DAY FOUR

So, the past few days in Ireland have been a blast, and since i'm awake and ready by approximately 830, I think it's safe to say my body has sufficiently adjusted to the time change. Way to go body, you get a high five. So we're going to go on our day trip to Glendalough (sp?) today, but while i'm getting ready/waiting for ashley to get done in the shower i'll give a quick recap of the past couple of days:

DAY TWO:
After a horrific first night experience, involving burned foreheads, nightmares of that horrific French movie Martyrs and possible trips to the hospital, we woke up happy to have survived. Ha, but seriously, it was a crazy night. We woke up probably looking hungover as I knocked a bowl of cereal over - sorry Brad Love. We had the awesome Ariel house breakfast and then went into the city.

The walk to St. Stephen's green didn't even seem that bad. We were all like, we could definitely do this all time. But then we walked further. and further. and I was about to start complaining because i'm a complainer apparently when we finally stopped to wait for our tour guide.



That [hopefully] was a video of him singing Molly Malone to us. But yeah we went all around Dublin with him and he explained Irish history to us. We saw Dublin castle and all of it's crazy additions, we saw Temple Bar - which is a district as well as a street as well as the actual pub, we visited Trinity college - although we have to go back to see the Book of Kells, we saw a lot of churches, learned about the vikings and on and on and on. For full pictures and captions, see Facebook. It was a really long day and we ended it with some traditional Irish food before we went on our pub crawl :



mmm...fish and chips. How Irish. Almost as Irish as our pub crawl. Full pictures of this are soon to be seen on Facebook as well - although you know my whole uploading pictures day thing. geez guys. So the actual crawl was 5 pubs and we actually only made it to four of them. Wow disappointing eh? But the thing is, Guiness is really, really, really hard to drink fast and a lot of. So me and a few other girls decided to go home. And we actually walked from Temple Bar all the way home which I was proud of us for knowing the way and also for being very cost effective. [If you look it up on a map our b&b is on lansdowneroad so it's quite the hike.] It was a really good girls night and we were back in our drinking element haha as Ashley liked to say.

DAY THREE:
We woke up after our pub crawl and got the delicious Ariel house breakfast. I am so happy that i've stayed at a bed and breakfast, and in case you have yet to be so fortunate let me just tell you the food is dank. Ashley actually got the traditional Irish breakfast and ate the white pudding, wouldn't touch the black though. I got eggs and bacon, haha - except that the bacon was actually ham. Fruit and juice and toast, all in all really cool. Ariel house is super nice by the way, we're in the ritzy district of town. When we tell people that we live on Lansdowne road they're like oh, well hoity toity for you. Good to know that your tuition money is going to the best huh mom?

Anyways so we went to breakfast...wow and immediately went to lunch. ha fat. But really me and Ashley had gotten up at like 9 and then had time to take a like hour nap before we had to head out. Still though, fat. Ha, we actually had to walk all the way around the city - they really like walking over here in Europe - till we got to the place. So I guess it felt kinda crazy? Anyways, this was our welcome lunch with some lady from the University. There were two tables and we actually didn't sit with her though, so maybe we'll meet her today. We ate at the Brazen Head, which is the oldest pub in Ireland, which was kind of cool. The food there was extremely delicious also. We started out with a tomato soup - the first that i've ever tried actually, and it was delicious. Then we had a chicken stuffed with...stuffing and wrapped in bacon. I don't know if it was Irish but it was definitely delicious. For dessert we had bread and butter pudding. Mm, alright, I'm sure you would have enjoyed it Mom, but I was like ok I'm ready to go to sleep now. Especially since the weather was pretty gross, even by Ireland standards - misty and dark/rainy.

We left the restaurant and walked like a mile down the river Liffy [which is the biggest river in the city, it separates it into North and South Dublin] into the shopping district. A lot of the girls wanted to go to H&M and other places to shop but seeing as how I have no extra room me and Ashley decided to go look at movie times for Sex in the City 2. We went to a matinee showing and it was so good! Slash awkward at the part with the braless Irish nanny. Ha. But yeah, after all of the sage Carrie wisdom, we were ready for bed. I took the bus for the first time and I just want to say: thank you, Irish transportation. I will begin using you more often so I don't kill my feet. Came home and crashed since we have this apparently long day ahead of us.

