State of the Kate

Ah, well, it’s time to deliver my phone number and address. After trekking 4,000 miles and about 20 hours, I arrive to find myself living directly across from:

MALLLL!!! Well, “Shopping Centre”, actually: the only one in Ireland. It’s basically like Somerset, only it has these half-floors and wide, flat escalators in the corners. Basically, it’s what a mall would look like if it were built inside Hogwarts. That’s how we know it was built by English people—it roughly resembles a structure from the Harry Potter series.

So my address is:

20 The Linden
Riverdale
Dundrum, Dublin 14
Ireland

Addresses here are just a conglomerate of directions that serve to give the reader a vague idea of where the building might be. Can you imagine that in an entire country, that is all the direction you need to get to my building? No street name (God help me, there are never any street names. Never), no zip code…it’s a mess. And because it’s a mess, I spent €90 on a taxi from the airport to my apartment, because the cabbie had NO CLUE where this place is. And I sure didn’t know! We ended up in a very time-consuming, very expensive bind.

Phone number is:

+353 085 722 0919

But they write phone numbers funny over here, so here’s how it would read if I were writing it for a local: 35 30 857 220 919. The 353, btw, is the country code, just as 1 is the country code for calls placed to the US, which is why we dial 1 before the area code in the States (e.g.: 1-248…)

And SPEAKING of the States, the other day my boss Dan (well, actually, one of my 4 bosses. Long story) was talking with me about the local weather. I said, “Sure does rain a lot here, Dan” and he says, “Well how’s the weather in MITCH-i-gan?”
He didn’t pronounce it with the “ish” sound I’m used to. Rather, the ‘tch’ sound came out so hard, so abrasive, it caused him to spit a little. It stopped the word and drew it out, creating 3 distinct, separately-spoken syllables. I was caught off guard; I sort of reeled back and paused.
In that fricative palatal stop, spoken abruptly and indelicately, I realized that I am living somewhere where people do not know how to pronounce my state, let alone identify it on a map. I have tried flashing people “the mitt” as a means of identifying MI, but it always comes off as some hailing gesture or an antiquated Trekkie homage or something.
It only took one 7-hour flight to get that far from home. Although, I’m sure I could find the same confused pronunciation and lack of locative understanding in various remote corners of Appalachia. All the same, it made me feel very, very far from home.

Because I watched TRL as a pre-teen and haven’t forgotten that former self, here are some ‘shout-outs’ (wooo!):
-Elisa, keep rocking on your studying. It’s finals time here and I think about you every time the radio or TV mentions studying. Keep going! Come Saturday it’ll all be over and you’ll be a real-deal pharm tech!!
-Beth, how is intern season? Is Graffiti in full-swing yet? Any goss? Give our cube wall a nice nuzzle for me.
-Amber, how is the wedding planning going? I promise to keep you posted on whether I can be there/in the wedding etc. ASAP!!!
-Hope all my family has a fun ladies weekend at the cottage!! Everyone take a swim and think of me…..think of me sitting on the swing watching from afar!!! :)