guiness and parks

the next stop our our week and a half long adventure was dublin - the beginning of our irish experience.

after the delightful dinner we had (mentioned in my previous blog), a shortish flight, and a busride into the city from the airport, we arrived in dublin. and i felt terrible. luckily, my feeling sick was short lived and i felt much better simply by getting off the bus, and even better once we got a little more food in us when we arrived at chloe's friends nicole's place. she provided us with super good irish bread with the best butter i have ever tasted (also irish, of course).. i've heard it exists at trader joes.. i will have to find it when i get home.

we soon learned we would each get our own room. with our own bathroom. it was like a hotel! except it was nicole's apartment.. apparently there just happened to be two rooms that had been vacated, so we lucked out. chloe and i had a little separation anxiety.. just kidding. but it was wierd haha.

we started our first real day in dublin by walking through stephen's green (a beautiful park) to get to our first destination.

at lemon crepes and coffee co. we had a delicious brunch (late breakfast really since chloe and i had lunch later- i swear we spend half our time eating) of waffles and crepes. chloe and i split a hardy crepe and a super sweet waffle.

next we headed to trinity college where nicole goes to check out the campus as well as see the 'book of kells' exhibit. lucky for us, she knew how to get us in for free :)

then we walked through temple bar.. which is a whole neighbordhood, not just a bar. its basically where all the bars/night clubs are.. and probably what most people visiting dublin are there to see/drink... we did not.

we visited dublin castle, which was not nearly as impressive as the one in ediburgh, but i guess still cool to see.

we did make friends with another armored statue though.

then we checked out the outside of the christ church cathedral. we peaked inside but thats all since we didn't feel like paying to see a church when we had already seen so many.

it was at this point that we sent nicole home because she wasn't feeling so hot and we didn't want her to start feeling worse. im so glad i didn't actually get sick on this trip considering i spent so much time with people who were.
mine and chloe's next mission was to find the whore. yup. the whore. ok. a statue. the molly malone statue to be specific. not really sure whats so special about her other than she is a whore that everyone can see.

there was some guy dressed up like a leprachon standing next to her. i didnt take a picture though because i was afraid he would make me pay him.

next up we found merrion square where we ate luncha nd then walked through the beautiful gardens. i love gardens. and parks.

anyways. this one had an oscar wilde statue.

later we saw where he had lived as well.

we visited the national art gallery.. because we seem to see art galleries in every city. there were some nice pieces, but we spent less than an hour there. why might you ask? well. we had gotten a text from patrick asking if we had made it to dublin. indeed we had. check. then we got a text telling us to report to city hall at 5pm sharp. we didn't know why. we were even one hundred percent sure he was in the city. so we left the museum fairly quickly.. though along the way there was a creativity corner so we drew him a picture - for just in case.

then we walked quickly in the direction of city hall. very quickly. then we got lost. anyone surprised? didn't think so. we had had plenty of time. now we didn't. some frenchmen were looking at the same map we were when we found one at a wall.. they were lost too. eventually we figured out where we needed to go, and so we ran. that's right, ran. why? we had no idea. but we knew it was important.
sure enough we found patrick in front of city hall.

turns out he had known for a couple weeks that he would be there at the same time as us, but decided to surprise us. and turns out that we had shown up at city hall to see some contact improv flashmob. and by mom i mean six people. one guy tried to get chloe and i to join, but we decided to laugh and take pictures instead.

after that interesting show, we headed to a pub with patrick and his friend sophie and drank some cider. bulmer's to be specific. it was really good.

chloe and i stopped by tesco to pick up food for dinner.
oh wait. first. the weather in dublin that day had been completely rediculous. sunny. cold. pouring rain. and changing between these every five minutes.
but back to dinner. chloe and i stopped by tesco to get some food for cheap. it started pouring while we were in the store and we were not looking forward to having to walk back in the rain. luckily though, the downpour stopped just as we were paying! yay! oh. andddd we got about 8 meals worth of stuff for about 14 euros. you really cant beat that. we were so impressed with ourselves.

we had a relaxing night eating our homecooked meal and watching grey's anatomy because we wanted nicole and chloe both to be fit as fiddles so we could go out the following night since it would be our last in dublin.

day two chloe and i started our morning with delicious eggs and toast for breakfast. we ended up not leaving the house until noon.. oops. in part because we were wondering if nicole was going to join us, but mostly because for some reason we just werent ready before then.
the two of us took off though and went on a 45 minute walk to find the only bnp in the city so we could hopefully get out some cash for free. nicole had given each of us some money when we arrived since we had high hopes for the bnp. well. turns out it was closed when we arrived, and there were no atm's outside. major fail :/
so we hopped on a tram to o'connel st which is apparently some big street and a big deal. we werent all that impressed so after less than five minutes we got back on the tram and headed toward phoenix park. oh but we did see a giant spire that was waving in the wind. and when i mean giant, i mean it made us look like ants.

after awhile of walking we made it to the park. we ended up hiding under a tree for a little because it had started raining again. we weren't all that impressed by this park, but stayed for awhile anyways. we found some shelter in case it started raining again and ate our lunch there. in the meantime, we got to witness 9 year olds smoking cigarettes. so sad. we also got to watch an adorable three year old girl kicking a pink bouncy ball around.

our big adventure of the day though was going to the guiness storehouse. it took us a little while to get there, but we knew we had to check it out if we were in dublin. we paid to get in and took the tour which taught us about the beer making process. we also learned that guiness thinks a lot about itself.

at the end of the tour we got a free sample. i thought it was disgusting so i didn't even finish that. chloe did but thought it was gross too. so when we got up to the gravit bar which had a really cool 360 degree view of the city and had the chance to order either a free pint or a soda, we both chose soda. how cool are we? haha

it took us much longer to get back to nicole's place than we had anticipated.. in part because we ended up on a part of the map we couldn't see/ streets werent even listed because it was such a touristy map.
but we did get to see the outside of st. patrick's church in the process.

we had dinner at home again to save money before heading out for our evening adventure.
we ended up at the bleeding horse pub where we each ordered a cider.

the three of us were enjoying ourselves when four irish guys asked us to join them. we though sure why not, and so we did. these guys were hilarious. they asked us about the states and different stereotypes. we even tried to teach one of them the cotton eyed joe dance, and then he tried to teach us a couple irish steps.

sometimes it wasn't a problem understanding them, and sometimes we had to make them repeat what they said. and when they all spoke at once.. we were in trouble. we didn't know who to focus on! irish accent was harder than i thought it would be lol. but definitely easier than the scottish accent.
so we tried to go to a couple more bars with three of the guys but it didnt work. they were all too drunk.. bummer since we were not at all after having only a cider each. but it was a fun evening nonetheless. we learned one of the guys likes to pretend to be sperm to get through crowds. he figures its more of an icebreaker hahahah. and we tried to do the dublin accent, but its super hard.
we finally said goodbye to them after taking some effort to point out that there were no more bars for us attempt to get into. chloe and i tried going back to one of the first ones for just a little bit. we got past the bouncer just fine and then realized it would cost money to get in. so much for that plan. we ended up just heading back instead.

dublin was nothing like i expected. probably because in my head i pictured all of ireland as countryside and cottages. it's not the pretties city i've ever been in. but i really enjoyed my time there.