Communication problems in the suburbs of Dublin

During our junior year my class and I went on a language trip to Ireland. We stayed there for two weeks,

Dun Laoghaire

which were 10 days in Dublin and the rest going to Galway a town on the west coast where we got to see some of the beautiful nature the Emerald Island has to offer, such as the Cliffs of Moher for example. We were all placed as a pair of two in host families in the Dublinian (in lack of a better adjective) suburb of Dun Laoghaire.

While Dun Laoghaire is a nice little town only 15 minutes away from Dublin by train it was a little bit boring, since all it had to offer was a small mall and a McDonald's which most of us went to to meet up. It didn't really matter though since our teachers made sure we were entertained most of the time. Before noon we had English classes at the local language school which I personally didn't find very helpful since we only learned stuff we had already done in school years before. After school our Austrian teacher would take us to Dublin for some sightseeing or hiking or the beach.

What I found most challenging about our stay there was the Irish English. I don't know if this applies for the rest of the town or if our host family was originally from Dublin but they sported a thick dialect that was almost unintelligible to me. While in America or England I never had problems, communication with them was kind of hard. There are some phrases of the things stuck in my memory because our host mother had to repeat them at least three times until I finally got it. For instance she always said “hosh” instead of “hot” and her question if we were going back out sounded something like “ ah yoush going back awt?”. While for the first few days you felt like a complete failure at English for having her repeat everything three times you get used to it and start figuring out what they were talking about. And this is what I would have liked to work on in that language school there. Dialect and differences to British and American English and also learn something about the Irish language Gaelic. Although we touched on the topic Gaelic language in one of our lessons I think the only thing we learned was “Pog mo thoin” which is kiss my ass and can be found on various t-shirts that they sell to tourists in Dublin. Dublin itself was a nice city, it reminded me a little of Graz just a little bigger. The only strange thing we saw there was that many people “walked” their children on a leash which was a bit disturbing but yeah.

Overall staying in Ireland was a fun challenge for my English as well as a great experience and although there are place more interesting for me personally I'm glad I got a chance to visit