Ellen, Maya, Olivia, Conor, Charlotte and I sit around a table. I have strategically placed a bag of M&S cookies in the centre. Ellen spent last term in Barcelona, Maya in Zurich, Olivia in California, Conor in Montreal, and Charlotte in Palermo. We do not need the cookies, they are each eager to talk about their experiences. 

*The following conversation has been shortened for brevity. 

Eve: What was it like first going over? What were your expectations? 

Ellen: I thought it’d be harder to move away. Actually, it wasn’t hard at all. 

Olivia: This was my first time living by myself. So I was very Type A, I knew exactly what I was doing, like the second I was getting there and everything. 

It was very much like the movies going over there. I remember watching Monsters Inc, the university one, on the plane, and getting there and being like, Oh my god, this is literally like Monsters Inc. 

“Honestly I think before I actually went over there, nothing was going right”, Conor laughs. “So when it came to Erasmus […] the idea of getting accommodation, and stuff like that, it was too fucking dif icult, I couldn’t think about it. 

But then, by the time I was going over, I was actually really happy. And I was anticipating stress, but I was also really anticipating a lot of peace”. 

Charlotte: I didn’t think about it the whole summer. People kept asking me, oh my god, are you excited? And I kept being like, Oh yeah, it’s just like a little holiday! 

Eve: Doing only the one semester, did you guys feel a pressure to do everything? And what was it like making friends within that little space of time? 

Ellen: I really felt like I was a first year again. 

Any sort of relationship there was intense, because everyone’s like, you’re only there for four months. 

Maya: I only met about two people who were staying for a full year. So everyone was in that mindset. …. I’m glad now that I didn’t do the full year because… you’d just be so tired! 

Ellen: Did you feel like you’d get FOMO if you didn’t go out once? 

Maya: Yeah, totally. 

Ellen: That’s how I’d feel. I’d be like oh my god I didn’t go out this one time!!

Olivia: I lived by myself, and I had 10 days before, like from getting there to when class started. …. It was the longest week of my life. I knew no one. I didn’t have any way of making any friends, because there were no events or anything. I was like, I can’t do this. I gotta go home! 

However, Olivia did not go home! She settled in and by the following week, “because you want to make the most of it … we were already traveling”. 

“The money that’s poured into [the Frats] is CRAZY. That was one of the most shocking things that I saw. The parties were insane. They had famous DJs and stuff. And one week it was Parent’s Week, so all the parents flew into the college. They had a football game that weekend, and my friend was also visiting from Trinity, so I was trying to show her around, and she’s like, This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. And like, there were babies at the frat parties that week. 

They do tailgating. So they’ll go drinking at the frat parties before the football games”. “The babies would?!”, laughs Conor. 

Maya: I feel like a frat party is not the place for parents. 

Ellen: But they probably experienced it too. It’s part of their culture. 

Conor: When I was five, I was at a frat party! 

“It was definitely the parents living out their glory days for a lot of it”, Olivia laughs. “One of the dads jumped from like the top of this thing into a crowd. Everyone was like whose dad is that? 

Ellen: Were there any [frat parties] in Canada? 

Conor: No, not that I knew of. I think there was stuff like that but not for me. I feel like a bad judge, because everyone is saying, oh I was at everything. I wasn’t at anything! I met like three people at the start of the year, and never talked to anybody else!! 

I think the people that I was with then, I was insanely close with. 

We were also in a WhatsApp group for just general exchange students. But all the people in the group chat were good mates with these two Israeli guys, and one of them was in the IDF, so we didn’t hang out with them. 

Eve: That’s another question I want to get onto, politics … I’m very curious to know what it was like in other places… 

Charlotte: Palermo is one of the most pro Palestine places I’ve ever been to. There’s Palestine flags everywhere. It’s because Sicily was where all the flotillas went from. 

Also everyone says, we’re Sicilian, we’re not Italian. Italian politics is going really right wing. So they’re really trying to step away from that, and separate themselves. 

“And then I was the same as Conor as well…. Like having, like, three insanely close friendships, and then not talking to anyone else”, Charlotte laughs. “It was just because the apartment I lived in, it was

me and two girls, and I was sleeping in a bed under the stairs in the kitchen. So it was like, you had to be close!” 

“We didn’t make friends in the college, it was more like the city itself. It’s not a big university town there. So you make friends just with people who are living there”. 

“In a weird way, Israel was a huge part of my exchange”, Conor says. “There was genuinely one time I went to college and they had a giant board on the main grass and it literally said: Pray for the IDF. And there were loads of people clapping and chatting and stuff like that”. 

Ellen: Aren’t we shocked by that actually? Canada’s a very globalized country. 

Conor: Also…the actual college… the front gates of it were a hot spot for protests. There was one time I was walking by, and I took my headphones out, and they were playing ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, and it was for Iranian independence. 

Ellen: I actually lived off the square that the Catalonian Parliament sits at, so there was literally a protest every day. Sometimes it was for Catalonian independence….a lot of pro-Palestine ones. 

Sometimes getting home would actually be a struggle, because everyone’s packed together trying to get through. 

Maya: [Switzerland] is obviously quite an independent country. They have obvious links to other places, but they’re not in the EU. So I think they tend to not get involved. 

There was this big open hall in the main building of the Uni, and there were loads of tables set up in it. And so there would always be people meeting there, studying there…There were a good few days that I would be in there and you would see people with signs up. 

