i arrived one day late. after the boston detour, the missed connection, the hotel voucher, the mapparium — i finally landed in dublin. the cohort was already there, already settled. i showed up with a full night’s sleep, zero regrets, and a bruised heart i hadn’t told anyone about.
there was a breakup. i’m going to mention it here not because it’s the story, but because it’s the reason this trip lives where it does in me. you’ll understand by the end.
ireland had been waiting. it was very much okay with that.
the point of this trip was study abroad — cultural immersion, international business in practice, experiencing how global companies operate from inside their walls. azusa pacific is a christian university, which meant the itinerary had both boardrooms and cathedrals on it. if you know me, you know: God is with me everywhere. and after the way this journey started — that detour in boston — i already knew he had a plan. i opened the door and tried to stay present for all of it.
what followed was one of the fullest weeks of my academic life. intel labs europe — we stood in front of that sign in our best professional attire and looked like exactly what we were: american graduate students trying to absorb as much as possible before our return flights. google had a satellite workspace in dublin too. the access was real. the conversations were real. the kind of behind-the-curtain look at multinational operations that no textbook can replicate.
trinity college dublin. if you have never been to the long room library — go. floor to ceiling books, rolling ladders, marble busts lining the hall. i stood next to aristotle and thought about how much he would have had to say about organizational science. i did not ask him. i did take a picture. we also visited maynooth university, where we stood on the steps of the chapel — red brick, gothic arched windows, stained glass catching what little light ireland was offering that day — and it felt less like a field trip and more like a reminder of why we were there.
and then there was The Upper Room in mullingar. a youth ministry space where the wall simply says ‘welcome home’ and means every word of it. we went to give something and left with more than we brought. that’s how those moments work — you think you’re doing service and then somewhere in the middle of it you realize the service is being done on you. i needed that more than i knew.
this was one week before the brexit vote. emotions were high everywhere — you could feel it in conversations, in the way people talked about borders and belonging and what it meant to be in or out. but here’s what i noticed about ireland in that moment: they were holding disagreement with dignity. vocal, passionate, full conviction — and then going back to their pint without destroying their neighbor’s home or business. i noted it. i’m still thinking about it, especially given everything that came after.
we visited christ church cathedral. we boarded the jeanie johnston — a replica famine ship moored on the river liffey — and stood on its deck looking back at the city, thinking about the people who once stood on a ship just like it and looked forward at nothing but open water, leaving everything behind. the EPIC museum tells you the numbers of the irish diaspora. the jeanie johnston makes you feel them. do both.
galway was a different exhale entirely.
we took the train. we ate pizza in eyre square standing up, in the cold, completely delighted. there is a chocolate shop in bellharbour that i will think about for the rest of my life — the kind of place where you buy more than you need and then finish it all before you reach the car. we visited dunguaire castle, sitting right on the water with the irish flag flying, and i walked the path toward it feeling like i had stumbled into a story someone wrote a very long time ago. the cliffs of moher came next. i sat on the edge, looked out at the atlantic, and felt completely small and completely fine with it. there are views that reset something in you. that was one of them. at dusk, near the claddagh, swans drifted across the water with the city lights warm behind them. it looked like a painting. it was just tuesday.
belfast carries its history differently from the republic — heavier, closer to the surface, written right on the walls. the northern ireland murals are not subtle and they’re not meant to be. they tell you exactly where you are and what this city has held. spend time with them.
and then, on a chain-link fence, a giant heart made of red and black pompoms. surrounded by all that political weight, someone had woven something soft and unmistakably hopeful into the wire. i stood in front of it longer than made sense. belfast city hall at night, lit in purple and gold, looked like the city was trying to show you its best self. the titanic museum — that stunning jagged building that looks like a ship’s prow cutting the sky — reminded you that belfast also built the thing. complicated pride is still pride. go in. learn the whole story, not just the movie.
now the part that wasn’t on the official APU itinerary.
the guinness storehouse — where i learned to pour a proper pint. the two-part pour, the angle, the patience. there is a science to it. we also did a whiskey tasting inside the storehouse because at that point we had decided to build a full curriculum. the jameson distillery, where i bottled my own black barrel — pictures or it didn’t happen, and it happened. the irish whiskey museum, a three-glass tasting flight, by which point i felt genuinely educated. and then st. andrew square, a live band, an irish jig, a beer in hand, strangers dancing next to each other without overthinking it. pre-pandemic. i am grateful i was there for that specific version of the world.
walking along the liffey at night, the ha’penny bridge lit and reflected in the water below — dublin doing that thing cities do after dark when they stop performing and just exist. i stood on that bridge for a while. i didn’t want to move.
f.x. buckley for the steak. the filet arrived like it had already won something. i ate every bite and felt nothing but gratitude.
eat everything. drink the milk — yes, the milk, it tastes different there and i cannot fully explain it but it does. eat the butter. order the steak. ireland is a country where the ingredients are simply better, and everything made from them knows it.
here’s what i didn’t say at the beginning: i was going through a breakup while all of this was happening.
i was pretending life was gravy. smiling in every photo, saying yes to every extra stop, keeping up with the cohort. and underneath all of it — a bruised heart, a bruised sense of self, the particular quiet devastation of feeling like your world got smaller right before it got very, very large.
what ireland did, without trying, was put my problems in their correct proportion. standing at the cliffs of moher, you cannot hold onto the thing that was breaking you at the same size it felt in your kitchen at home. it shrinks. not because it wasn’t real, but because the world is so much bigger than the corner of it where you were hurting. you are standing at the edge of a continent. there is so much of what God created left to see.
those out-of-body moments — on the jeanie johnston, in The Upper Room, watching swans in galway at dusk — they restored something. my self-esteem. my identity. the quiet certainty that i was an independent woman who had traveled across a country, across an ocean, to this grand and majestic place. my heart was bruised and also my heart was winking — in that i see what you did here kind of way. God, the universe, whatever name you’re most open to in your moments of vulnerability — he knows how to make his message heard. he knew i needed this. he knew what form to send it in. and in those moments, somewhere between the cliffs and the ministry and the ha’penny bridge at night, all i heard was: no mms Mayra — no pasa nada. todo pasa por algo. sin miedo al éxito.
if you know, you know.
do the study abroad. regardless of age. regardless of where you are in your degree, your career, your life. you meet people you’d never otherwise meet. you breathe different air. you come back changed — not always in ways you can articulate right away, but changed. you left as one version and returned as the upgrade. x 2.0. it’s completely legitimate to call it that.
i didn’t come back the same person who missed her connection in boston.
i wouldn’t trade that for anything.
ireland gave me a week of classrooms and ministry and cliffs. a group of people i won’t forget. a country that knows how to be itself without apology. and the quiet, settled knowledge that the delay in boston — and maybe everything else that hurt that year — was exactly where the story was supposed to begin.
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