of my trips. As Inside Out 2 says, "As long as you're having fun, you're not lost." So follow your own feelings and your own pace, and everything will turn out to be the best arrangement!