Since Brad was in his room, I the rest of the apartment to myself! So I changed into some sweats and sat down on the couch in the main room and watched some Irish TV! It took me awhile before I found anything I was familiar with. It was a little strange for me to hear everyone speaking with an Irish or British accent on every channel. I stopped briefly on the Irish equivalent of MTV. There was an Atomic Kittens music video playing – a British girl band. They were singing the song “Eternal Flame”. It was kind of catchy and I liked it. Soothing. (To this day whenever I hear that song I’m reminded of my time in Ireland and the novelty of working on a movie and being a member of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team!) I flipped through some more channels and found one channel playing a Seinfeld rerun – FINALLY! Something I knew.
The more I watched the more I started to feel little homesick. I guess I never really had time to feel homesick until now. The last few days have just been such a blur. Everything happened so fast! But now that I had some time to let everything sink in, this…feeling just hit me all of a sudden. I mean back home I watched A LOT of TV and I guess watching TV here and flicking through the channels and not finding anything that I was familiar with was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It struck me that this would be the longest I’d ever be away from home without anyone really close to me that I knew. I mean sure I’d been on the odd family vacation or ski trip but all those trips were barely a week long and I was around family and/or friends.
I’m not even sure if what I was feeling was homesickness. I guess everyone experiences it differently. It kind of felt like there was a heavy weight on my heart and it was sinking slowly. I started to feel a little sad and longed for what was familiar to me. Now I wasn’t about to wallow around for the rest of the trip crying myself to sleep every night. No. But I guess it was this combination of little things that was slowly getting to me bit by bit. The smells of Dublin were different. The sights were foreign. The bed was…well it wasn’t mine. They were new and exotic at first, but with this single act of flicking through the channels and not finding anything I was familiar with, I slowly began to realize that I missed all the ‘little things’ of home. The smells, the sights, the routines, and of course the people. I had grown up for the last 19 years in the same house, seeing my family every day, hanging out with the same group of friends on the weekends and well…this was just the complete opposite of anything that I was used to! I mean don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have changed a thing! This was the experience of a lifetime! But I’m only human and the more and more I thought about it, one by one I started to miss the bigger things like my family, my friends, my…home. I wondered if this is how Brad, Paul, or even Da Guh felt each time they started working on a new movie in a different country. It didn’t seem like it. They weren’t fazed at all! I guess after a while, you get used to waking up in a different country with different sights…different foods…different people.
I laughed at George Costanza’s unnecessary outbursts of anger,Kramer’s quirky personality, Elaine’s bad dancing, and Jerry caught right in the middle of it all. Funny enough this was the closest thing to ‘home’ that I had here…I went to sleep that night picturing every room in my house down to the very last detail afraid that if I forgot one little thing that would mean that I’d be forgetting where ‘home’ was and everyone needs somewhere to call home. I pictured my family, my mother and my little sister who saw me off only a few days ago and my father and my little brother who were in China still and probably had no idea what I was doing or where I was! I laughed picturing their reactions when they finally found out! I knew that they would both be in disbelief and I imagined that the conversation between my brother and sister would go something like this:
“Okay seriously, where’s Allen?”
“I told you for the millionth time! He’s working on a movie with Jackie Chan in Ireland!”
“No seriously, where’s Allen?!”
“In Ireland with Jackie Chan!”
“Okay this isn’t funny anymore, SERIOULSY Christine WHERE IS ALLEN?!”
I started to laugh out loud in my bed. I hope Brad didn’t hear me – if he did he’d probably think I was crazy or something! The laughter died down and when it did I realized that it would still be just under a month away until I would see any of them again…