The whole trip was an interesting experience, including the trip to get there. First of all, Melanie, Nikki, and I had to leave the school by 3:30 a.m. to catch the bus to the airport. But, when we got to the bus stop, we found out that we needed tickets in order to get on the coach bus. So, we went on our phones and ordered tickets for the last resort time for the bus, but Melanie's didn't work and each ticket is time specific, so Nikki and I had to leave her behind. I ordered her a ticket while we were on the bus to the airport so she could catch the next one. Nikki and I waited for her at the airport and by the time she got there we had to run to catch our flight, but we made it! Once we got into Dublin, we walked around to try find our hostel and it started to downpour. We had to stop at a coffee shop and let it cool down a bit because it was raining too hard to carry on but we got to talking to a woman who was from London visiting Dublin to see her grandson play in a soccer game. After we noticed the rain let up, we continued our hunt for the hostel...and a couple outlets. Found out that it wasn't that bad to find once we could actually see ahead of us instead of ducking under an umbrella. We dried off in the hostel and then decided to head out and take the Guinness factory tour. It seemed pretty unimpressive at first but got better with every floor. With every ticket you get a free pint of Guinness, but they have a taste-testing room to make sure you know how to taste it correctly. I gave it a try but wound up giving the rest of my sample and my whole pint to Melanie. The rain had picked up again by the time we finished the tour so we took a taxi home, grabbed some dinner and headed off to bed.
The next morning (Saturday) we had another close encounter. We had purchased groupons for a day tour to the Cliffs of Moher with stops in the Kinvara fishing village, Bunratty Castle, Doolin, Burren and Galway Bay. We tried finding the tour and wound up going to the wrong place and then only had two minutes to get to the tour not even knowing where to go. Luckily, we found a phone number, called the Paddywagon tour company and the woman told us where to go and had the driver hold the bus until we got there. I am so grateful that we made it because it was well worth it to go. The cliffs, seeing the country side and getting away from the city was such a nice change of pace, and that's where most of my pictures are from. Later that night, we went out to get dinner and then see how the night life of Dublin was. Most of the bars were packed with people between my age and people in their 60's. It was an interesting experience, but still fun to search through.
Sunday morning we planned on taking a walking tour around Dublin. Unfortunately, that was the one thing we weren't lucky enough to make it to. Since we had taken the tour the previous day from Paddywagon, they provide free luggage storage and transportation to the airport. So, we left with what we thought was enough time, but we didn't have the right address. Instead of making it to the walking tour, we made our own by walking all around Dublin trying to find the Paddywagon tours office. After walking for about a half hour, we found it, dropped off our bags, and really made our own walking tour by finding the Dublin Castle, Trinity College, and St. Patrick Cathedral. After seeing all these things, we made sure to give ourselves plenty of time to catch the bus back to the airport and we actually had time to sit down and rest before catching our plane and we managed to make it back to school safely.
That little boat is called a black hooker....
These walls were hand made by just aligning the rocks like tetris without mortar or anything to hold them together.
The "baby" cliffs
So President Obama came to visit his long lost relative in 2011 and the small village was so excited they're making an Obama Plaza..
Oh yeah and he drank a Guinness so they're using it as advertisements.
Oh right and one last thing, his relative's small village now has a national landmark sign on the side of the highway marking that Obama is related to someone there. Apparently he is a big deal in Ireland.
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