I’ve now gone through the leaving-someplace-I-love process more times than I’d care to remember. And let me tell you – it never gets easier, at least for me. This time around it was even harder than four years ago, at the Erasmus exchange. Back then, we all left to our various home countries, but now, I left all of my newly made and amazing friends behind, and it still aches.

Ok, I promise I’ve left all the sad parts in the introduction, let’s look at how the month of June was all bright, warm and shiny for me. It started with a Bank Holiday weekend, which was partially spent with friends at the beach in Malahide and saw my cheeks get sunburnt yet again. The main thing is, I swam!

I strangely returned to Malahide the very next weekend, that time to the Castle & Gardens, because one of my favourite bands was playing there – Gorillaz! It was a perfect package deal, because I got to go there with my favourite lads I met five years ago in Slovenia because they were doing their Erasmus in Ljubljana at the time. We had an amazing time. I spent a lot of time in Dublin, hanging out with my Slovenian and Croatian friends and I went to visit my friend Polona in Belfast and got to see her baby boy Elliot! It was cuteness overload 🙂

A lot of evenings and nights in that last months were spent playing Uno with my friends, we got very immersed in the game and of course, very competitive. We may sound like complete nerds but I don’t care because we had so much fun and laughed hard at each other’s blunders and twists of the game all the time. The time to leave was nevertheless approaching fast, so everything got a tinge of wistfulness and sadness about it.

At least it all ended with a bang 🙂 Last weekend of my stay some friends from the UK flew over and we had a really nice trip to Connemara. Everyone interested in visiting anything of extreme natural beauty in Ireland should visit it! On Saturday, we first stopped in Tullamore for some whiskey cocktails, we drove through the beautiful Connemara landscape, we (almost) climbed a mountain… and then the next day, we went back to Maynooth. Sunday was spent in a ruin of a monastery (Ross Errilly Friary), then in Salthill for some ice cream, we traipsed through Galway to hear some of them amazing buskers and stopped in Athlone for some food. It was a gorgeous sunny day and it ended with my Goodbye/Birthday party, having all the important people over at our house and dancing until the morning light.

I can’t say these four months have been easy all the time, but to sum it all up, I really had an amazing time. I treasure meeting all the wonderful people, especially all my colleagues from the office a great deal. I would recommend any and everyone to do an internship in the International Office of Maynooth University, because it really does have the best people. And also, Ireland beware, because I shall be back!