-IRELAND-
On May 2008, I was given a grant to spend a month in an English-speaking country to practice and improve my English. The month was July and the destination was the country of Leprechauns and clover: Ireland.
Two weeks before the leaving day, all the students who have been given the grant, were summoned to a meeting, in which organizers would tell us what can we expect to find when we arrived: food we were going to find, daily habits, weather and, of course, everything in English!
We were given the departure day, together with the time of departure and the city in which we were going to live. From that day I began to get nervous because I was going to live with a family and share with them everything. I thought I won't be able to made myself understood in English and I would have problems with them. But all this stuff was provoked by uncertainty, because I didn't know how my host family would be and I didn't know also if I could manage there. However, everything was perfect and nervousness and insecurity soon disappeared once I arrived there.
The departure day I found myself and some of my friends, who also were given this grant, waiting at the airport to be told the name of our host families. We were there with other people who also would come to the same city I was going to. I forgot to say it was the city of Galway, or at least that was what we thought. Moreover, we first meet there a boy and a girl who would be responsible for our group.
We all had a strange feeling when we were given a paper in which we could find our host family's name. We start to compare names because we wanted to see if there was some relation between our names and we found that there were a common feature: we had been divided into two groups and each group would live in a different town in the County of Galway.
From that moment we started to talk each other and during the flight we shared more feelings and impressions about the journey we have just started.
When we arrived at Dublin's airport, we felt a bit shocked because from that moment English had to be the language of communication and that was something quite difficult for all us.
We had to take a bus to go from Dublin to our respective towns near Galway. It was a 4-hour travel, but it was nice because we could enjoy the green views that Ireland shows and we could get to know each other a bit more.
About 4 o'clock I arrived to Ougtherard, the town in which I was going to live. When I got off the bus, there was my host mum to pick me and brought me to the house that would be my house for a month.
At first, I was going to be the only Spanish at home, but organizers phoned my host mum and told her if she could take in another girl who hadn't have a home. The woman asked me if I would mind to have a roommate and, of course, I said I wouldn't mind it at all. I knew that having a roommate would imply that I wouldn't speak the whole day with the family in English, but at that moment I preferred it because it meant that I would have someone in my same situation and that is a positive thing when you find yourself alone in a country whose language is not yours.
The girl who was to be my roommate was one with whom I hadn't speak during the travel by bus so I didn't know anything about her, not even her name, but that was solved quickly. We got on well and didn't have a problem during the whole month.
The day after our arrival, we had to go to school to take our classes. There we found all the people we had met the day before, even though the ones who were living in the other town, because the school was in mine. There we made a level test to got separate in two groups. Once we had made the test, organizers showed us the facilities of the school. I have to say that was a very old school and facilities weren't so good. There were basketball courts outdoors and also a gym.
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