John F. O'Sullivan

It was much easier as a kid. I’d get along with someone in school, tell my mom about them, and she’d call their parents and schedule a “play-date.” No one tells you how hard it will be to move to a new city where you know no one. It’s a problem I struggled with in Galway, but luckily I had some friendly flatmates who introduced me to their friends. Now that I live alone, my main friends in Cardiff are my co-workers. I meet some great guests at the hostel but, in what must be a plight of many hospitality workers, they all in the city for only a few days.

That’s why I’ve set out on a personal mission to make new friends. First I checked the local council’s website for community ed programs. There are some neat courses I could take, but none of them start until September and they cost a fair amount (£60 or more). I could go to a bar to try and meet people, but working at a bar sours me on going to another one for social interaction. What’s left for a guy like me?

Enter City Socializing. It’s a website that could best be described as dating for friends. Instead of emphasizing individual profiles like a dating site would, they highlight local group meet-ups. They range from trips to the theater to biking excursions to pub nights. It’s a subscription-based site, although they let you go to one event without paying. I attended my one free event last night and had a nice time meeting a huge variety of folks from their twenties, thirties and forties at a local bar. People’s backgrounds were different, but they all seemed to be in the same boat: Sociable people who needed a few more like-minded individuals to hang out with. When I returned, I signed up for one month with the site.

It may be a millennial solution to a much older problem, but if that’s what it takes to meet a few more people, I’m all in.

Besides, I’m not sure play-dates are socially acceptable for a 24-year-old guy.

What strategies have you used to meet people when you’re in a new city? I’d love to hear some suggestions or anecdotes in the comments section below.

I’ve been working for over a week now on finding the right adjectives to describe the British and Irish perception of The American. Not Americans, mind you, just “The American.” Like “That Guy” at the bar, everyone knows who “The American” is. The cargo pants and sneaker-wearing, opinionating, jumping picture taking American has become a universally understood stereotype in tourist cities like Galway or Cardiff.

The American is the one who bursts into the pub with friends and drowns out every other conversation with the volume of his voice.

The American is the woman who approached my former flatmate at a crowded bus stop and interrupted their silence by asking when the next bus arrived, then turned around and told everyone else at the stop about what she’d done that day despite the fact that no one was listening.

The American is the one who marches into a quiet café on a rainy day and demands to have a spot next to the fireplace to dry off, ignoring the others who are currently enjoying the warmth of the fire.

Is this what we’re really like? Hell no! But “The American” isn’t a real person, it’s a perception we have to live down. Of being the oafish, nitwit American, I’m guilty until proven innocent. I can’t tell you how many variations of “I usually don’t like Americans but you’re alright!” I’ve heard since moving abroad.

So as of today, I’m on a personal mission to make “The American” as antiquated as smoking indoors.

I’m an American, and proud of it. I’m from the land of prom queens, pep rallies, and The Pledge of Allegiance every Monday over the PA in high school.

The land where regardless of race or background, if you’re born in the country you’re one of us.

The land where convenience is king, hence the drive-through bank windows, automated DVD rentals at McDonalds and dual-conveyer belts.

The land of interstate highways where an eight-hour drive from Minneapolis to Chicago isn’t just within reach, it’s considered a weekend getaway.

There is so much we can be proud of in our country, yet we’re afraid to talk about it because of The American. Politics aside, we’ve got some neat things to offer. We should be as proud of what we have as the English are of their tea, the Japanese are of their cell phones and Brazilians are of their superior hair-removal techniques.

Quieter people who are “alright despite being American” need to take exception with that comment. I’m just as American as those irritating Americans. Can’t I be the basis of your stereotype?

So Americans who are abroad, help me to disseminate this message. Stop telling people you’re Canadian. Avoid politics and start talking about what really makes you an American.

Kill “The American.”

Dear America,

Hi. It’s good to see you again. I’m glad I could make it back home for your birthday this year. I had forgotten how crazy we all go for that Independence Day of yours. It’s quite the celebration – fireworks galore, small-town festivals, cotton candy and obnoxious t-shirts that say things like “America: Love it or leave it” or “These colors don’t bleed.”

America the Beautiful

I’ve really been surprised to find how endeared I am by your wear-it-on-your-sleeve patriotism, even when it gets a little overt. It’s so quaint to see the handmade patriotic signs hanging in the windows of Main Street, so nice to see everyone reflexively stand in unison as the singer at the Forth of July celebration sings the national anthem.

