dublin, ireland

After a short 2.5 hour flight, we had arrived in Dublin, Ireland. We claimed our bags no problem, and caught the bus into town. It was so weird to drive on the other side of the road! Everything is backwards; the driver's seat is on the other side and it was so weird getting in on the opposite side of the bus. And it felt totally bizarre going through all the roundabouts "backwards". We thought about renting a car in Ireland, but I don't think I could drive here. I'm sure I would pull out onto the wrong side of the road and get in a head on collision or something.. plus all the cars are standard here, and I couldn't imagine shifting gears with my left hand! Once we got to the hostel, I gave Jay a call, who was staying with some of his family in Bangor, near Belfast. We finalized our plans for the next day when he was going to take a bus down to Dublin and meet us. I was able to make him a reservation at our same hostel, in the same room even, which was cool. It took me forever to get through to him though, because I hate how the phone numbers work here! It can be quite confusing. Depending on where you are and where you are calling to, you sometimes add digits or leave digits out of the phone number. I finally found the right combination though!

For dinner that night we made, wait for it…. PASTA! We also bought a couple of cans of Guinness, which I knew I wouldn’t like, but had to try because it’s Ireland for pete’s sake! Guinness is the blackest, heaviest beer..so nasty! I couldn’t get through the can. After dinner we just walked around. Our hostel was in a great location, right near the downtown Temple Bar district. Every second building is a pub, and there are tons of drunk people stumbling around everywhere. I’ve never seen so many splats of barf along the sides of buildings in my life! We went to bed pretty early, because we had been up till about 5am the night before at Mike’s cousin’s house in Vienna, doing our laundry, calling home, and doing planning. I was also blogging, lol. It’s such an effort to keep this thing up! I think Mike may have even given up on his, lol. I went to bed before Mike, and when Mike came in the room to go to his bed, there was someone else in it! hahah, he woke him up and said "uh, this is my bed", and the guy was like "yea but someone is in MY bed". There was a free bed and the guy asked Mike if he had a preference, and Mike was like "yes, I'd like my bed with all my stuff around it..please move" hahah..sheesh!

We slept in a bit the next morning, because we were tired and because we knew Jay wasn’t arriving till the afternoon anyways. This was also when we realized that we had undergone a time change! I was like why do all the computers here say the wrong time? *CLICK* oh yeahhhh.. They’re only 8 hours ahead of Vancouver here, instead of 9. When Jay got there, we caught up for a bit then went and did a tour of Trinity College and their library, which houses the Book of Kells. The Book of Kells is what they call an illuminated manuscript. It’s made completely of vellum (calf skin), which is kind of iridescent by nature. It’s a book written by monks from the dark ages, containing the four gospels. It was really neat - all of the drawings and writing were so detailed and fancy. It must have taken forever to complete! It was absolutely pouring that day, which made the walking tour interesting! Lol. We didn’t feel like sightseeing in the rain after that, so we went to see a movie (Miami Vice) It was alright. For dinner we went to the grocery store and bought stuff for a stirfry. Mike was busy making phone calls, while Jay and I cooked. He came back downstairs just as it was ready – how convenient! Hahah.. It was so delicious! We also had the bottle of wine that Mike’s cousin had given us as we were leaving Vienna. After dinner Mike had some more phone calls to make, and Jay and I went for a little walk. It was weird, it felt like we were hanging out back at home, but we were in DUBLIN – crazy!

The next day we didn’t really know what to do, it seemed like the main attraction of Dublin was its pubs and nightlife. We all took a train to a suburb of Dublin, called Blackrock. There was this market thing there which we explored for a while. The town was quite small though, so there wasn’t much to do other than that! When we got back to Dublin, it had miraculously stopped raining for a while. That was good because we didn’t have much to do except walk around! We stumbled across this REALLY bizarre street performance art thing. I really don’t think words can describe it! Its theme was something hippy dippy like man’s struggle against environment or something like that, lol. There was no dialogue, just people using weird props. We also went to a photography exhibit because it was free. For dinner we went to this 50’s style burger joint called Eddie Rocket’s for some delicious burgers, and after that Jay caught his bus back to Belfast. Mike and I just walked around that night and took some pictures. We also made our plans for the next day when we would be catching a bus to the Dingle Peninsula.