My family and my closest friends came to see me off at the railway station.
That is a strange sentence to write, because it sounds ordinary and it was not. My mother, my father, my sister, and the people I had grown up with, all standing on a platform at Rani Kamlapati station in Bhopal for a train to Delhi. I had never left home alone before. Not for a weekend, not for a job. The first time I did it, I did it with a suitcase heading to another continent.
The feeling on that platform was not excitement. I want to be honest about that, because the version of this moment you usually see online is all confetti. What I actually felt, sitting down and looking out of the window at all of them waving, was a very direct question: am I doing the right thing?
Then the train moved, and I gathered myself, and I answered it. I can do this. I am doing this for them anyway.
That was the last calm thought I had for about forty hours.
The goodbye that did not happen
Five minutes after the train pulled out, my phone rang.
It was an old friend from my Gurgaon days, someone I had not spoken to in nearly a year. She had heard I was leaving and called immediately. Where are you? I told her I had just left Bhopal and that I was feeling too much to talk properly, and asked for ten minutes.
She called back in exactly ten. What time do you reach Delhi? Which terminal, what time is the flight?
I did not understand why she was asking until that night, when she told me she was travelling down from Chandigarh, where she is posted, just to say goodbye at the airport.
The next afternoon I was at the terminal and she was stuck in traffic. She kept sending me her live location, getting closer and closer. I told her I had an hour and I would wait.
I did not have an hour. Immigration does not care about your friends.
She was fifteen minutes away when I had to walk. We ended up on a video call instead, and we have still not managed to meet since.
Some goodbyes just do not get to happen. You carry those differently.
Cash and no card
Before the airport there was one more stop. The train arrived at Hazrat Nizamuddin and I went to my brother Ayush's place in Gurgaon for two or three hours, the last time anything felt like home. He dropped me at the airport at three in the afternoon.
Here is something I did not plan well. I arrived in Ireland with two thousand euro in cash and nothing else. No credit card. No international debit card. Just notes in a bag and a lot of confidence.
And somewhere in all of it I stopped eating. Not a decision exactly. I was not hungry, I was too full of everything else, and I kept telling myself I would eat at the next stop. I did not eat properly again until Dublin.
If you are making this move, carry a card that works internationally. Not for emergencies. For lunch.
There were three or four of us flying out of Delhi together, all heading to Galway. In Dubai we had a three hour layover and met the group coming from Mumbai, because the Dubai to Dublin leg was the same flight for all of us. That was the first time it stopped feeling like I was leaving alone and started feeling like a group of strangers moving in the same direction.
Eight in the morning, Dublin
We landed at eight. Tired in a way that goes past tired, jet lagged, and somehow still electric.
From the airport we booked the Citylink coach. Dublin to Galway, two and a half hours across the country.
The first thing I ever saw of Ireland was Dublin and it was quiet. Genuinely quiet. People walking to work, no horns, no crowd, a calm I had no reference point for. If you have grown up in Indian cities, the silence of a European morning is the first thing that tells your body you are somewhere else, long before your brain catches up.
On the bus, some of us slept. Some of us pressed our phones against the window taking photographs of fields. Nobody was pretending to be cool about it.
Then, Galway.
Then, Galway
At the coach station there were people waiting from the university's international office, ready with answers, SIM cards, directions, anything we needed. I had sorted my SIM before flying, which I would recommend to anyone, but the fact that somebody was standing there at all made a difference I did not expect.
It rained a little, then cleared, then stayed clear the rest of the day. I would learn later that this is not a special welcome. That is just Saturday.
Dunlin Village, and a friend with beers
We had booked ten days in Dunlin Village, the university accommodation. Ten days. That was the entire window. Move in on 24 August, find somewhere permanent to live, and be settled before the course started on 6 September.
We checked in and everyone got their own room. I sat down for the first time in nearly two days.
An hour or two later, Prateek arrived. He had flown out five days ahead of us and had been staying with his brother, and he turned up at our accommodation carrying beers to welcome us in. That was the moment the trip stopped being a journey and started being a life. You have not eaten in forty hours, you are eight thousand kilometres from everyone who has ever known you, and a friend appears at your door with a plastic bag.
The cheese sandwich incident
Our first proper meal was at Capital Kebab, a doner chicken kebab, and I have rarely been so pleased to see food.
One of our group is a strict vegetarian. He went to the counter and asked for a cheese sandwich, which in his mind was the safest possible order in a foreign country. He came back, sat down opposite us, and worked through it happily, telling us how good it was.
Somewhere in the middle of this, Prateek and I noticed something.
