A Jaunt to Dublin!

This blog is rather long..sorry...but I split it up into three days, so you can read them like chapters of a book if you'd like :-)

Day One
I went to Dublin last weekend! I went with my friend Katie, another exchange student from New York. When we bought our plane tickets, I was looking forward to going to Dublin, but I wasn’t extremely excited, I think, really just because I didn’t know anything about Ireland, except, Leprechauns, four leaf clovers, and St. Patrick’s day.

I was leaving early on Friday morning, and by the time, Tuesday rolled around, the travel bug in me, had kicked in, and I was ready to go! Katie has class on Fridays, so she would take the later flight, but I left really early on Friday morning. I think this was the first time, that I ever travelled completely on my own. I left my flat at 5:00 in the morning and walked to Waverly Bridge, but of course, I walked to the wrong bridge, but I stopped a lady and asked for directions, and she ran across the street with me and told me exactly how to get to the bus! I made it just in time and rode to the airport. I was flying on RyanAir, which most of you probably know about, but they are known for having extremely cheap tickets, but not usually good service, and things usually seem to go wrong. I was praying everything was in order and would run smoothly. Everything was great, we even made it to Dublin ten minutes early! They announced at the end of our flight, preceded by a recording a bugle, like we were at a horse race or something. I got off the plane and didn’t know where I was going, so I went to the bus counter and the lady told me I could take a bus to the city centre for 2 Euros. Sounded good to me, I got on, and got off when everyone else did, hoping that was the right stop. In Edinburgh everyone is really helpful about giving directions and turns out they are possibly even more helpful in Dublin. I was given a great free map at a little kiosk and given directions to my hostel before I could even stop and ask anyone.

I spent the day really just wandering around the city. Katie and I had made some plans of what we would do on Saturday and Sunday, so I just decided to try and learn the lay out of the city and find some fun things to do. I went to Grafton Street, a really busy pedestrian street with clothing stores and restaurants. The street was lined with guitar players, singers, mimes, clowns, people selling flowers, people selling photographs, live human statues, a man playing cardboard boxes, a group of African drummers, it was a lot of fun. If you’ve ever seen the movie Once, it’s set on Grafton Street.

Everything in Dublin was really expensive, more expensive than Edinburgh, so I stopped at a cheap little kebab place for lunch and then went to St. John’s park. Growing up around the equator and now being in Texas, I had never experienced fall before. I walked into this beautiful park where all of the leaves were all different shades of gold, red and orange. In the middle of the park there was a perfect pond with ducks, swans, and a stone footbridge.

I’ve always loved museums, so I decided to go find the Natural History Museum. It was kind of far away, but I found it!...and then I saw the sign that said, “Museum currently closed for renovation”…just my luck. But, the archeology display was moved to another building and it was free to get in. By the time I got to the museum, I kind of just wanted to sit down, my backpack was kind of heavy, and my feet had never really fully recovered from the wet tennis shoes at the Lake District, well for that matter, my feet have just never really fully recovered from being in Scotland! I must have looked confused or tired when I walked into the museum because a janitor or guard came over with a big smile and asked me something. The Irish accent was much harder to understand at times, than the Scottish accent is. He gave me a map of the museum and said a bunch of stuff I couldn’t understand, so I just smiled, nodded and said thank you.

(Christs Church Cathedral)

The most interesting and disturbing thing they had on display were these bog bodies. They’re human bodies, corpses from hundreds of years ago that have been found in bogs around Ireland. I guess somehow they can learn a lot about the culture and history of the time through the bodies and stuff. I’ve seen skeletons before and that’s pretty normal, but this was not the same. Even stranger, there was a girl sitting on a bench sketching them. Don’t worry, I did not sketch or take pictures of any of them!

I wandered around the city for the rest of the afternoon and then went back to Grafton street to a café to read and write in my journal. I hadn’t actually seen my room at the hostel yet, but I didn’t think I wanted to just be sitting in my bunk bed for hours waiting for Katie to get in. Dublin has so many cute little café’s, its really just a beautiful city. A little Irish lady was sitting at a table next to me, and when she was getting ready to leave she started talking to me, telling me about her trip to the US, her niece in Jamaica, our lady of Guadalupe, antique stores, and what I should do in Ireland. She left the café and then came in a minute later to warn me that she had just seen a man wearing a gorilla suit! Poor lady! Haha. Our hostel turned out to be really nice! There were only six people in our room, and Katie got there just as I was going to sleep.

