From Coimbatore to Dublin: Chaos, Humor, and Growth

✈️ Wait... Am I Really Doing This?

It hit me one morning between packing my charger and losing my passport for the third time: I'm actually moving to Ireland.

Leaving behind Coimbatore's warmth — the people, the food, the familiar chaos — for Dublin's rain and rolling R's felt surreal. I boarded that plane with an AIB card, a slightly broken suitcase, and zero idea how to cook rice without my mother yelling instructions from the kitchen.

The calendar said Departure Day, but in my head, it screamed "Are you sure about this?!"

The first morning in Dublin wasn't poetic. It was me, in a foggy room, Googling "How much does rice cost in euros?" while rain smirked outside the window.

💻 Why Dublin? Why AI?

Dublin wasn't a random pin drop on a map. It was strategic chaos.

I wanted a city that didn't just teach AI, but breathed it. Dublin City University (DCU) checked all the boxes — modern labs, diverse people, and professors who spoke the language of algorithms like poetry.

My MSc in Computing (Artificial Intelligence) wasn't easy. It still isn't. The coursework is brutal, but the learning curve is even steeper — Italians, Brazilians, Chinese, Indians — all thrown into one classroom. Every conversation sounded like a mini UN conference.

"Dublin keeps whispering: 'Learn fast, or get left behind.' So I learn. Fast."

👋 Farewell: Bus Rides, Hugs, and Half-Goodbyes

The farewell wasn't cinematic — it was messy, loud, and heartbreakingly human.

Family hugs turned into tissues, friends cracked jokes to hide tears, and my bus from Coimbatore to Chennai felt like a moving memory reel. Every kilometer away from home felt heavier than the last.

At Chennai airport, I tried to be brave. But when the flight got delayed (of course it did), anxiety staged its own drama. Still, when I finally hugged my friends one last time, I realized — this chaos is love.

📑 Paperwork & Panic: IELTS, Loans, and Visa Nightmares

Ah, the glamorous student life... starts with forms.

Packing? Let's just say "organized panic." I threw half my life into a duffel bag labeled 'International Student' — and hoped for the best.

🛫 The Flight: Jetlag and Jitters

Coimbatore → Mumbai (IndiGo) → Istanbul → Dublin (Turkish Airlines).

By the time I landed, I had no idea what day it was. I set up international roaming, bought a local SIM, and called home:

"Yes Amma, I'm alive. No, I didn't lose my passport. Yet."

Hazelwood Student Village was my new "home." It was clean, cozy, and painfully expensive. The first grocery trip nearly gave me a heart attack — rice cost more than chai!

🌧️ Arrival: Ireland Hits Differently

Ireland doesn't welcome you gently — it slaps you awake with wind and sideways rain.

Dublin city center buzzed with trams, polite strangers, and bookstores that begged for rainy-day reading. Temple Bar, St. Stephen's Green, Grafton Street — all postcard-perfect.

But nothing prepared me for the math of grocery shopping. Bananas shouldn't cost that much.

First Impressions: Culture Shock in Real Time

• The Weather: Rain isn't an event here; it's a lifestyle. I learned to carry an umbrella everywhere, even on sunny days.
• The Accents: Irish English is beautiful but bewildering. "Grand" means everything from "good" to "okay" to "I'm not sure either."
• The People: Surprisingly warm for such cold weather. Random strangers helped me find my way more times than Google Maps did.
• The Food: Let's not talk about what I paid for vegetables. But discovering Irish breakfast (full fry-up) made up for some of the pain.

🎓 University Life: Panic, People, and Little Wins

DCU doesn't play around. Miss one week, and you're already behind a mountain of code. Between assignments, plagiarism warnings, and group projects with five accents at once, I sometimes wondered if I accidentally enrolled in a global experiment.

Still — there were bright spots:

• Cricket club on rainy weekends — finding home in the least expected places
• Engineering club coffee breaks that felt like therapy sessions
• Job rejections that stung, but toughened me up
• Late-night coding sessions where broken code somehow became breakthroughs
• International potlucks where I finally got to show off my (admittedly limited) cooking skills

The Howth Cliffs Moment

And then — Howth Cliffs. Standing there with friends, hair flying in the Atlantic wind, laughing for no reason — I realized Dublin was quietly becoming home.

Sometimes the best moments aren't planned. They're just Tuesday afternoons when you decide to take a DART to the edge of the sea and remember why you took this leap.

💶 Money Talk: When Rice Costs More Than Chai

Here's the reality nobody sugar-coats in those "study abroad" brochures:

Budgeting isn't optional here; it's survival. Every euro makes you think twice, every grocery bill makes you grateful for your mom's home cooking.

Ireland's economy, like its weather, has its moods. Protests, rising prices, and all. But the kindness you meet in strangers — that's constant.

🌱 Lessons from the Journey

Six months in, here's what I've learned:

• Home is portable: It's in WhatsApp calls at 2 AM, in a friend's laugh, in the smell of chai you finally learned to make right.
• Discomfort breeds growth: Every awkward moment, every cultural confusion, every "I have no idea what I'm doing" — they're all building blocks.
• Community matters: Finding your tribe in a foreign land isn't just nice, it's necessary.
• Failure is data: Every rejected job application, every failed assignment draft — they're teaching me resilience I never knew I needed.
• The little things matter: A sunny day in Dublin. A perfectly cooked meal. A message from home. These aren't small joys; they're lifelines.

🌦️ Looking Back: The Real Growth Story

Homesickness still visits sometimes, usually at midnight with a cup of overbrewed tea. But so does joy — in little victories, in shared laughter, in seeing how far I've come.

The Ranjith who left Coimbatore and the one writing this are different people. One was nervous, uncertain, clutching a boarding pass like a lifeline. The other is still nervous, still uncertain, but now knows that's okay.

"Growth doesn't announce itself with fireworks. It whispers in the quiet moments when you realize you've stopped Googling 'How to adult in a foreign country' because you're just... doing it."

💭 Would I Do It Again?

If you ask me now, "Would you do it all again?"

Yes. A thousand times, yes.

Because somewhere between the rain, the ramen dinners, the random friendships, and the relentless assignments — I found myself growing, laughing, and learning that sometimes, you have to let life blow you off your feet...

...and enjoy the flight.

📝 To Future International Students

If you're reading this from your hometown, passport application in hand, wondering if you should take the leap — here's my advice:

• Do it. The paperwork will stress you out. The goodbyes will break your heart. The first month will feel impossible.
• But do it anyway. Because on the other side of that anxiety is a version of you that's braver, wiser, and infinitely more interesting.
• Pack light, but bring patience. You'll need more of the latter than the former.
• Budget ruthlessly. Every euro counts. Every. Single. One.
• Say yes to adventures. Even when you're tired, broke, or both. Some of the best memories come from the plans you almost canceled.
• Call home often. They miss you more than they say.
• Be kind to yourself. You're doing something incredibly hard. Give yourself credit for showing up every day.

This journey from Coimbatore to Dublin isn't just about geography. It's about transformation — messy, chaotic, beautiful transformation.

And I'm here for every rain-soaked, euro-counting, lesson-learning moment of it.

Still chasing dreams, still dodging puddles. 🌧️✈️