Adaptation
( Part 3 )
The place where we lived seemed peaceful to us. Due to the fact that we didn’t have a car, we walked everywhere on foot. Even to the city centre; living a little more than an hour walking distance from the centre; because when the bus was coming up, it turned out that there is already one stroller with a child and the other stroller would not fit anymore.
Information – in Ireland there are bunk buses, such as in England, but blue-yellow.
Therefore, we had nothing left but to explore the area on the way to the destination. After a while, we got used to it and it was no longer as inconvenient for us as it was at the beginning. We tried to take advantage of the opportunities offered to us by walking, and which we would miss by bus. It didn’t even bother us that in less than 30 minutes we could experience as many atmospheric phenomena as beautiful sun, cloudiness, wind and rain, and even we happened to experience all these phenomena at the same time, and it was amazing. However, the worst months were the winter period. Then it rained a lot; actually poured and it was windy non-stop; sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger. Of course, those stronger winds were 75% at that time, but as you can see, we survived 😉.
Now as I write about it, memories come back and I have to admit to you that they are very nice, in spite of appearances. Even the heat is on the heart 🧡. It was a time we could spend together, walking, talking and the same time getting to know the various corners of Dublin. In the car or bus, however, it is already different, as if it were not, you lose such the opportunity.
The days were passing slowly. At least I thought it did. After some time from moving in, our baby son began to wake up at night screaming and crying. We didn’t know why. We were looking for all sorts of reasons, without effect. A lot of time passed before he began to sleep all night quietly again. In the next post, you can read the whole story, but let me warn you, a terrifying story, only for people with strong nerves 😉. Finally, the time of the longed-for night silence came. At least for a while 😄.
Autumn has arrived. The school year began. In September, we have enrolled our baby son in kindergarten for him to be around other children and learn the English language. It was one of the first steps of adaptation like his and in a sense mine. I was forced to drop him in and pick him up, and sometimes to squeeze out some words in English.
I will admit that I hated this language so much that when I was in college, having the first English and the second German, I asked a change to the first German and the second Italian. Most of you may think: but why to change, English is the most important language in the world and you can learn it for free. Of course. I agree 100%, but as far as I’m concerned, the reluctance to do it was stronger than common sense. I was stubborn as a donkey. English – yuck, German – cool. And see for yourself. As you can see, I couldn’t get away from it. It can be said that I just went to Ireland, where the official language is English. What to do 🤷♀️.
I have to bear the consequences of my “donkey’s” decisions 😉 and finally start to learn. It is true that I really like German, plus, I have two cousins who live in a German-speaking country, so I have where to practice it, but in my heart, somewhere deep sits quietly, secret love for the French language. I really like its sound. Who knows, maybe one day, once I have mastered this English, I will begin to learn French 😍😁. That’s by the way 😊.
Back to our adaptation. Either way, I have nothing left but to apologize to English or at least start to tolerate it, since we came to live together, and it is not yet known how long. The only thing I could do at that moment was watching TV shows with subtitles enabled. Then there was the filling of various forms so that I mastered spelling and reading better than communicating. It’s already big progress for someone who hates English and has to live with it (that is, for me). Unfortunately, still in real life, it was just a “drop” in the sea, and even I’m inclined to write that in the ocean. Every next day I would catch some new words, then check their meaning and try to remember them. After a while, I started to understand some words that others were saying. That’s how my “drop” was becoming bigger and bigger 😉.
I have to admit that I had it easy. My husband was under lots of stress. Everything was on his head. First, a job in which he had to find himself and get along. And imagine how difficult it is to understand a foreigner without knowing his language, even more, when he is drunk. Not to mention the English, Welsh, or Scots who visited Ireland frequently. And they didn’t spill behind the collar. Mission Impossible 😉. In addition, other matters that had to be dealt with outside of work, such as doctors, offices, etc. Poor man. All stress was on him, but I’m very proud of him 😌. (You’ll find out soon about why I’m still proud).