That’s not to say that you’ve got the market cornered on patriotic citizens. Hell, I just came from Europe in the midst of the World Cup, where the soccer football fans are as loud and annoying as they purport us to be when we travel through their countries. I even went to St. George’s Day celebrations in London, which is the national patriotic day for England. But I’ve got to be honest with you: nobody does patriotism like ‘merica. They don’t even have the day off of work for St. George’s Day! No barbeque, no trips to the lake, no loud, tinny music from old stereos while we throw the Frisbee around.

But do you know what I’ve really missed about you, America? You’re so darned efficient. It’s really one of your best traits, although not many people appreciate it. When I tell people in Wales about how handy our drive-through bank windows are, they scoff. “You mean people are too lazy to get out of their cars?” People just don’t realize how much we value order. From the drive through banks/restaurants/pharmacies to the dual-conveyer belts behind the grocery store checkouts, you’re built for with me in mind. “How can I make that easier for you, John?” you seem to say.

So the old lady who takes forever to bag her groceries can continue to do so while the cashier checks out the next customer. Efficient.

There are a few beefs I have with you though. Top among them is portion sizes. America, I lost twenty pounds after I left you — without even trying! Sure, you’ve got some great food, but why when I order one scoop at the ice cream shop in Nisswa do they give me two heaping scoops? Why does a burrito from Chipotle weigh the same as a small dog? I used to love it – hell, I still love it, I’ve probably put on more weight in the last week and a half than any human has a right to. I tell ya, if you just knock down the portion sizes (and prices) by 30%, you’ll have cured the obesity problem in America.

Super sized retail.

I’ll give you this: you know how to do things supersized. I come from a relatively small town of 50,000, but even there you have more big-box retailers than you know what to do with. My parents just finished remodeling their living room, so one of the first things I did when I got home was go to one of your national chain hardware stores to pick up some quarter-round, a long, narrow strip of wood that visually joins the floor with the baseboard. It’s a pretty specific item, but I’ll be darned if you didn’t have it somewhere in your hundreds of rows of hardware. Not only did you have it, you have two full rows of varieties to choose from. By contrast, all the shops in the UK and Ireland are tiny. A humongous grocery store to them would be but a size normal sized convenience stores to you. You do big, and you do it well.

I’ve loved visiting you, but you know what? I think I’m gonna stay away for a bit longer. I learn so much about you by being away. I become a fierce defender of you, flaws and all, particularly to those of us with American citizenship who jokingly say “I’m Canadian.” (But more on later in my next blog entry.) I’ll return back to you eventually, but for now I’m going to stay abroad finding out what makes you, you. In the meantime, thanks in advance for letting me pull a Prodigal Son on you.

Sincerely,
John F. O’Sullivan

As is to be expected, I’ve been keeping mighty busy during my trip back home. It has been quite eventful time so far. I can’t muster a full blog entry yet, but in the meantime, here’s a bit of what’s been keeping me busy.

It’s early morning in Central London. I’m not sleeping well, so I decide to let insomnia win this battle as I get up and make my way to the posh hotel gym for their steam room. Now wide awake and smelling of eucalyptus, I get dressed and head to a corner café and sit outside as the first light slowly peeks over the rooftops and fills the narrow alleyway with a dramatic contrast of light and shadow.

As I finish my bacon and egg sandwich on a sesame seed bagel, I take a long walk around the city and eavesdrop on a handful of morning vignettes as the slumbering city awakes.

A long line of people stand outside a building adorned with a humongous Brazilian flag, waiting for their consulate to open.

Peddlers throw imitation handbags, English flags and tacky souvenirs on card tables as they ready themselves for the tourist crunch.

I revel in pretending I’m a local, observing the rituals of an awakening city. But today I feel a unique detachment from these Londoners. Today, after seven and a half months of being away from home, I return. Today, I depart from London Heathrow Airport for Minneapolis to absorb two and a half weeks of friends, family, food, “not so much the heat as the humidity” weather, a bachelor party, a wedding, an outdoor concert, a homecoming party, baseball and hopefully a whole lot more.

Today I go home, but only temporarily. Upon my return, I’ll dive right back into all things in Cardiff, becoming one of the people I saw this morning: A local.

“Here you go,” she said with a reticent smile, handing me an envelope.