DAY FOUR CONT:
So we just got back from our day trip to Glendalough. It was so pretty! Being outside wasn't even that terrible because it's a really nice sunny day. Still cold of course, but definitely pleasant. We left at 10:00 and got on buses to go to the countryside. Being like any other bus tour that I go on, I was lulled to sleep by the rocking of the countryside. But we saw some really nice hillsides and lakes, and got great pictures. If I had uploaded before I posted this you would see my picture of the bridge from PS I love you with the caption PS I haven't seen this movie, but everyone was pretty excited about it anyways. There were some fields where they shot ring of fire - some mcconaughey movie, and braveheart in. We visited this really old - like 10th century - church and saw these gorgeous pristine lakes. I'll try and upload some pictures to add to this later.

Anyways, we leave Ariel house for the last time tomorrow to check in at UCD for the rest of the stay. Quite excited to finally settle in for real and eek..start class?

DAY ONE

My first day in Dublin was amazing. Getting there was not. After I left my mom and sister at Intercontinental in Houston, it was the start of my first international trip alone. The flight to London was fine, the trouble began when I got to Heathrow airport in London. I was passing through customs and even though my mom told me to read things a million times I didn't know what to say when I go to the desk. Apparently they don't take kindly to people who don't have letters from their study abroad school. I honestly thought that I wasn't going to be able to come into the country. She finally let me through and I got lost in the maze that is the airport. The annoying thing is that you're supposed to just know that all flights to Ireland leave from gates 77-86. What does that mean? Oh I will tell you my friend, it means that you have to wait till about 30 minutes before to know exactly which gate you're going to. It's a madhouse. I then got on the plane and discovered that there was a food menu and since I didn't have any euros I just went to sleep.

I got to Dublin and honestly, Brad Love was right. People would look at my legs and instantly give me a disapproving look. I quickly went to change and went outside to look for my bus. I was feeling like I was never going to get there when a girl from our group spotted me. Thank God. We rode to the Ballsbridge hotel together and then proceeded to walk up the street to the Ariel house which was down the road. I was wheeling my 100 pounds of luggage in and Brad Love looked at it, shook his head and said glad you finally made it. I checked in to my room and found Ashley thankfully, and my day was instantly better.

As a group we walked towards St. Stephens green, stopping to get a little lunch at the Doonselbery....maybe... deli. Brad Love paid for all of us which was really nice of him. This is also when I told him my customs story and I got chastised for not reading everything. We then walked to St. Stephen's green which is the Irish version of Central Park right in the middle of the city. We were allowed to split up so of course Ashley and I went together. We were walking around aimlessly and then decided to go try and find the old University College of Dublin as that was the one thing we were told we wouldn't be seeing the next day on our guided tour. We began walking the perimeter of the park and assumed we would just run into it. We stopped a police officer and inquired as to where it was. He seemed to now know what we were talking about but advised us to see the beautiful church inside. Since it said it was a Carmelite church I assumed it was catholic and we went inside:

It was really pretty actually, and I lit a candle and said a prayer for my safe flight as well as Allison and mom's. We thanked the police officer outside and I thankfully snapped a picture of the name as we were leaving.

We continued our trek around the square, asking literally everyone where the old UCD college was. People either didn't know, pretended like they knew and told us the wrong way, or asked us if we were sure we weren't talking about Trinity college. We managed to figure out that it was called the Newman building, and we thought we had found it when we went on an awkward tangent off of Grafton street. We were told that it was never a University though, and we ended up circling the park twice. On one of the shops we actually stopped in was a liqour store:

We tried a sample from the bottle on the right. Smokey Irish whiskey. Wow. They do not mess around. We both looked at each other and thought the same thing: we probably should have taken a shot of this, instead of sipping this shot so our throats are on fire. Oh, I'm sorry, are smokey. We looked at our watches utterly disappointed upon seeing that it was time to meet back up with the group at St. Stephen's green. We were trudging along when...

Bonus points if you can guess what we're doing in this picture...

Anyways, we got back with the group and flopped down on the grass. Brad Love asked us how our day had gone and we told him. We found 4 churches, the Topshop and the H&M, sampled some lovely alcohol but had no idea how we missed the old UCD campus. He told us the story of how Trinity College was originally a Presbyterian school. Even though 90 percent of the population was Catholic, they were not allowed to study at the University. The Neuman family realized this and decided to build a school where the Catholics would be allowed to study, conveniently in a Catholic church. Wait I thought to myself, the Newman Church...Newman building. I quickly scrolled through the pictures I had taken to find the name of the first beautiful church we went into

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Ha, so we had gone there first all along. I was so happy, I didn't even mind the mile walk home.