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the one where I walk down the aisle in a 6 euro primark dress

  You know how it is. The end of the month. Your cupboards have seen better days and for the past three nights you’ve been eating some questionable concoctions of instant noodles, fish fingers and whatever else you can ‘borrow’ from your flatmates until payday comes. As expected, this is exactly the position I found myself in at the end of my first month in Spain after overindulging in café con leches and one too many one euro tequila shots. Before moving to Spain, I knew that I would eventually need to find extra work to supplement my part-time teaching hours and it seemed as though that time had arrived. Therefore, one evening, after another dinner of instant noodles gone wrong, I wrote a post on Facebook detailing my job experiences and posted it into multiple different Facebook groups; ‘Expats in Alicante,’ ‘Irish in Alicante,’ ‘Work in Alicante,’ A day later, I found my phone flooded with messages; an old Irish lady from the group, ‘Irish in Alicante’ wishing me well and telling
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how homesickness led me to the most embarrassing moment of my life (so far)

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Welcome back to the Intensive Clare Unit! First of all, I want to thank every single person who liked, shared or commented on my first blog post. It means so much and not one piece of feedback went unnoticed. People sometimes like to say that, especially in Ireland, we don’t like to see other people do well. I don’t feel as though that is the case and I am overwhelmed by all the support I have been given, especially on my very first post. Thank you all so much.  After suffering an unusual bout of homesickness this week for the first time since September, I decided that for my second post, I wanted to provide a bit of a reality-check on what living abroad is actually like. Yesterday, I posted a photo on my Instagram story of the view from the top of the Castillo de Santa Barbara, a medieval fortress perched on an urban mount overlooking La Playa del Postiguet. Many of my friends commented on how beautiful the view was, and how lucky I was to be there. And they were right, I was lucky to
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all about me: my first blog post where I overshare worse than that really drunk girl you see crying to strangers in the smoking area

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Hello everyone! Welcome to ‘The Intensive Clare Unit,’ where I share the crazy and cringe-worthy stories of my life. To give you all some context, my name is Clare and I am a 22 year-old Irish girl living in Spain. Although living abroad had always been on the cards for me, my life plans were turned upside down when nine months ago, I was rejected from a scholarship that would enable me to pursue what I thought was my dream career: becoming a barrister in London. For months I felt so hopeless, wondering what was next for me, cringing at my performance at the scholarship interview and beating myself up for not knowing any better. When I graduated six months ago, surrounded by my classmates who had secured graduate jobs and training contracts, I felt so confused. My whole life I had pushed and pushed to become a lawyer and suddenly, here I was, questioning everything that I had ever worked for.   My academic life thus far had been thoroughly unenjoyable. I put so much pressure on mys
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