Student Bloggers

While much of the time you spend abroad may be used to enrich your individual experience and conception of the world, one of the most gratifying experiences is sharing your new home with the ones you love. Although I may be  relying heavily on the cliche that things are best when shared, it turns out to be fantastically true, especially when parents come to visit.

A parental visit has a myriad of positive potentials. On one hand, having parents visit you while abroad is a temporary luxury, you may very well be treated to dinners at places you simply didn't make the time for or didn't save the money for. On the other hand, you are given the opportunity to elevate your status from extended tourist to tour guide, you become the owner of privileged information that can only be acquired through experience, you become a pseudo-local in your parents eyes.

However, with great power comes great responsibility, and you must be able to provide suggestions and directions in several realms of the travel experience. I found that the parental (or even a friends visit) can be divided and conquered by addressing four categories:

• Historical: Consider what museums to visit, important cultural sites, and an array of fun facts that capture the city's history.
• Exclusively local: Recall where you have gone that seems to be absent of the tourist population, and seems to reflect the sentiment of the place you have spent a good portion of your semester.
• Culinary: Visitation of foods and drinks that exemplify the food culture of where you are, what restaurants are worth visiting, and what restaurants did you save to visit with them.
• Shared experience: Visit places you have been told to go and haven't gone yet, take tours you have heard rave reviews about, take a seat in pubs that you know have live music that earned a listen.

In regards to the historical, Dublin's museums make it easy. Not only are most museums free, they are usually quite proximal to one another. Just a short walk from Trinity College Dublin are many museums you can visit and practically spend a day in each. However, given the fact that time is limited, my parents and I took in the museums I deemed as crucial. The National Gallery is necessary to gain a sampling of Irish art (especially important modern artists such as Séan Keating, William Orpen, and Jack B Yeats), the National Museum is an easy way to receive an education on Ireland through many ancient artifacts and visiting the bodies discovered in bogs they were preserved in, and finally a peak in the National Library, where you have the opportunity to trace your heritage as well as view a display regarding the early 1900's in Ireland.

For the exclusively local, I first took my parents on a tour of my habits in Dublin. I showed them Hodges Figgis, Dublin's oldest bookstore where I spend my day gazing at the spines of many a book I long to read. We went on a walk around St. Stephen's Green, and spent some time in The Stag's Head, a local pub where I listen to live traditional Irish music in the evenings.  I tried to show them places where you can sit back and watch the true Irish locals interact in a world that is familiar to them, and only slightly foreign to us.

The culinary exploration and tour guiding was often guided by serendipity and time constraints. But my consistent suggestions will remain to be The Ginger Man for the best vegetarian curry, J.W. Sweetman's for the best ambience, Queen of Tarts for an ideal cup of tea and a scone or beautiful baked good, and Malone's for the best fish and chips. All of these are fed by my experiential bias of "firsts" in Dublin, however, I also consider them to be quite good!

The shared experience chosen between my parents and I was a trip to Cork to see the Blarney castle and the grounds as well as Cork city, and the slightly nuanced culture that exists there. We took a tour from Ireland's day tours in order to gain the cultural narrative as well as have the convenience of guidance is places to visit across the Cork area. The tour took us to the Rock of Cashel, a beautiful castle area, thought to be the seat of the high king of Ireland, Blarney Castle, the castle with the Blarney stone which had beautiful grounds to wander through, and Cork city, a place where you can enjoy the different sentiments of regional pride and get a good bite to eat at any of the pubs.

Ultimately, no matter who you share it with, time abroad can be more gratifying in a group discovery. Every person you share a new experience with serves as a human archive of that memory, an interactive photo album that can recall the emotion and excitement between every pub's serving of fish and chips and every castle's breathtaking view. Your independence abroad often becomes most valuable when contrasted by the company of those you love.