Bro. Do you know what that is?
And he said, cheerfully, without any alarm at all we said: it is a bacon sandwich brother.
I have never seen a man reach a bathroom that quickly.
He was fine. He also spent the next several months interrogating every menu in Ireland like a customs officer, which was funny for us and completely fair of him. If you are vegetarian and moving here, take this as your warning. Read the whole label and assume nothing from the name.
Forty of us on a footpath
That first evening we walked around the city. Every local we spoke to was welcoming in a way that felt almost suspicious at first, recommending places to eat, telling us about the area, offering directions we had not asked for. We went and looked at the campus, quiet and half empty in the last days of summer, too early to tell what it would feel like full.
By the end of day one I had the strong sense that I had chosen correctly. Not proof. Just a feeling that the research had held.
Back at the accommodation, we discovered something. Two or three of the buildings were more than half Indian students, from Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, everywhere. And a social structure assembled itself within about forty eight hours.
The meeting point was downstairs, where people went to smoke. I do not smoke. I went anyway, every single evening, because that footpath was where the entire batch gathered. Thirty to forty of us standing outside a student building in the Galway evening, comparing notes on accommodation, on PPS numbers, on IRP appointments, on which supermarket was cheapest.
Then upstairs, we developed a system. One building, three floors, three functions. First floor: meet and greet. Second floor: the party. Third floor: the kitchen, where two or three enormous pots of biryani were produced at a time.
For ten days that was the rhythm. Chase viewings and paperwork all day. Cook and eat and talk all night.
I have thought about why that stretch mattered so much, and I think it is this. Every one of us was equally lost. Nobody had an advantage. Nobody had been here a year already and could be smug about it. You form a different kind of friendship with people you met on day one of the hardest thing you have ever done. Those ten days made friends I still have.
The part nobody posts about
Underneath the biryani, the clock was running, and this is the part I want to be straight about.
Four of us had planned to find a place together: me, Prateek, Siddhant and Nav. That plan lasted until Nav won a room in Corrib Village through the lottery system and the rest of us did not.
So there were three of us, and for eight days we lost.
Two or three viewings a day, every day. We would see a listing, message immediately, get an address, travel across the city, and arrive to find twenty or thirty other people already standing outside the same door. You are not viewing a room in Galway. You are auditioning for one, against a crowd, and most days you do not get told no. You simply never hear anything again.
The places we could have taken were the ones nobody wanted. Too far out. Too poor a condition to accept. The good ones were gone before we reached them.
Eight days of that. Rejection after rejection, with the course start date getting closer every evening.
What we got out of it, though, was not nothing. Every failed viewing meant more phone calls, more contacts, more people on that footpath comparing what they had found. The network we built out of losing is the reason most of us eventually landed somewhere.
The Galway accommodation crisis is not a rumour and it is not exaggerated online. It is the single biggest problem facing every student arriving here, and no amount of research from Bhopal fully prepares you for standing in it.
Then I looked in a newspaper
On the eighth or ninth day I did something nobody my age does any more.
I picked up a newspaper.
There was a number in it. I called it. A man named Tom answered and told me to come and see the room.
It was an single room in an owner-occupied house, four kilometres from the university, about twenty minutes away. Tom lived there alone, so none of the awkwardness people warn you about with owner-occupied places applied. He was welcoming from the first minute, and the room had everything already in it. I did not have to buy a single thing. I just had to arrive and live there.
Four hundred euro a month, including bills. Two hundred deposit.
I remember standing there thinking: am I extremely lucky, or am I missing something?
I was extremely lucky. I took it on the spot. Prateek and Siddhant found places nearby not long after, and the four-of-us-together plan quietly became four-of-us-within-walking-distance, which is what the housing market decides for you whether you like it or not.
Ten days later
By the time the course started I had a room, a SIM card, a paperwork queue, and about forty new phone numbers.
People ask if I was homesick in that first stretch. Honestly, not really, and I think the reason is simple. I was never alone. We spoke to family constantly, but we also spent almost every waking hour of those ten days together, forty or fifty of us, sitting around talking about where we came from and what we had left behind.
Homesickness needs a quiet room to work in. We did not have one.
That came later, and I will get to it.
What I had at the end of day ten was not a settled life. It was a room I found in a newspaper advertisement, a group of people I had known for a week and would know for years, and a course starting in a fortnight that I had crossed the world for.
It was enough to start with.
Next post: the paperwork. PPS number, IRP registration, the bank account, and the appointment system that has quietly become the hardest part of arriving in Ireland. If you are landing this August, that is the one you will need.