I’m sitting in a booth of four on the RER, outbound to Charles-de-Gaulle airport from Paris City Centre. It’s 11pm, and I’m clutching a piece of poster paper emblazoned with the words “Bologna Babes”, haphazardly put together in my flat a few hours before. I’m on my way to surprise Meabh and Alannah at their gate – their flight had been delayed by around 6 hours because of snow in Paris, and they had spent most of the day snapping pictures of them looking morose while slumped on the floor of Bologna airport. 

They would be the newest in a slew of visitors me and my flatmate Grace had entertained while on Erasmus, but not the last. 

Each year, a large chunk of third year students disappear from Trinity, disembarking on Erasmus voyages to different spots around the continent. Hotspots are places like Paris, Bologna and Barcelona, but no corner really remains untouched by a Trinity student determined to try something a bit different for a year or semester. Lots of the discussion around the Erasmus programme is highly individualised. Each year at Law Ball there’s an award given to the person “Most likely to find themselves on Erasmus”, a satirical poke at the common trope that the exchange programme is all about individual growth and development. 

However, sitting on the outbound M2 to CDG (That’s Charles-de-Gaulle, for us Parisian locals), I chronologically place Meabh and Alannah on the list of guests me and my flatmate Grace have had to our little flat in the 15th arrondissement – they’re number 13 and 14. It brings to mind a whole other aspect of the Erasmus experience: the opportunity to visit friends in other countries.

To the wide-eyed opportunist, Erasmus is so much more than your friend jetting off to a random European city. The world is suddenly a lot more accessible when your nearest and dearest have been flung across Europe and beyond; all at once, you have an excuse to visit a host of new cities (and free accommodation). Heading off on Erasmus, you are at the optimal age for considering a futon mattress on your friend’s apartment floor the epitome of grungy college glamour. Love is a language best shown through making mochas using local coffee beans in their new moka pot, and generosity is divulging the location of your favourite Sunday flea market where they sell hammered silver jewellery for a fiver a piece. 

Of course that isn’t to say that any of our guests were opportunists for coming to stay with Grace and I. Rather, it’s to paint a picture of Erasmus that recognises that the experience is made not just by where you go, but by who you are with and without. It’s often said that being around real friends is akin to being at home. This makes friends visiting on Erasmus a paradoxical experience – you’re simultaneously at home, yet far from it. In this way, visits from friends, the coming and going, keeps you tethered to home while creating a new one. Exchanging memories about people we went to school with alongside my hometown friends while wrapped tightly in a new trench coat at a bistro overlooking the square at Le Contrescarpe – who says you can’t be at home in two places at once? This strange intertwining of timelines and locations meshes into the indescribable sensation that seems to fall on those who go on Erasmus, highlighting the centrality of visitors and others to the experience as a whole.

To some extent, though, it is still ultimately an individualised experience. The memories you make of a city, the people you meet, are all pieces of thread you weave together to make a tapestry of the time you’ve spent abroad. That sounds idyllic, but friends coming to visit grounds this experience, in the same way you might feel when reading personal poetry in a room full of your peers. All of a sudden your tapestry is a possession you share with those who have come to see you. This allows your experience to become more realised than it could have been otherwise. I may not be able to give you a historically accurate walking tour of Paris, but I can point out the spot where we had a few too many below the Eiffel Tower, or our favourite bar where I realised I fancied the German boy from one of my law modules. And what’s my new Parisian trench coat if not something to be picked apart as ‘performative’ and ‘cliche’ by those closest to me?

When I got to visit Meabh and Alannah in Bologna, I swapped my trench coat for a denim jacket and let myself be carried away in their experience that they had forged. In the same way as I took guests to my favourite bakery, to my stop for college on the metro, to the dive bar where they did five euro pints on a Tuesday – they took me to their spots, anecdotes woven from their previous experiences. I might not have visited Bologna for many years had they not ended up there on Erasmus, and if I had, my trip probably would have been noted for immersion in the beautiful culture, awe at the ancient architecture. Instead, I was fortunate enough to receive a curated experience – an underground jazz bar it had taken them months to find, a statue that had a lewd backstory, the gay club that played Luigi Mangione edits on the projector. 

The sign I’m holding is tattered, and utterly more indicative of a crafty, harum-scarum side of myself which decidedly doesn’t add up to the elegant refined persona I pretended to create while in Paris. It’s akin to ones I might have made in a science fair at school – a true Parisian would have done this in cursive script using sloe-black ink, as opposed to a green sharpie they picked up that morning. Yet, as tacky as it is, the poster is what will set me apart from the others at the arrival gate for the flight from Milan. You can’t quite recreate the Irish penchant for tat, and the blotchy poster will serve its purpose for those who will know what to look for.

Law Ball is around the corner, and our year has been pumped full of individuals like myself who are all worthy contenders to fulfil the brief of having ‘found themself’ on Erasmus. If I was feeling particularly sanctimonious (Parisian, dare I say) I’d challenge that the award should be scrapped for a collective nod of the head for those who found each other while on Erasmus. I’d smash the plastic tiara they give out into smithereens, and blow it over all of us who went away, and lived and relived experiences time and time again for all those who came to see us. Then again, the same individuals whose visits would qualify me to say such a thing would be the same ones to immediately distance themselves from any association with such notion in horror. In this spirit, perhaps the award should stay the same, but maybe our personal reflections on what Erasmus is and can be ought to be what changes. It’s not an individualised experience – it’s a collective transition. It’s a gaggle of 20 year olds who change their Snapchat bitmojis to be wearing berets and poke fun at their friends posting Instagram stories with Edith Piaf playing in the background. It’s three people trying to get ready at the same sink while two more argue over whose turn it is to sleep on the floor that night. It’s a boy in a new trench coat hoping his friends from home will find his Erasmus-inspired poster a little bit funny when their plane finally lands.