Living in The Liberties: Life in the heart of the city

By Paavani Pegatraju

My first month here in this unbelievably welcoming country has been a whirlwind, rich with experiences and adventures. Right from getting used to the weather (I’m from India), to taking tours and sightseeing, to registering for my modules and trying to keep up with my coursework, and to having tea, tea, and more tea, it has been overwhelming! Much of the credit for this amazing experience goes to the area where I live. Like most visiting students here for one-term, I chose to stay at Binary Hub.

European Explorations

By Kailee Madden

Before beginning my semester abroad at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, I took two weeks to travel around other areas of Europe. This whirlwind of a trip brought me from the city of Prague in the Czech Republic, through central Europe and Italy, and finally to Geneva, Switzerland.

The Spirit of Dublin is On Fire

By Amirah Orozco

I vividly remember the moment I opened up the email with the approval to attend Trinity College for my junior year or third year. Being given the opportunity to attend Trinity College will always be a dream come true. One of Dublin’s most popular tourist attractions, Trinity College’s beautiful architecture is hardly rivalled. Established in 1592, the walls have stood tall and steady for much of Irish history. The classrooms have seen the likes of Mary Robinson, Oscar Wilde, and even One Direction’s token Irishman, Niall Horan. While I was certain about Trinity College, I naïvely never even considered the experience of living in Dublin. It is now, one month into my experience, the one thing I would cite as having the greatest impact on my time here. While the small island of Ireland is only the size of Indiana, Dublin’s unique historical situation makes it a cosmopolitan centre unlike any other.

Why I Call Ireland “Home” After Two Months

By: Agape Deng (M.Phil in Speech and Language Processing)

I started pondering whether my soul was dead when I was fourteen years old after reading a patriotic poem by Sir Walter Scott titled, “My Native Land.” In it, the narrator asks if there exists a man who is so soul-dead that he has never loved or longed for his homeland. He warns readers that “if such there breathe, go, mark him well,” for he is, in short, a proud, vile wretch doomed to die alone in shame. So there I was, a little Chinese girl living in Russia learning this English poem about what it is to love your country and feeling, on one hand, guilty that I possessed no such loyalty, and on the other hand, forlorn that I had no country to call my own.

Welcome to Singapore

By Cian Weldon (Biomedical engineer)

Singapore is known as The Garden City, and not for no reason. With an area less than a third of my home county of Meath, and with a population of nearly six million, one million more than Ireland, crowded was the least I expected of this South East Asian city-state. I was wrong. As a country boy in Dublin, I often found myself missing some greenery, but not here in Singapore. Every street is lined with trees, and parks are abundant throughout the city. Even the highly developed business district, where skyscrapers rarely drop below fifty stories, is lush with greenery. Traffic congestion and its resulting fumes aren’t an issue here either as heavy taxation leads the price of a VW Golf to be a whopping S$120,000 (€75,000)! Such is the result of an incumbent, but democratically elected, interventionalist government party.