I should preface this story by telling you about RyanAir's ridiculous weight restrictions. Checked bags are only allowed to weigh 15 kg (33 lbs) and carry on luggage can only weigh 10kg (22 lbs). Also, purses, laptops, etc. must fit into your carry on luggage and are included in the weight. If you go over the weight for either bag, you have to pay a fee (somewhere between 35-50 euro). And it costs 15 to 35 euro to check a bag (depending on when you do it). For our two week trip, we decided to each bring our backpacks and fill them with clothes and then share one checked bag. We figured that if we all put clothes in our backpacks and the rest of the stuff in the checked bags we would be fine with the weight restrictions. Wrong. Each of our backpacks were either exactly at the allowed weight, or slightly over, and our checked bag weighed a good 10lbs over what is allowed so we were faced with the dilemma of whether we should pay for another checked bag, or try to eliminate weight. Being poor college students, we chose the latter. I stuffed as much as I could into my pockets, including my bible, journal, chargers, camera, ipod, wallet, and few other small things. My coat probably weighed at least 7 lbs. Hannah filled her pockets as well, and Jenn got creative with hiding her purse under her shirt. It sort of started out as a joke, but when we realized it was actually possible to eliminate the weight, we went for it. In the end, our checked bag ended up being .3kg over, but the nice lady working the baggage counter let it slide. Today when we fly to Edinburgh, we'll take the same measures plus tiny foot Jenn is wearing her Sperry's inside my large tennis shoes, i'll probably stick the straightener in my sleeve, and we're all planning on wearing multiple belts. Should be a fun time going through security.
After our flight landed, it was a huge pain carrying the checked bag through Dublin as we tried to find our hostel. We definitely should have packed lighter. When we finally did get to our hostel, for some reason they weren't expecting us until April. Since the hostel worker felt bad about the mix up, he gave us a 6 person room all to ourselves, and he took 25 euro off the total price. Love when that happens! Besides smelling extremely strange, our hostel was pretty decent.
Saturday morning we got up with the intention of sightseeing but we really just ended up walking around and shopping. Dublin has some incredibly cheap stores. My favorite part about walking around the city was just hearing the accents. Irish accents are awesome. Also, everything is in English! It's almost strange to see signs I can actually understand. Oh, and they drive on the left side of the road here. It's funny because you can tell who isn't from this area by the way they look when they start to cross the street. All of us used to driving on the right, look the wrong way before trying to cross. Dublin must have had problems with this in the past because they now have directional cues on ground saying "look right" or "look left". Very helpful.
For lunch, we went to a bagel shop-- first time i've had a bagel in 3 months. It was delicious and we met a really nice Polish lady who joined us for lunch. She has been living in Dublin for 3 years so she gave us advice on where to go and what to see.
Saturday evening we went to a pub and had fish and chips for dinner. Considering I don't usually like fish, the meal was better than I expected. Later we went to a different pub and listened to live music.
Sunday we got up at 6am and took a PaddyWagon tour to the Cliffs of Moher. The bus left at 7am and we didn't return until 7pm. We made a few stops along the way and finally got to the cliffs around 1pm. They were absolutely amazing! I would say they're my favorite thing I've seen since I've been in Europe. I'll post pictures on Facebook so you can see them. After we spent about an hour and a half at the cliffs, we left and went to lunch. They took us to Fitzsimon's bar that had a nice buffet. I got turkey and veggies. Then we stopped in Burren, which is a city in Ireland where there is literally no soil. Because of some scientific reason I didn't understand (Jena, maybe you know?) there is something going on with the tectonic plates in the area and the ground looks very different than the rest of Ireland. It pretty much all looked like rock. Also, where they dropped us off, there was just a herd of cows hanging out. I originally thought they were wild cows, but they had tags so I'm going to say someone probably owns them. I don't know why they were there or why there wasn't a fence or something. I actually saw a lot of animals while looking out the bus window including cows, sheep, little baby lambs (so so cute), and an unidentifiable animal I've deemed as half sheep half dog. It looked a lot like a white Rory, so mom and dad, you may want to check into this. The only bad part about the trip was that Hannah, Jenn, and I sat in the very back of the bus. The seats didn't recline and it was a very long ride through many bumpy and winding roads. I thought I was going to puke numerous times, but luckily I held it together.
Monday the whether was pretty much terrible. It was cold, rainy, and windy. For some reason we thought it would be a good idea to go to the seaside. We took a 30 minute train ride to Howth, and when we got off the train and attempted to walk to the sea, it was nearly impossible to keep our umbrellas up. We were using them as shields from the wind and it was hard to walk. We eventually gave up the battle, put our umbrellas down, and got soaked. We went to the tourism office, learned there was pretty much nothing we could do in Howth under the current weather conditions, so we headed back towards the train station. We did get to see a few seals in the water and we enjoyed a soup lunch before going back to Dublin.
Since the rain continued, we decided to see a movie. We saw Bounty Hunter with Jennifer Aniston and Gerald Butler. It was pretty cute.
The rest of our time in Dublin was really just a lot of walking around. We didn't actually see a whole lot of famous sights. Today is scheduling day for fall semester classes so we're hanging out in the hostel until after we schedule because we need to use their internet. When we leave here, we'll go get lunch, and then probably walk around the Trinity College area. Our flight to Scotland leaves around 8 tonight so we'll take a 6pm bus to the airport. We will then stuff our pockets and board the plane.
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