Day Two


On Saturday we woke up, ate our complimentary breakfast, and went to find the Guinness Storehouse. Katie and I are both not really Guinness drinkers, but we figured, when in Ireland do as the Irish do?.....I didn’t know that beer was such a big deal, but this storehouse was basically a museum all about how Guinness got started, how they make it, the advertising. Learning about the advertising was my favorite part, oh, and also Guinness makes the Guinness Book of World Records. Makes sense, but I had never thought about it before.
We got kind of lost on the way back from the Storehouse and found a great little pub for lunch, it wasn’t a touristy place at all, which was really nice.

In the afternoon we went to tour the Dublin Castle. I have seen a few castles since being in Scotland, but they’ve really just been ruins of castles. The Dublin Castle is actually now called a palace, it used to be a castle, but then in burned down. It’s an operating government building and we got to see the big room where they inaugurate the president of Ireland. I wish I knew more about the history of Ireland, but it was really interesting to hear about the Castle/Palace. They took us underground to see some ruins of the castle and the moat. It was really cool to see something that’s been around for so long. The tour guide pointed out a waterway that they had tried to block off with bricks during the 1300's because they were trying to keep the black death out of the city! For some reason I always think that historical sights like that should be out in the middle of nowhere, but Dublin was settled by the Vikings and there have been people living there since then!(hopefully thats right, correct me if I'm wrong)
We wandered around the city for a bit, went to some tour shops and decided we should go find out hotel. Yes, hotel, not hostel. We stayed at a Travelodge which was really nice. We had to take the bus to get there, but when we got to the hotel I felt like I was back in the states, except this room was probably nicer than most hotels I would stay in. We had our own bathroom, a mirror and a TV! I don’t know if I’ve talked about the TV licenses in Scotland yet, but basically, you have to pay to have a TV, so nobody has them.
(a leprechaun on Grafton Street)

Day 3
We had a list of thing we wanted to see on Sunday. On Saturday we went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but it was closed to the public for a graduation. On Sunday they were having an Evensong service, we didn’t know what that was, but we thought we’d try to catch it. We wanted to go see Trinity College because it was supposed to be really pretty, and its where the Book of Kell’s was. I also wanted to show Katie the beautiful park, and Katie wanted to find the post office where some revolution had happened in 1916. The only problem was we didn’t really know what had happened at the post office, or where it was.

We started our day by going to a little café to get a muffin and juice, the Travelodge didn’t have complimentary breakfast. Once again, we were delightfully surprised by this little café. After breakfast we went to find Trinity College. The campus was really nice, very collegiate, and quite different from the University of Edinburgh. The University of Edinburgh is kind of spread out throughout the city, but Trinity College has a real campus feel, it was really nice. The collegiate feel and fall weather reminded of the movie Mona Lisa Smile. I told Katie and she said that the movie was actually based on the university she attends in New York! And I was a slightly jealous for a second J We didn’t go see the Book of Kells, because it was pretty expensive, and so far we had been having a great time on our Dublin trip without paying for very much. And also, we didn’t know what the Book of Kells was. According to Wikipedia its an illuminated manuscript in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with various prefatory texts and tables. It was transcribed by Celtic monks ca. 800.

All day long we were kind of trying to find the Post Office, Katie thought it might be next to this park, but she wasn’t sure. We wanted to go that service at St. Patricks Cathedral so we started the hike to that side of town. On the way there, we passed a little Cathedral that said ‘free admission’ so of course we stopped to take a look. It was really pretty, and like everything else, had been around for a LONG time! The man working at the front desk showed us around the inside of the church and gave us a little art history lesson about all of the different symbols and stuff in the church. That’s the stuff that I really enjoy, learning about all the iconography and history of the places(that’s probably not very cool to say :-]). We made it to St. Patrick’s Cathedral just in time for the service, we were excited that it might involve a choir, and it did! It also involved a lot of sitting, standing, reciting and us being a little confused. After the choir sang some songs and someone read some passages from the Bible a lady got up and started reading a paper about Jonathan Swift. He’s the writer of Gulliver’s Travels and also attended Trinity College. The lady didn’t seem to be speaking very highly of Swift, didn’t mention God or the Bible at all, and then just kind of abruptly ended. It was interesting, but I was confused. I am glad we went, the choir and the cathedral were both beautiful.

