A Spanish Student’s Journey Through Transition Year in Ireland

Living in Ireland already has been a adventure – from wearing a uniform for the first time to exploring beautiful places like howth and Dublin.

Mar Llop

High School Ambassador – Mar, Spain

Hi, I’m Mar.
I’m from Spain and I’m 15 years old. I will stay in Ireland for 9 month and I live in Portmarnock. Portmanrock is near Malahide, where my school is, Malahide Community School.
Here in Ireland all the students in the school have to wear a uniform. My school is a bit different from the others because we don’t use so many books, we work with iPads.
In my school I’m doing TY, transition year, and this year is so different to the others because is not an academic year. This year offers you a lot of things. We have work experience in November and we also do a lot of projects and trips. We can learn how to drive and a lot of different things.

School life in Ireland

My school starts at 8.45 am everyday, so I have to get up at 7-7.30 am. The first thing I do in the morning is look at my time table to see if I have to wear my P.E. uniform or not. Wearing a uniform is a new thing for me now because in Spain only a few schools wear uniform, so I never wear it.
After this I do my make up and I go have breakfast with my host sister Silvia, who is from Italy and is in the same school as me but in a different year, she is in sixth year.
Then we take our lunch and put it on our bags and we take the bus at 8.40 am, because we live near the school so we arrive there at 8.45 am.
In our school we are not allowed to use our phones so we have to put it in a pouch and if you don’t have one you have to bring your phone to the office.
We finish the school at 15.50 pm but we have two breaks, one of 15 minutes and the other of 40 minutes to eat our lunch, in this break you can go out of the school if you want.
On Wednesday is a half day so I finish the school at 13.50 pm.
After school I sometimes go out with some friends to Malahide to get a coffee, but only if I’m not too tired, and then we go home.

Freetime in Ireland

Freetime as an exchange student in Ireland

Ireland is a really beautiful country, there is a lot of things to visit.
With my firends we go out every weekend to different places.
We go to Howth, a really beautiful place, we go to Dublin very often because it’s a very good place to stay. If the weather is so bad we go to Pavilions, Swords, it’s a shopping center, so we stay there the whole day and sometimes we have dinner there.
We also go to see our friends football match or we go to the Karting or some places like this.