I hate it when somebody else writes about a topic that was wandering around my head also. It makes me feel like I couldn’t articulate my feelings or thoughts well and fast enough. That probably is because that’s exactly what it is prove of.

Tonight, I was identified as “an Erasmus” and subsequently was asked a few questions about Dublin by a guy who apparently was training for his stand up performance. So, there was the obligatory Hitler joke, and then, of course: “How do you like Dublin so far?”

Is it rude to call a city dirty? It’s hard to explain, but I really don’t mind Dublin’s fucked up streets that look like they’re striving to fulfill some cliché. I like them, I am amazed that they exist, simply for the reason that they look so incredibly different from fucked up streets in Hamburg.
Anyway, I tried to make up for the first comment by the statement that I already love Dublin, and wholeheartedly so.

There are different levels of language, and I find the normal/colloquial one the hardest to get really good at. Even having that in mind though, most of the time I can’t tell if a word is too posh or not without giving it a try. Apparently, wholeheartedly was a tad too sophisticated in that context.
Or for the Irish in general, what do I know?

Damn, why didn’t I say I feckin’ love Dublin?

It is a very interesting situation, to have native speakers wondering all the time how the average Erasmus student’s English is so good, and recognizing the tad of an inferiority complex most of them have because they’re fluent in only one language. That makes me realize over and over again how it’s really a very lucky situation to be the native speaker of some non-trivial language and hence be able to learn English as a second language.