We were still in search of the Post Office, so we went to find that park where she thought it might be. After a very long time, and getting completely different directions from at least four different people, we found the park and the painted doors of Dublin, not the Post Office. In Dublin there are a few streets where all of the buildings doors are painted all different colors, I love bright colorful things, so it was cool! But still no Post Office. Finally, we asked a guard about the Post Office and he told us where it, which was not any where close to where we were thinking it was. We decided we’d go check in to our hostel and then go find it. The hostel we were staying at Sunday night was considerably less expensive than where we had stayed the past two nights, so we knew we shouldn’t expect too much. But once again, it wasn’t too bad, it reminded me of being at camp. It was just a big room with a bunch of bunk beds. We were going to have to wake up at four in the morning anyway to go to the airport, so it didn’t need to be that nice.
(Lounge area at the hostel, pretty cool)
The Post Office ended up being basically in the City Centre, right where I had been let off the bus when I arrived in Dublin, I just didn’t know the big fancy building with giant columns was the General Post Office. We were glad to finally find it! And thanks to the internet, we can all know why its important.

"Built in 1818 halfway along O'Connell Street (formerly Sackville street), the GPO (right) became a symbol of the 1916 Easter Rising. Members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army seized the building on Easter Monday and Patrick Pearse read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from its steps. Inside the building is a sculpture of the legendary Irish warrior Cuchulainn, dedicated to those who died for their part in the Easter Rising. " http://www.dublintourist.com/details/general_post_office_gpo.shtml

It was night time, but it was still relatively early and we didn’t want to go back to the hostel. The weather was really nice, it was a little chilly but not too windy so we decided to walk around and try to find a coffee shop. The part of Dublin that we were in now was not really touristy, and being a Sunday night we were having trouble finding a coffee shop. But I was not going to give up. We walked for probably almost an hour, and crossed over the Liffey River, which was beautiful at night! So, of course I stopped and took a lot of pictures. Right next to the bridge we found a little Italian restaurant that served coffee and dessert. We didn’t look in any kind of condition to be going to a fancy restaurant but we wanted to find a place to go inside and sit. We walked in, and the very proper, polite waiter asked if we had reservations, haha, reservations?? No! But he seated us, we both ordered hot chocolate and shared a piece of cake. Everyone else in the restaurant was dressed really nice and eating three or four course meals. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten at a restaurant where they bring the courses out at different times. The waiter brought out what was possibly the best hot chocolate in the world. It was the perfect way to end our time in Dublin. We sat in the restaurant for a really really long time, enjoying the hot chocolate, it wasn’t regular hot chocolate made from milk or water, it was literally like drinking chocolate. After that we went and sat next to the Liffey River for a little bit, relaxing. I feel like most people probably would have gone out to a club or something like that during a weekend in Dublin, but that’s not really my style, and this really was the perfect way to end our trip!

We went back to the hostel to try to sleep for a few hours, the hostel cost 7 Euros, but we had to pay 2 Euros for a blanket, which we didn’t want to pay for. I thought it wouldn’t be that cold, but it was. I don’t think either of us slept very much because it was so cold, but we were definitely up and ready to go at 4! The flight back to Edinburgh went just as smoothly as the last flight. Except, we got in line to board the plane and after standing in it for about ten minutes I saw that it was for Bratislava! I’ve kind of always wanted to go to the wrong place on an airplane…but going to Bratislava on a Monday morning and missing Philosophy of Religion probably would have been bad. We got on the right flight to Edinburgh, and this time, half way through the flight, RyanAir started playing this music over the intercom that sounded like we were at a carnival, so strange!
(Monday morning, back in Edinburgh!)

I’m going to Paris a week from today! That should be really fun! I can’t wait! I think I’ve wanted to go to Paris since I knew what Paris was, but didn’t think I’d ever actually get to go. I’m going with Katie again, she speaks a little bit of French, which will be good, because I don’t speak a word of French! I’ll be spending most of the first day in Paris by myself again, which will be interesting not knowing the language. It will be a true adventure!