Culture Shock in Ireland: My First Impressions as an American

it's my first time ever here in Ireland and there are some interesting things that I noticed in my first few days staying in Dublin the first thing is that it's really so green it's like everywhere you look there's green whether it's part of nature or green lights green paint green houses green is everywhere and it's really beautiful but I was just very taken aback by Hal Green Ireland really is another thing that I noticed really quickly is how expensive it is especially compared to the rest of Europe and I've heard this is mostly within Dublin and that once you get outside of the city that the prices are a lot more reasonable in The Villages and smaller towns throughout the country so I'm here in Ennis scary at the powers court house and Gardens and I can say that you notice even 30 minutes or an hour outside of Dublin that the prices do start to go down but Dublin is a city that's known for having very high housing prices but also the prices at cafes coffee shops restaurants stores everything seems to be quite High very similar to the prices where I'm from in Florida taxis are also quite expensive and I found it funny that strangers on the street offered to split a cab with me at night after leaving a bar because they wanted to reduce the price you could pay around 11 to 20 Euro within Dublin City Center for like a five or ten minute ride and I even paid 30 Euro one time because there was no availability of taxis and sometimes the buses can be a bit slow so that was pretty shocking something that was a very pleasant surprise was how good the food was I really wasn't expecting that much as far as the foodie scene I haven't heard that much of about the scene here in Dublin or throughout Ireland I was kind of just expecting a lot of burgers and pub food and while of course there is plenty of that I was surprised by the variety of food and how many healthy options there were as well so if you come to Ireland definitely enjoy the local food everything at the cafes like soups sandwiches scones everything seems homemade and made within that location so that's something that shocked me in a good way another thing that surprised me was the weather it's actually been like this the entire time I've been here yeah it's been a little bit windy it's been a little cloudy and cold but it hasn't rained yet the whole time I was here and I was expecting it to rain pretty much every day so I've been pleasantly surprised at how mild the weather has been although maybe I just got lucky something that legitimately blew me away is how friendly the people are in Dublin now I've always heard that people are friendly in Ireland as they are in many countries but I definitely noticed that people see more laid back here they also seem to know each other like it seems like a very small town like a big city with a small town feel and I've noticed a lot of people like running into each other on the sidewalks greeting each other stopping for a chat and that's not something that you typically see in big cities people are usually in a hurry but I was definitely surprised by how many people seem to know each other and would just bump into each other on the streets and then how happy and open they were to talking with foreigners and strangers and so that's something that I really enjoyed they also wave to each other a lot and that's something that stuck out to me and they're also very nice to their bus driver so whenever you get off the bus everyone says thank you and I think that's really nice as well but one thing that a local told me is that even though people may seem friendly and happy on the outside it's not always that way on the inside and he said that a lot of his friends suffer from mental health problems and also feeling like they're not doing anything with their lives that they don't have enough opportunities and that they're just kind of stuck and I have seen some signs around just around the city that have numbers to call for like a mental health hotline and I mean that's something that I think all of us can relate with because mental health is a universal issue you and I don't know what the reasons for that are maybe if you're Irish or you're from Dublin you can give us some more insight into that but although it's something that you know definitely we can all relate to life isn't all sunshine and roses and rainbows and pots of gold another thing with the buses I learned the hard way that you have to flag down the bus if you want it to stop for you so even though I was kind of standing at the side of the bus stop and there was only one bus that stopped at the stop I was at the guy just kept driving so yeah if you want to catch the bus you have to stand outside and flag them down lesson learned something that I didn't like so much that I thought was strange especially because of all of the tech companies and multinational corporations that are based in Dublin is how slow the internet is the Wi-Fi is really slow at hotels at my Airbnb and also the 5G connection on my phone with my local SIM card was also pretty slow so in some countries you can get 50 or 100 megabit downloads per second on your phone and here it was like 10 to 15 to 20 whereas my Wi-Fi has been like one to five megabits per second so I've heard that that is pretty common throughout Dublin and possibly the rest of the country but that's something that really surprised me something else I wasn't expecting is to hear that the population still hasn't recovered from the Famine of the 1840s over 1 million people are estimated to have died during that time and many immigrated as well and so the country is still trying to rebuild its population from hundreds of years ago so that was quite shocking I also didn't expect to find a Japanese Zen Garden in an Irish village but here we are something that really confused me is that there don't seem to be any electrical plugs in any of the bathrooms now at first I thought it was just my hotel but it was also at my Airbnb and I noticed other people talking about it so yeah apparently there's no plugs in the bathroom so when you go to look for your hair dryer look in the kitchen or in a drawer in the desk or something like that and you may have to blow dry your hair in the living room on the plus side though just like in the UK you can actually turn off the individual electrical outlets so I think that's really cool and I wish we had that in the US as well I remember when I was in college my roommate used to unplug all of the appliances so we could save money on our electrical bill and yeah if we just had plugs that you could turn on and off we wouldn't have to do that something that I thought was really cool is that all of the signage and the road signs are in English as well as Irish and even though I knew that Irish was an official language here I didn't expect to see all of the signs in Irish so I think that that's really cool and it looks like quite a difficult language to learn but something else that really surprised me is that it could be quite normal for people to be late around here and that's not something that's very customary throughout Europe so I was pretty surprised to hear that yeah people could be 15 minutes late an hour late and it's really no big deal but also things are open quite late so I notice people out having dinner really late like 10 p.m 11 p.m clubs are open till 3 A.M and then there's also people out and about like just walking around on the streets in the middle of the night having kebabs and things at four or five in the morning so I was surprised at how Lively The Nightlife was and how late people were out and about and the towns outside of Dublin have quite interesting names I saw towns such as step aside goat's town and the scalp and I'm sure there are many more those are just a few of the towns that I've passed through so what other interesting things do you know about Dublin and Ireland in general let us know in the comments below and subscribe for more videos see you next time

Channel: Traveling with Kristin

Views: 332,568

Keywords: culture shock, culture shocks, dublin, ireland, dublin ireland, irish, irish people, irish culture, living in ireland, living abroad, american abroad, travel, traveling with kristin

Id: 081o-hgQX8M

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2023