My Lagan Love (DUBLIN)

ello!

I just got back from DUBLIN! Wow, what can i say? It was the most amazing city! It reminded me a lot of Edinburgh, Scotland (although Edinburgh was much smaller).

There was some confusion before we left though. The day before we left we thought that Southern Ireland was a part of the UK...LIES!! Poor Christina kept telling us that Dublin took the pound and not the Euro...until we found out for sure last Thursday. Luckily, we found out just in time. We got to Dublin at around 1:30pm on Friday and took an Airlink bus from the airport to the city. At first, we were a little lost, one thing that I've noticed about Europe is that their signage is a little iffy and most of the time things aren't marked at all. After a very very very very brief freak out we found out the bridge that we were supposed to cross. Once we got to the right street, we started to realize that the place our hostel was in was...well...REALLY cool! It was a place called Temple Bar, and it was like the Theatre District of the city. They had small film and photo colleges inside as well as gift shops, museums, pubs, an Urban Outfitters, record and thrift stores! It was def the place to stay for a bunch of 20 year old students. The hostel that we stayed in was called Barnacles (suggested by my lovely cousin!). They were very nice and extremely helpful.
Our hostel room was really cute but kinda tiny. It was a six bed room and we shared it the first two nights with a kind French lady traveling by herself. The first night we explored Temple Bar and ate a REAL restaurant meal at the HardRock Cafe. It was so nice to eat warm, filling food and Shanna was glad to finally eat at a place that sold both veggie and meaty things, I thought that she would faint after taking a huge bite of her burger ^____^ she misses meat.
After eating, we went to Urban Outfitters and killed loads of time before taking a nice long walk, then crashing in our hostel.

The next day we got up at around 9:00am and ate our free toast and tea breakfast in the public kitchen. Boy was it fabulous...toast never tasted so good. We then left the hostel and made our way to the Guiness Factory. It was a long but comfortable walk. We always knew we were headed in the right direction because once in awhile we could smell the distinct smell of Guiness in the air. It was pretty cool; but the factory was in the ghetto in Dublin so I'm glad we went early in the morning. The back streets were really cool though and there was a place where you could take a ride with some ponies. Nikita was so excited to finally pet some ponies she didn't want to wash her hands afterwards haha! After looking through the gift shop and through some of the factory we went back to Temple Bar and ate lunch. The place we went to was a little market right outside of the photo museum. It had a bunch a things like chicken, crepes, cheese and Indian food. One place had a bunch of dead pheasents and ducks hanging by their necks ouside the tent! I ate some AMAZING Indian food, I swear I will never be able to get anything that good ever again.

After going to the photo museum (which was a little lame) we went to Trinity College! It was so cool! I wanted to go see the book of Kells but no one else wante dto spend the money! I said that I would go alone if I had to...and I did! Everyone was so nice to wait for me! It really was the coolest thing! I love old stuff. I also got to see the old Library of Trinity College. Okay...so you know the library in Beauty and the Beast? Yep, I saw that. It was so majestic I almost cried! BOOKS EVERYWHERE! It was then that we stopped at the Molly Malone statue for Nikita and then we made our way to the statue of Oscar Wilde in the park. Oscar Wilde was full of himself, for sure, but it was all most in a cool way. He wasn't afraid to be an ass and he wasn't afraid to say it either. Even though that would be a major turn off, I respect him. He was cool...like the Fanz.
That night, we ate dinner at a place called Half Moon. It sold toasties, paninis, and crepes. It was so cute and cheap! We had a great time taking goofy pictures and eating our yummy affordable food. The waiter I think had a crush on us because he gave us a couple of free nutella crepes with ice cream! It was so good! All of a sudden we all had second stomachs!

The next day, Mandi, Shanna, Nikita and I took a small bus tour to Wicklow and Glendough. Caroline went to Galway for the day by herself. As we travelled through the mountains we stopped at different places to take pictures like various lakes and farm land. It was so beautiful and amazing no words can describe it! There were three really cute boys sitting behind me on the bus too ^___^ hehe. Oh, before I forget, Nikita and I had to use the bathroom REALLY bad so on one of our stops we had to go into a really creepy forest and rough it! I hadn't done anything like that since Girl Scouts! Anyway, while Nikita was peeing she yelled out to me while I was going. I didn't hear what she said the first time so I yelled back. "What!?" I said. "I said I found a SKELLINTON!" it was the skellinton of a deer apparently...creeppyyy.

We got back at 5:00pm and were extremely hungery! We stopped and got some last minute presents and then went to the grocery store to pick up some noodles and garlic bread for dinner. It was then that we crashed really hard and were ready to leave the next day. We were going to miss Dublin, it had been so kind to us. :(