Thirty Minutes Early

This evening on the 24th of July, I was thirty minutes early to our evening study session. The Global Lounge, our principal meeting spot, was closed, as there was no supervisor or student group in there yet. So I sat outside of it in one of the chairs next to the second cafeteria global center building and took in one of the last days of idle time on this trip.

The global building (not sure of its name) is set up as three floors. The top floor is one cafeteria, the one our group eats at. The middle floor is filled with functional things: computers for registered students to use, a post office, a UCD merchandise shop, bathrooms, and vending machines. The lowest floor, where I was, had both a second cafeteria and the Global Lounge (essentially a recreation room and meeting place for international students). The cafeteria is an open room, and the Global Lounge has doors to offices of study abroad coordinators and the lounge itself. Outside it are a few chairs next to the cafeteria, where I sat to take in the cafeteria chatter and relax a bit to record the experience.

This cafeteria was assigned to all the groups from Spain and the new Italian groups that came in soon after our first group left. Their counselors (both Irish UCD grads and supervisors from whichever country they came from) also ate here. This created a trilingual smoothie of hearty chatter which echoed throughout the building up the open stairs in the middle of the whole building.

Someone dropped a fork or cutlery of some kind. The particulars aren't important. What's funny is that as soon as the clatter occurred, everyone in the cafeteria burst into applause in an act of collective sarcasm. It was the best group response I've seen all week.

There are Spanish kids living across the way from the apartment I'm in, but they're quite shy. We've tried to talk to them a couple times, but with no success. The Italian fifteen year olds, on the other hand, will go out of their way to ask you for a cigarette. Ahh, cultural differences. Disappointingly, there are cigarette butts all over campus near curbs and such places of informal teenage gathering. 

Now the meeting is about to start, so I have to end this here. We're working on the late posts presently.