On Sept. 11, while all my fellow Madison College students were going about having a normal Wednesday, I was sitting in a bathroom stall at the Dane County Regional Airport trying not to fall apart for the third or fourth time that day.

Earlier, my flight from Madison to Dublin had been cancelled. The first replacement flight sat on the tarmac for 20 minutes as the cabin grew steadily hotter and stuffier before the captain announced that we were experiencing mechanical issues and would have to return to the gate. The next plane I tried to catch was also experiencing mechanical problems.

Four hours after I was supposed to leave for Ireland I was still stuck in Madison and it looked more and more likely that I wasn’t going to be going anywhere that day.

When it comes to airplanes, I have never been a graceful traveler. Give me a bus or a train and I can go anywhere with ease, but there is something about air travel that reduces me to a tense, emotional wreck.

In his essay, “On Running After One’s Hat,” G.K. Chesterton writes the oft-quoted lines, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

I have been reminding myself of these wise words over and over throughout my first month of studying in Ireland.

There are a lot of inconveniences related to traveling and living in another country. Even little things like figuring out which bill to give a cashier to pay for your groceries, or how to get a library card or who you go to for answers to a question about one of your classes can be minor hardships that build up into a lot of inconvenience and alienation.

Today, one of the other American girls and I were set to catch a bus to Dublin so we could fly to Edinburgh for the weekend but we missed our bus and, consequently, our flight. Though normally missing a flight would freak me out I keep reminding myself, this is an adventure. Living in a foreign country is strange and often frustrating, but even changing your mindset about a situation the tiniest bit can change a lot about how you feel and react to it.

That night I slept on a bench in McDonald’s at Dublin airport – using “slept” in the loosest sense of the word.

Roughing it in the airport for a night in order to catch a 6 a.m. flight to a country you were supposed to be in eight hours earlier isn’t the greatest of situations, but wandering around the airport at two in the morning, when there were hardly any people there, was actually pretty cool. It was like seeing backstage of an event, seeing where all the late-night workers got their coffee, and what songs the janitors sang to themselves while cleaning the bathrooms at 2 in the morning.

When things like this happen, it’s better to look at them with a positive attitude – how can I turn this into a good experience? – instead of acting as if the world is ending.

My first month in Ireland has been far from a smooth ride. Though Ireland is a very Westernized country, there are many, many little differences between it and Madison. There’s a whole new currency to get used to. Though most people in Ireland speak English, their unfamiliar accent and the fast speed at which they talk can sometimes make it seem as if they’re speaking in a foreign language.

The classes here are structured very differently from the way they are in America, which can be very confusing to an American student. But instead of seeing these differences as frustrating and confusing, I’m trying to see them as a positive learning experience. Learning to understand the Irish accent is like trying to crack some secret code. It all depends on how you look at it.

And as far as Sept. 11? I finally caught a flight to Dublin and now I have a funny story to tell.