Like everyone else, we had to find a doctor of the first contact. We managed to find it quite close to our house and of course, despite our best efforts in search of a Polish doctor, it was an Irishman. The older, very nice, the sir. He ran his own clinic and also took people on the so-called medical card, which, thank God, after a while, we also managed to get it. One day, our baby son got a very high fever 🤒. We gave him some medicine to lower the temperature, but after a few hours, it came back again. It was the end of the weekend, and all the clinics were closed and only hospitals were open. On Monday, we went to our doctor with our baby son, as we had already started to get nervous. In those days it was on a first-come, first-served base. It was happening 😆, sorry, happened, that we were waiting only 30 minutes instead of an hour or more. Even when we came earlier before the doctor opened the clinic, there was already a queue in front of the door 😩. But that’s nothing compared to a visit. Once we were able to get to the doctor’s office, explain what and how, and with hope in our eyes, looking at him, as soon as he writes a miracle cure for our poor child, to relieve him in 5 seconds, looking at his throat, his ears and listening with a stethoscope – now one of the best – through his clothes!, then we heard, “He’ll be all right, after two days it’ll be over”. We got speechless 😳. Not enough that we were not yet shaken off the shock after we saw how the procedure looks like, then yet such a diagnosis for dessert. We left the office shocked. We couldn’t believe what we just saw and heard. Compared with pediatricians in Poland, which I had to deal with for the first 1.5 years of our baby son, believe me, I was shocked and for a long time I could not shake it off. Nothing else left us like to go home, with a sick child, without a miracle of the cure, with an additional dose of shock. We continued to beat the temperature with syrups every couple of hours and in fact, as the doctor said, it went away. I think it probably had any other choice, sooner or later it would have had to go anyway, but we wanted it to be sooner rather than later. It’s good that it passed and went and now we can only look back 😉. (I will write about medical care and our experiences in a separate post).
However, our adaptation in the apartment did not go well for us. We decided that we would go to the bank to ask for a mortgage for our own apartment. We assumed that it is better to pay a mortgage than to pay someone for rent. No one will tell you whether you can or not stick a nail or hang a picture and whether the child can play or not at home during the day because it may bother someone. We were riding a bus or a train around the area to find a place to settle down for our family. Traveling by train we saw a new housing estate under construction. That was the one that touched our hearts. The next day we went there to see the apartments. We had no problem choosing 😉. We immediately booked our desired nest. Now all that’s left is the formalities.
One evening, my husband was talking to a regular customer of the bar and mentioned that we found an apartment, and we want to get a mortgage. It turned out that this client has a friend who is the manager of one of the banks. He gave my husband his details and said he would let him know that we would contact him. And so we did. We went to the bank for an appointment. It was immediately obvious that the man had no problem with us getting a mortgage, quite the opposite 😁. Every time we met the gentleman who dealt with our mortgage was quite nice. At one of our meetings, when we filled out a form about our earnings and expenses, our nice gentleman looked at the form and asked if we had not made a mistake. Surprised, we were looking at this form, and he showed us the box with expenses. I don’t hide that he instilled a little anxiety in us. We started to wonder what might be going on. Or maybe we put too much and what to say now, we really cared about this mortgage. It turned out that the manager was very surprised by the amounts we entered, because with their Irish lifestyle; OUR amounts; they were out of this world. Not in the sense that it was too big, but on the contrary, it was too small. Can you believe it? He was unable to comprehend how one could function with such amounts. I can’t say we were not relieved. We already thought something was wrong. Well, in their eyes it probably was, in ours, it was normal 😉 (About this also another time). After “glance” at all our documents, we learned how much we have to earn to get a mortgage. And imagine that he was so nice that he even informed us what we had to do to get this mortgage 🤭. To achieve this, my husband had to get a second job. Fortunately my brother worked in a fresh fruit and vegetable warehouse which delivers goods to shops, restaurants, and hotels, he managed to get him a job. A completely different story. Then he started to work in two jobs at once. To the first, the bar, he worked at 4 pm until the closure, from there he got on his bike and rode to the city centre to the warehouse (no matter the weather, rain, wind, heat or cold) where he had to start at 2 am until 10 am, and so on for 3 months. I also went to work 3 days a week in the bar-restaurant as a waitress for evening shifts in the same place as my husband, and I was already in a fairly advanced second pregnancy 🤰. At that time, our baby son was taken care of by my husband’s friends, who came to Ireland, and at first, they moved in with us. After leaving the warehouse and still at high speed 😉, in order to help his friend to get a job (who didn’t speak English, not excluding swearing 🤭), he got hired with him at Pizza Hut as a chef to be on the same shift and translate. He continued like that for 2 months 2-3 days a week. Apparently, he had to gradually emerge from this madness 😉.
The experience my husband has acquired as a Pizza Man, we still experience today when enjoying pizza ordered from a pizzeria, going out to a pizzeria or bought in a store and preheated in the oven 😆.
I will tell you that it was a very difficult time for us, and especially for my husband. When I think about it now, I can’t imagine how it was possible to function like this. He didn’t really have time to get enough sleep and regenerate 😳.
After all these torments, when we finally submitted all the necessary documents, all we had to do was wait for an answer. The time was moving terribly slow. We couldn’t wait. It took a very long time. Too long for us.
Your,
Moment for You
P.S. This donkey in the picture is in all its glory me! 😉😜
Point of view
