There is always an adjusting period for how long it takes you to feel at home when you find yourself in a foreign city, country or continent. You know, how you say "let's get back home," when your legs start to hurt after a long day of sightseeing on vacation, but you actually mean your hotel or the apartment you're renting.

When I decided to jet off to Ireland for a semester, I was equally terrified and hopeful.
Terrified that I'll spend the semester locked in my room without any friends; terrified that something bad might happen at home and I couldn't be there; terrified that I would screw up traveling alone and end up stranded on the other side of the world; terrified that the semester abroad might scare off my wonderful boyfriend.
But also hopeful to find a new home and leave a piece of my heart in Ireland. As Amy Poehler, whose book I have finally acquired a few days ago, once said, this is the time to take risks - as you grow older, you become more fearful and less flexible.

After deciding to be less fearful and more flexible, I am now sitting in the dining room of my shared house not too far away from Maynooth University while I watch my French housemate prepare a quiche (it's quiche day, after all), I hear my German housemate singing to herself in the next room, and I hear my Slovenian housemate coughing upstairs, and I think to myself: "This is home."

This is my home for now.

As much as I anxiously anticipated the four long months ahead of me that I would spend in Ireland, the moment I settled into our lovely, badly insulated Irish house with a heating problem, and met my mixed bunch of housemates, I felt like home.

All the other parts of this experience were just added benefits; like the fact that I now live in the city where one of my favorite musicals, Once, was filmed. Or that I wanted to attend Trinity College of Dublin after I finished high school and now I actually study at a university not that far away that is even more beautiful than Trinity. Or the fact that the Irish are one of the nicest nationalities I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. And the concept of "luck of the Irish" that I unknowingly live my life by.

I know it will be painful to eventually leave this part of my life and these people behind, but for now, this is home. And these amazing people are home.