Nothing Like St. Patrick´s Day in Dublin

Since it's been over three weeks since my last update, and since so much has happened, I've decided to divide my next update into three entries. It only seems fitting, because I have three trips that I still need to write about. This is for both of our conveniences, you see, because it'll be easier for me to write it in three different entries and hopefully will be easier to keep your interest in three different entries instead of one really super duper long one. So first is Dublin, which was from March 17th to the 20th. Here we go:

If someone ever tells you that they don´t really celebrate St. Patrick´s Day in Ireland, he or she is lying to you. A group of 8 of us skipped class on Thursday (sorry dad) to catch our flight out of Santander at 11am. Ireland is an hour behind, so we gained an hour, and arrived at the Dublin airport at 1pm ish. We made our way to the hotel, paid, and settled into the room. After that our first stop was to a novelty Irish gift shop, so we could find ridiculous green wastes of money to adorn ourselves with. Then we walked along the O´connell street, which I gather is the main street of central Dublin. All of us were immediately having the time of our lives. The streets were insanely crowded (tough break to be a car) with tons and tons of people. We made our way to Temple Bar, which was an area surrounding an actual bar called, you guessed it-Temble Bar. It was the craziest party I´ve ever seen, which really isn´t saying much, because I´ve only seen a handful of parties in my day, and they were all fairly tame. But I assure you, this was probably the biggest party going on in the world on Thursday. And also probably EVER. We met up with one of my sorority sisters, who is studying in Wales this year. Another one of our sisters was visiting her, and she also brought along her Welsh friend. When we retrieved them, we heard somewhere that the drinking age in Ireland was 20, and me and my sister´s Welsh friend began to panic slightly, as we´re both 19. Our friend Shelby walked to the bouncer of our first bar and said "Hi, I´m with that group of people over there, and we all forgot our IDs, can we come in anyway?" And he said, "Yeah, you look old enough." And in we walked. We started the night off early at about 2:30pm with a Guinness, which was the cheapest available pint (I shopped around. By asking the barman, "What is your cheapest pint? I'll have that." I´m so resourceful...) at 5€. Just so you know, the drinking age is actually 18 in Ireland. Good thing I did some research before I left, right?

So I won't bore you with the details, but basically we walked around the insane crowded green party that is Temple Bar and went from bar to bar and drank. I'll try to paint a picture for you. All you can see is green. You can't hear yourself think. You can barely walk for how many people there are. While making our way to another bar, I looked over and saw an early 20s looking man laying on the sidewalk, just vomiting into the street. I had two reactions:

1. Gross.
2. I'm so glad I don't have to clean that up.

St. Patrick's Day.

So yes, our day was much more successful and vomit-free than this stranger I saw on the streets of Dublin. Our night did end extraordinarily early, though. We went for Irish fast food at about 10, and took a cab home at 11. We got back to the hotel before midnight. All I could think was, wow, if we were back home in Santander, I wouldn't have even have left my apartment yet. I suppose when you begin drinking at 2am, midnight is a good time to throw in the towel.

Friday was a long day. It started out promising, as we'd all bought tickets to a 2 day hop-on, hop-off bus tour of Dublin. It's a line of buses that run constantly from early in the morning to about 6, and they stop at 24 popular tourist spots. You can get off at any point, and go to any bus stop and get back on. It's a pretty good deal, too. I recommend it if you're ever in the Dublin area. http://www.dublinsightseeing.ie/ It's only 11€ if you're a student and you buy tickets online (if you're wondering, that's my Travel Tip #14). Anyway, we started out at stop #1, and our tour guide was really funny, so we decided to stay on the bus for the entire circle of the city, just to get acquainted and decide where it was we wanted to go. After one full go around, which took about an hour and a half, we made our way back around to stop number 3, or 4, I can't remember because it was like 2 weeks ago and I need to stop procrastinating writing these blogs. This stop was Trinity College, which is the oldest college in Ireland. It's consistently rated as Ireland's number 1 college, and is rated 40somethingth worldwide. Also, it was founded by Queen Elizabeth I. It's really beautiful, and I admit that it would be cool to go there and all but, I get annoyed when I see high schoolers touring UNCW. There's no way I'd be able to handle the hundreds of tourists coming to see my school just for the novelty of it. How do you focus with all those people clouding up your mind?

After the college, we all went to get something to eat and to sit down and plan the rest of our day. We did some shopping and then made our way to the Guinness Storehouse. I'm really not a huge fan of Guinness, but when in Ireland, drink like the Irish do. We got our student discount (kinda ironic to get a student discount to enter a brewery, but then again, maybe not that ironic) and went in. Everyone gets a complimentary pint of Guinness. You have three options: go to the fifth floor bar and get your pint, go to the seventh floor gravity bar, from which you can see the entirety of Dublin, or go to the fourth floor, where they teach you the "right" way to pour a pint of Guinness. And then you get feel the pride of a job well done by drinking the very pint that you labored over and poured yourself. Guess which one I picked? The fourth floor, of course! I'm an american, I want to work for my pint. I don't want it just handed to me. That was a cool experience, though. They even gave me a certificate to prove that I am, in fact, a certified pourer. After that, we walked aimlessly through the other 6 floors of the storehouse. Actually, let me amend that statement: the other 5 floors. There actually isn't a sixth floor. The seventh floor is made up of only the gravity bar, which gets its name from the fact that it's floating rather than resting on the sixth floor, make sense? Kinda cool, no?

Also, when you first walk in, the central structure of the building is made of glass and is shaped like a pint glass. They seriously love their Guinness, don't they? They told us how many pints it would take to fill, and I think it was somewhere around 28 million. Then our tour guide said that that's how many pints are sold in Ireland per week. Then he added, "But this week, that's how many pints are sold per day."