It was at my going away party last November, and the turnout had been far better than I’d envisioned. Friends from a variety of walks of life had turned out, from old high school theater friends to co-workers. One of those people was Sara, a girl I had studied abroad with in Ireland three years previous. Sara had a similar itch for adventure and travel. After graduating, she decided to uproot herself and volunteer at a monastery in Tanzania. It wasn’t through a formal program; she just rang up one of the nuns and asked if she could volunteer. I’ve been amazed at her gumption ever since. She’d since returned from Tanzania and was living at home with her parents in order to financially recover from her African adventure.

But despite my respect and admiration for her, we hadn’t kept in close touch since graduating. So I was particularly surprised and pleased to see her at the party. What I found in the envelope floored me: Five crisp twenty-dollar bills with five Post-Its attached including a little inscription on each one, so it read like a flip-book letter.

Just because…
You are inspiring (I’ll be joining you in less than 2 years)

I have faith in you
(I bet you’ll still be in Ireland when I get there)

And I hate you
(because you’re going right now and I’m not)

So, Have a few drinks on me

And a few more for me. Best of luck!
~Sara

I stood there, flummoxed to receive such a generous gift from someone I hadn’t done a great job of keeping in touch with, someone who financially was just getting back on her own feet. I tried to give it back, but she insisted I keep the money. It took me a while to digest this act of altruism.

Just a few nights later I laid wide awake in bed, my first night in Ireland. Doubts filled my mind. I was terrified I’d bitten off more than I could chew with this grand adventure. Panicked, I had already begun to think about throwing in the towel, flying back home just a few weeks after I’d moved. I think some of my early blog entries here reflect that unrest. One of the things that stopped that train of thought was Sara. A thank you note doesn’t seem like enough to explain how grateful I am. I think of Sara every time I get an email from a stranger who has found my blog and asks for advice about moving abroad. I can’t wait until she makes good on her pledge to “join me in less than 2 years” so I can pay her back with support of my own.

It’s match day: Wales verses South Africa. Since it’s one of the Six Nations rugby match-ups, it’s cause for one of the busier days of the year at the pub. We’re just across the river from the 75,000-seat, retractable roof arena, and guests have poured in from across Britain, Ireland and South Africa. The day seems as much devoted to drinking as it is to watching the match, so by the time I arrive to start my shift at 9pm, most people have either gone home or are beyond inebriated. It makes for an easier job for me, since all I have to do is clean instead of dealing with the drunk patrons.

As my co-workers end their shift at 2 and 4 in the morning, they decide to stick around for a few drinks. I serve them and we alternate answering the door as the hostel guests return from their wild nights out. All in all, it’s a pretty relaxed night, until about five in the morning, when my coworker runs back from answering the front door.

“Shit,” he mutters as he grabs the phone. “I need an ambulance right away,” he says into the receiver.

I run to the door and look outside to find a man slouched over on the ground outside our hostel, unconscious. He’s surrounded by three drunk Samaritans who rang our doorbell to alert us of the man. He’s lying on his side, face toward the ground. Not wanting to move him, I feel his back to check for breathing. I’m relieved to feel it rise and fall, but the relief is only temporary as I notice a pool of blood on the pavement beneath his head.

“Uh, guys,” I yell back to my coworkers, who are inside because the phone’s reception doesn’t reach to the spot where the man is laying. What follows is a game of telephone where my coworker relays what the person on the line is telling him to do.
“Turn him on his back!”
“But what if he vomits? I don’t want him to asphyxiate.”
“The woman on the phone said you need to make sure his airway is open. Turn him on his back, push back on his forehead and pull up on his chin.”

He’s a heavy bloke, but I manage to turn him around to find the side of his face covered in superficial but bloody wounds. His eyelids start to flutter as he regains consciousness. By this point my coworker has gotten off the phone and comes over wearing sanitary gloves. The ambulance is on its way, he says. We try to get some information from the guy, but his slurring is so bad he can’t convey anything. I notice his fly is down and surmise that he fell while attempting to relieve himself on the sidewalk.

We sit with him for 45 minutes waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Finally, it gets there and two guys in their fifties emerge and traipse over to us. They wear the expressions of men who have seen this many times before, men who know there’s nothing urgent about this situation, just a guy who drank too much and will have a nasty headache in the morning. No hospital bill though, thanks to Britain’s national health care. They put him on a gurney and wheel him into the ambulance. The guy wasn’t staying at our hostel and he wasn’t drinking in our bar, so I haven’t heard anything about it since.

The experience served as a good reminder – working in a bar can be a lot of fun, but it requires dealing with some serious situations too. I’m just glad I had my coworkers there to help me out.

