Fri June 29 - Sun July 1. This weekend my roomates, Kati and Alex, and I went on a weekend trip to Dublin, Ireland. Our little adventure started out at 4:30am when the mini-cab pick us up outside our flat. We got to the airport at 5am....from here check out Kati's website because we had a ton of problems finding the correct gate and it's a really long story. Here's Kati's website: http://journals.worldnomads.com/kgriffis
Once we got to Dublin, we got a 3day bus ticket and headed into town. We started out on O'Connell Street and tried to find some breakfast. It took a while but we ended up eating at a Cafe in the mall. After that we went in search of our hostel. To all of our surprise we found it with no directions and no problems at all, we basically walked right to it. After we checked in we bought double decker city bus tour tickets. We found a stop, climbed on top of the bus and rode to St. James' Gate, the Guinness Storehouse. We went through the 7 floors of how guiness is made. We were able to pick up the barely (before roasted) and tast the roasted barely. As we worked our way up to the top we recieved a free taste of Guinness, at this point non of us like the taste of Guinness. We learned more history and how Guinness is made. Finally at the 7th floor, or better know as The Gravity Bar, we all recieve a free pint of Guinness. mmm...at this point, I was the only one who like the beer!!! (I should like the beer, I'm Irish after all!!!) While we were at the Gravity Bar, Kati ran into two guy friends that she knew from the Univeristy of Arizona. What a small world! The view from the bar was amazing, it was a full 360 view and you could see the whole city.
After the Guinness Storehouse, we went to St. Patrick's Cathedral. When we arived we went straight for the gift shop; yes, before actually looking at the church. This turned out to be a very good thing because they closed less than 5 minutes after we bought our item. Weird!! The man at the check out counter told us that there was a men's choir and a service that was going to start soon, so we stayed long enough to hear the men's choir warm up and sing. They were fairly good. The church was really pretty, and old, but I guess it looked a lot like any other old church. The only difference was that St. Patrick's had a section of historical artifacts from various wars that Ireland was involved in.
After the St. Patrick's the three of us made our way back to the hostel. We took a little time to figure out what we were doing and if we were going to change...haha, we didn't bring enough close to change for dinner. :) (side note: we each only brought a packback.) We ended up meeitng up with Kati's friends and we all went to dinner. It took us forever to find a place to eat that was affordable. For some reason everywhere we went the dinner plates were about $30-$35. We weren't going to pay that much for dinner. Finally we went into another mall and asked someone in the food court where we should go. We ended up randomly finding their suggestion and had a great meal that cost us each less than $30, and we had a bottle of wine...mmmm!!
After our lovely meal we started walking back to the hostel. On our way back there was an internet cafe... 1euro for a 1/2 hour... we stopped to check our emails and call home. This day was also when there were all of the bomb threats in London, so we tried to have good contact with our families so they knew we were alright, and to find out what else was going on. After the internet we made our way back to the Barnacles Temple Bar Hostel for night of much needed sleep. :)