A lot of it, unfortunately, was through German and I don’t speak a lot of German so I wasn’t totally involved. 

Olivia: I was very nervous about making friends with people because of their political beliefs. It was crazy how much people would silently support Donald Trump. 

You’d be getting coffee with someone, and think you’d be getting on well, and then they’d be like: “yeah but he’s a good businessman…”. 

It came out that USC was pouring funds into Israel. But there were no protests about it. 

All my prior research had confirmed that it was a very liberal college, because I felt safe going over there, and then when I got there, I was very surprised with some of the attitudes of professors. 

Eve: Does anyone have any funny stories, or any moments when you were on your exchange that shocked or surprised you?

Charlotte: I got a lime thrown at me by an eight year old on a motorbike! 

All the kids would just be on these motorbikes, just going around. 

The men there were actually disgusting, that’s the one thing that I will say that was really bad about it. 

Charlotte also tells us that often, at night, fireworks would go off. “I looked it up, and I think it’s the mafia, when someone gets released from prison, they do that, I think, as a celebration?! 

“So when people would come over to visit me, they’d be like, is there a gunfight happening? And I’m like, no, just a mafia person got released. Don’t worry!!! 

Ellen: My apartment had a little tiny balcony that was onto this little alleyway…And [this guy] would sleep under there, and he would always pee there. 

And sometimes…drunk men on nights out, would go down that alleyway…So one of my roommates bought a water gun…. Like the way that the actual people from Barcelona do that to tourists… So anytime anyone would pee on the street, we would spray them! 

Eve: Did anyone try anything that they had never tried before? Or did your diet change much when you were there? Were you cooking for yourself, or were you eating out? So, yeah…. food!!! 

A lot of places Ellen visited served sangria by the litre. “There was this one place, a student bar that everyone would always go to, that would get you unbelievably drunk. And then if you ended up throwing up… it would just be pink! 

“Awwww”, we all respond in unison. 

Maya: Zurich is really expensive. I kind of knew it was going to be expensive, but I was like, I’ve been paying rent in Dublin for a couple years….it can’t be worse. And then I got over there and I was like, “Oh, it is way worse, actually”. 

There was a canteen on campus which was cheaper, and it is a Uni right in the middle of the city as well, like here, so you are pretty close to food spots. 

I had a local Lidl and Aldi. 

Olivia: Yeah it was kind of the same, it was so expensive to go out so that was just not on the cards. 

The food in America is…. kind of designed to make you sick. You’d see it in the prices of things. Like apples would be so expensive, and then junk food would be way cheaper. 

Every American I was like “This is not normal. You are being – I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I was like – POISONED BY THE GOVERNMENT”!!

We had a Trader Joe’s on campus, which was the cheapest place. 

Conor: I was in a student building that had a meal plan ….it was basically like a cafeteria. They also had a soda machine, so I got really addicted to cherry Minute Maid lemonade. 

Charlotte: We would make a big pot of pasta every day …. There was a place that we used to go to so often that you could get a whole pizza for a fiver. 

And my last week there, I kept coming in being like, “I’m leaving soon bye”! but then I’d be in the next day. 

Eve: Was anyone homesick? Was that an issue at all? 

Olivia: I was expecting to be homesick because.. when I’ve gone away for long periods before, I’ve been so homesick, but I was so fine. My mom would text me every week and be like, hey, you alive? And I’d be like yes! 

I don’t know I wasn’t expecting it, but the second I got there, and I got into a routine, I was so fine. 

Ellen: I think I was homesick for my friends at certain points. …especially when I didn’t know people very well, in the first little bit, I’d be like, “ohh wish I could just talk to this friend in person”. I did have a couple people visit me, to be fair, which was really nice. 

Eve: Most of you are used to living at home with your family….that was probably nice, being independent? 

Ellen: Yeah definitely. 

Eve: Did you find that hard then readjusting to that? 

Olivia: I got back on the 23rd of December, and the next day I wanted to go Christmas shopping, and I was trying to drive my car … .and my mum was like: NO, NO, NO, You’re gonna drive on the wrong side of the road! 

Charlotte: I think it was a nice time to come home…. 

Our apartment only had cold water for our shower. So I was like: a hot shower pleaseeee. Like it was those things that you don’t think about. 

Maya: I think I would have found it way harder to leave if I was going home for summer. 

There’s the excitement of coming home for Christmas…. I came home on the 24th so it was literally, got home, and then you don’t have time to think about the fact that, that’s over. And, only now I’m kind of realizing I was like, Jesus that feels like that didn’t even happen.

Ellen: It feels like a fever dream. 

Charlotte: It literally feels like a fever dream. 

Ellen: Like this is not real. I wasn’t just there. I had a whole completely different life. Maya: I was so removed from my life here…. 

Eve: How does it feel being back in Trinity? 

Ellen: It’s getting easier now but I felt disconnected from the general Trinity life. …. But that is just something that will happen over time. 

Maya: There are a few modules that I’m in that had a part one to them last semester, and I’m like we’ll just figure that out along the way, I guess. 

Charlotte: I feel kind of behind but that’s just because college over in [Sicily] was so chill. 

I heard some people talking about not doing Erasmus because they were worried about that aspect of it… But I feel like you get experience in other ways. You learn to move to a different city that you’ve never been to, and make friends, and be independent… so it kind of balances out. 

Conor: Before I went away, I really felt a need to get away from things … .Now coming back, I actually feel a lot better.