St. Patrick's day.

The rest of the day was uneventful. We ate dinner and made our way back to the hotel, in hopes of getting up early the next day to get some more sight seeing done.

We did succeed in getting an early start on Saturday, though as soon as the cab dropped us off in the center, one of our number realized she didn't have her bus pass. This weekend was one mishap after another. Luckily we all like each other. The group I was with was the poor group, so while 3 of our group went to see stuff you had to pay for, we went to see all the free stuff, which happened to also be all the stuff that was shit. The first was Pheonix park, which was, admittedly, beautiful. Despite the winter months that preceeded, it was a vibrant green. There we met with our sister Jordan and her Welsh friend Jack.

Next was the National Museum of Ireland. It was kind of boring, admittedly, but I tried to be a good sport about it all. I mean, jeez, Ireland, we get it. That whole "luck of the Irish" thing was just a facade. It was like they wanted to avoid telling about all the misfortune in their past, so they just filled the museum with random things that you'd never go to a museum to see. For example, fashion on the 19th and 20th centuries. Then later, examples of the way a typical Irish bedroom or living room might look in the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, and so forth. And then they exagerrated their involvement in the American Civil War, especially in the north (probably to win points, no?). Why do you need an entire floor of a museum dedicated to this? Even I could tell you about the Irish involvement in our Civil War. In fact, I can sum it up for you in one sentence: There were some legalized Irish aliens and some naturalized Irish immigrants living in the states at the time and they were drafted to fight. Some of them felt passionately enough about it to enlist themselves. Oh, wait. That was two sentences. You win this time, National Museum of Ireland.

After that, we went to the Irish Museum of Modern Art. I hate modern art; I think it's a waste of materials, money, time, capital, and energy to take a large canvas and paint it entirely black, save a 2cm by 2cm square in the bottom left corner (yes this was an actual piece that I saw). I value much more a person's ability to recreate actual, recognizable images, but that's just me. I won't be judgemental. Anyway, I found myself a nice room and read a book until one of my friends came to get me. When we were done at the Modern Art museum, we went to a crowded bar called Flannigan's or something Irish like that to watch the Rugby game.

The game was Ireland versus England, so it was really exciting to get to watch it in Ireland. And, as an added bonus, we got to watch Ireland win. This was especially exciting because this meant Ireland prevented England from winning some kind of title (forgive me; I'm new to this rugby thing). So after watching my first game of rugby, I have another thing to add to my list of things to bring back to the states. Where did we deviate from rugby and create American football, which is really just a shit version of rugby? Seriously, United States, get it together.

Sabrina, Abi, and I really wanted to get over to St. Patrick's cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral to take pictures before we lost the sun (it was about 5pm at this point) and before the buses stopped running. So we left during the game and made our way over to the churchs. They were really stunning and I got a couple pictures, but it was really just because I felt like it was important to at least make it to St. Patrick's Cathedral while you're in Dublin. That's not something you can see anywhere you go. After my few photos, we went to a place down the street that the cab driver had suggested. Apparently it's super famous. They have a list of the celebrities that have eaten there outside on the wall. It was a lot of food, but hey, I ate fish and chips in Dublin next to Saint Patrick's Cathedral. It wasn't on my bucket list exactly, but still cool all the same.

We got back to the bar to watch Ireland win, which was just about the most insanity I've seen in a single room in my whole life. After the game, Sabrina and I were getting tired and didn't feel like staying at the bar for the next game, which was between Wales and some other country I don't remember, so we met up with Shelby, Danielle, and Kelsie, who had all gone an another tour the rest of us couldn't afford. We met them in the center and caught a taxi back to the hotel. We spent a couple hours in the room having girl talk, and then went down to the bar for a night cap. I had an Irish coffee, which was suggested to me by my boss (Thanks, Mark!) a while back. It wasn't as good as I was expecting. I like whiskey, and I like coffee, but it's kind of like how I enjoy the taste of lasagna and the taste of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, but I certainly don't like them together. Then we called it an early night.

The next morning we had to wake up at 4am in order to catch the bus in order to make it to the airport in order to get our plane in time. It makes me feel so adult to do things like this by myself.

So what did I think of Dublin? It was beautiful. I didn't miss Santander as much, but I think that was just because I had already gone to Barcelona and learned what it was like to be away from your home away from home. It's kind of like when you go to school for the first time. It's really scary and you don't know what to expect and all you really want to do is go home, but then you get used to it and it's not so bad. (Until you get to college and you have to drag your ass out of bed at 7 in the morning to make it to quantitative methods and statistical analysis for business and economics, but that's a different story). So yes, Dublin was beautiful. There was a lot to see. I had a lot of fun Thursday, but I didn't particularly enjoy the rest of the weekend. Understand, I think this was mostly circumstantial. I don't blame the city for my bad time. I wish I could have somehow teleported to Santander during the night on Thursday and woken up in my bed on Friday morning. I missed class Thursday, and two day trips over the weekend, one of which I had to write a paper for in order to make it up. I feel a lot of what I did was purely for the novelty of having said that I did it. Yes, I drank a Guinness in Dublin on St. Patrick's day, but was that an even trade? I suppose I'll never know. It's best not to dwell on what could have been, especially one single weekend of my life. The important thing is that I had fun in Dublin. Don't misunderstand me; it's not that I regret my decision to go to Dublin (which, ask anyone of my friends, was a difficult one), it's just that it was this weekend that I began to realize how little time I have left here. Maybe I should be thinking the opposite way, that I should be taking advantage of all my time here and using it to travel around Europe?

Anyway, next entry will be about my trip to Salamanca! Adios, todos!


"El mundo es un libro, y ellos que no viajan leen solo una página."