In 2012 our family moved from Ithaca, NY (a college town of about 33,000 people) where we’d lived for 18 years to Dublin, Ireland.
While Dublin is a very different place from Ithaca, it was a relatively smooth transition. In fact Liz and I have both commented several times how quickly Dublin felt like home for us. And although the transition was not quite as smooth for a couple of the kids, when we were back in the States for 4 weeks last summer, each of our 3 teen-agers commented that they were looking forward to getting home to Dublin.
Now I’m sure that there were other factors that went into helping us transition so quickly to feeling at home in a city that is not only in a different country, but different in so many ways from where we spent the past 2 decades, but I wanted to share 5 that stood out to us.