At my last job in Galway we would call them zombies — the customers you always seem to get stuck behind, shuffling aimlessly through the main aisle, while you were struggling to carry the heaviest box of your life to the other end of the shop.

I had no idea the zombies would follow me to Cardiff.

After I finish cleaning up the bar at night, the main task my job requires is answering the door. We don’t have a curfew for our hostel guests, so they’re free to return at any hour of the night. They take advantage of that right and return all the way through breakfast time. In the early twilight hours, when the sky is just hinting at a lighter shade of blue, I’ll often answer the doorbell, check the guest’s room key to make sure they’re staying here, then peer down the long road to see a staggering figure heading my way.

Sometimes he’s alone, sometimes he has a lady in tow, staggering in discord from one another from one end of the sidewalk to the other. Sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, I swear I hear a faint moan, “Braaaaaaiiiiins.”

When they reach the door, they’ll spend a good few minutes fumbling through their pockets for their room key as they slur the requisite “Is the bar open?” Once they get inside the zombies will often approach the bar in a vain attempt to bribe me into serving them, so I craft a zombie defense:

The sun rises and I survey the damage done at the hand of the zombies. Rubbish strewn about, fences torn apart and bile throughout the streets. It’s not hard to see why we keep a club behind the bar.

I call it The Enforcer.

Moving to a new country is an exercise in discomfort. Everything that was familiar becomes unfamiliar. Simple things like going to the grocery store, finding a bank or even just ordering a pizza become challenges. Which grocery store is closest? Which bank will accept my job offer letter as proof of residence? What is my UK postcode?

Moving to a new country for the second time in seven months, though? It’s a lot of déjà vu all over again. Open a bank account, apply for a National Insurance number*, get a library card, get a young persons’ rail card, register for the rewards club at the grocery store, set up my direct deposit, request holiday time at work…the list goes on and on. Three weeks since moving here and I finally feel like I’m back on my feet, just learning to be a local. (Again.)

One problem with working at a hostel is that I meet lots of cool people, but they’re always only visiting for a few days. So, to try and meet some local folks, I headed to the Cardiff Blogger Meet-Up last week and stood leaning awkwardly against a pillar until I got the nerve up to introduce myself. Boy did it pay off. I met a handful of Cardiff’s most tech-savvy; Journalists, PR specialists, food bloggers and the like. I shouldn’t have been a surprised when just a few days later at the Apple Store I ran into a guy I’d met at the meet-up. We were both checking out the just-released-in-the-UK iPad, of course.

So now that I’ve overcome the initial hurdles of once again moving to a new country, it’s time to get involved in some community programs. Some guys at the bar tried to get me to join their Aussie Rules Football team the other day. But I like my ribs unfractured, thankyouverymuch. Guess this means I’ll have to keep looking. Suggestions from my new Cardiff readers are more than welcome.

*On that note, I now have an American SSN, an Irish PPSN and a British NI number. I can conceivably collect benefits ‘till the cows come home

“How long do you think you’ll be here?”

I get that question more frequently than any other. It has become the most difficult to answer. One thing has been for certain since the beginning. I’m going to be home on July 3. That’s when I’m a groomsman in my friends’ wedding. The big question in my mind: Would my ticket be one-way or return? Until recently, I was resigned to returning to Minnesota to pretend to be a “real” adult and job hunt. After all, what was the point of returning to work my retail, stock room job in Galway for a few more months? Then I took this job in Cardiff. A week into working, I still hadn’t purchased my planet ticket. I still hadn’t decided if I was going to move home for good or come back to Europe after the wedding.

Why? Allow me to let you in on a secret: Living abroad alone is, well, hard. I don’t like to dwell on it here for fear of becoming the over privileged white boy who whines about getting to live abroad, but let me say this: I’m on my second city and my second country and my second job in a matter of seven months. It can be disorienting, exhausting even. Not a day goes by where I don’t think about buying a one-way ticket home. But yesterday, I decided once and for all not to succumb to temptation. I purchased a return plane ticket. I’ll be home for two and a half weeks next month, then I’ll come back to Cardiff to continue my job. I haven’t finished experiencing this new job, this new life. I haven’t even scratched the surface of Cardiff. Returning to Minnesota, while it would be the easy option, would be the easy way out. When the right opportunity presents itself in Minnesota (or Ireland or New York or California, for that matter), I’ll seize upon it. But until that happens, I’m going to stay in Cardiff, as your humble barman at a hostel on the banks of the River Taff.

How long will I be here?

Simply put: Until I’m finished.