Thoughts on my travels

Now more than a year removed from my extravaganza of a trip I am still so thankful I was able to do it. How many people are afforded the opportunity to spend a full five weeks in a foreign country. I guess plenty of our servicemen do, but at least the Irish never shot at me.

I used to hear pro athletes at their retirement press conferences remark, “I owe so much to basketball and want to help give back.” I always thought what the heck are they talking about. Basketball is a game. How can you owe it something. Well this trip helped me understand. If not for basketball I wouldn’t have had the chance to visit a new and exciting place and at the same time make money. Basketball also helped me to travel in a manner way better than most tourists. I stayed with families, befriended Irish people and really learned about the culture. Not that it’s very different from here, but it is different. The biggest difference is that you feel so safe over there. There aren’t bad neighborhoods or trailer parks or even guns. There are some slightly run down areas, but at no point do you ever feel in danger.

Another difference is how nothing gets done in the mornings. I do feel that here we are too preoccupied with the early morning. It’s not healthy to be up at 5am when the sun doesn’t come up until 7am. Over there, they take it to the other extreme and cities are ghost towns until 10am. Another thing is the Irish term Fáilte. It means more than just welcome. It means welcome to the point that you feel totally comfortable and at ease. The Irish are perhaps the most hospitable people on earth. It took me a while to realize this though. Here is something I wrote when I first got there that I did not put on the blog.

I just feel so out of place. I miss America. No matter where I go in America, I feel at home. Here, it feels very different. I feel out of place, because I am out of place. I dress differently, I speak differently and I live differently. That shouldn’t keep me from enjoying myself, but it does make me uncomfortable most of the time.

I didn’t include it in the blog because by the end of the trip it was a ridiculous thought. Yes, I was out of place, my accent, clothes and haircut all made me different. But no one thought ill of me for it. I never even got the feel that I was being judged for being an “outsider” once I was over the initial worries of being in a new place. In the end it was a great experience. It was liberating to go a month without a cell phone. It was great to roam around a country without anything but bus fare and a rain jacket. It was thrilling to climb the same mountain as St. Patrick and to drink myself silly in Pubs. It was fantastic for my whole family to come over and to see where my ancestors lived many centuries ago. It was great to fall in love with another culture and at the same time love your own even more. I couldn’t live without college football and college basketball. I couldn’t live without hanging out at the pool in the summer or celebrating the fourth of July. So I loved my trip for what I learned and the experiences I will remember for all my life.