Oh, Dublin, Dublin, Dublin. I’ll be back for you.
Let me start by taking a moment to express how damn fast this experience is going. It feels like just yesterday that I was in Paris… for the first time. In reality, that was over two months ago. I’ll be in Africa in nearly 2 weeks, and then next you know I’ll be in Brazil! Time is really flying by.
I’ve been excited for Dublin since it showed up on the itinerary, but I was even more excited when I found out that my wonderful, wonderful friend and sister would be studying there this semester! So essentially we’d both been counting down the days until Dublin and our reunion. I can’t really put into words how amazing it is to see a little piece of Chicago when you’re thousands of miles away. While my homesickness had died down, it was also (excuse the burst of total sorority talk) recruitment week back at DePaul. All of our sisters were staying up until 3am, bonding over the stress and rewards that come with one of the most, ahem, interesting weeks of the year. While it may not seem like a big deal to most people, it is really hard to know that your best friends, the woman you look up to and admire who have always answered your 2am phone calls and have never let you down when you needed a dinner date (Or an excuse to order a Lou Malnati’s pizza. Yum), are busy hanging out and bonding and all you can do is stalk their social media pages. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade positions with anyone else for the world (haha, get it? ‘Cause I’m basically getting the world…), but regardless, it was nice to see Maura and Facebook stalk people together.
The first day we arrived to Ireland, Wednesday, we took a free tour-just as I always do. The tour was 3 and a half hours long, so Lord knows we learned enough about Dublin to write a small book. But perhaps the most interesting fun fact was that the name “Dublin” is derived from words meaning “dirty water” or “black pool.” Ew? Thankfully the city is much prettier today. After the tour, we wandered around and visited Trinity College, one of the oldest institutions around. Everyone about it was amazing. As classes had just started, the campus was bustling. While DePaul isn’t nearly as old, Trinity’s urban campus in the middle of Dublin reminded me a lot of home and I loved it. After lunch/dinner, we did some shopping around and I headed back to the ship to pack my bags and meet my friend, Rose.
Rose and I came back into the city on the shuttles that Semester at Sea provides, and then proceeded to lug our bags across Dublin-almost a mile- to our hostel. At check in, we have our first experience with Generator Dublin (Remember how well the check in went at Generator Berlin? Where they messed up our roomed and then tried to smooth it over with 2 free soft drinks?). Rose’s booking “doesn’t exist.” LIES. I’M STARING AT THE BOOKING CONFIRMATION. But this guy continues to insist that he can’t find it. The whole process takes around 15 minutes, then he finally finds her booking and checks her in. We’re in separate rooms, so I check in and we head up to her room first. Except we run into a little issue: the key doesn’t work. She runs down, gets a new key, comes back, still not working. Sigh. We decide to cut our losses and head to my room to start the night and agree to handle her key situation later. So we arrive to room 122 (Fun fact, my room on the ship is 4122. Cool, right?!) and we start getting ready to go out. My room isn’t exactly bumpin’. There’s a 40 year old business man who refuses to put a shirt on and a kid around my age who refuses to take out his headphones and engage in conversation (much like my freshman year roommate.) Then we hear a knock at the door. Confused, BusinessMan answers the door to find a young, too-happy, foreign kid holding a suitcase. We ask if we can help him (because why else would you knock?) and he, through his giant grin, exclaims that he’s our new roommate! Okay…. Cool. We asked if he had a key, he said he did, but since he heard us talking he figured he’d introduce himself via knocking? Some cultures are a little strange…
So ChattyCathy enters the room and peppers us all with questions and actually gets FreshmanYearRoommateTwin to speak. HOW?! He seems nice enough, but for the life of me, I cannot remember his name. He was from Brazil, and Rose and I called him Brazil. from the beginning. We asked Brazil if he would like to come out with us, and he pretty much jumped out of his boots. The best way I can describe this kid is to say he was a human version of Beau. So. Happy. All. The. Time.
So Brazil, Rose, and I head out to the infamous Dublin bars. But first we make a pit stop at a pizza joint. Rose and I will forever blame Brazil for this stop, but deep down we both know that we weren’t all that upset about a few giant pieces of pizza. Then we make it to the first bar, which is covered with SAS kids. As we float around the room, we quickly lose Brazil. No idea when he went home, but we waved a quick goodbye and headed to the next bar. Essentially the next few bars are uneventful. No amazing stories. Sometime around 1am we head to some club with a few locals and some other SAS kids. Walking in, I experienced what is easily the strangest club experience ever. Rose and I headed to the top floor with a few of our guy friends from the ship. I couldn’t name a single artist they played. Not because it was Irish-because it was heavy metal. Being a few drinks in and in a generally awesome mood, we made the best of it and worked on our rock star dance moves. At one point I headed downstairs to get a drink and they were playing Missy Elliot down there. I’m wildly confused on the theme of the club, but we spent a few minutes downstairs at the end, dancing to music we actually knew.
As the night winded down, the guys expressed to us that they were hungry, so yet again Rose and I got to go to OUR FAVORITE PIZZA PLACE EVER. Mmmmm. Drunk pizza. Then we headed to our hostel, making complete fools out of ourselves trying to get into the building (Ugh. Hostel security!) and then drunkenly deciding that we will, logically, want to shower in the morning so we should, logically, get our towels now. At 3:30am. Rose tells them to charge the towels to our room, I try to pay the 0.8 euro fee on my credit card, and I think the lady ended up just giving them to us for free. I changed into pajamas and came back to the lobby to make some calls back home. About 5 minutes after sitting down, two wonderful guys from Belgium wandered in, sat down, and we chatted for awhile. 2 hours, actually. Finally, around 6am, we all decided that we were extraordinarily tired and the French that they were trying to teach me was just not getting through my sleepy little brain. Sometimes I meet some really awesome people while traveling.
The next day, Rose and I nursed some gnarly hangovers. We met up with Maura for lunch and made plans for the cliffs the next day. Essentially, the day was uneventful. We spent about an hour at a Starbucks while we made arrangements for future ports and booked our tickets for the tour the next day. Rose also took this opportunity to attempt to download iOS8……… The iPhone update. The one no one should get because it crashes their phone. Thankfully, we were on Starbucks wifi, so the download had gotten nowhere by the time she decided to tell me about her endeavor.
Intent on not wasting a single night in Dublin, Rose and I decided to rally and go out. Slowly, the idea turned to “Go out to a bar down the street.” And then it turned to “Have a drink in the bar downstairs.” We walked downstairs, heard the music, and walked back up to our rooms and went to bed. It was around 10pm.
The next day we started the day extra early and hopped on a 3 hour bus to Galway, a city on the other side of Ireland. We got incredibly lucky with the weather and I can’t put into words how beautiful the Cliffs of Mohr were. I mean absolutely incredible. I can proudly say that I’ve been a lot of places and seen a lot of things (Nowhere near enough places or things, but definitely more than I had a year ago!) but the cliffs were easily one of the most magnificent. We spent a few hours dangling our feet over the edge, taking pictures to send to our parents to keep them on their toes. Pictures will never do this place justice. All I kept thinking was how much my parents would love Ireland. As much as Kevin hates flying, Ireland would have made up for it. The countryside (basically the whole country aside from Dublin) was everything you’d expect, and more. I would 100% go back.
That night, Maura, Rose, and I decided to go out and end our time in Dublin with a bang! It was quite an interesting night, full of stories that will probably make me laugh for the rest of my life. Perhaps our favorite story: Rose and I low key physically assaulted someone. A guy had been pestering Rose for a while and I had started getting significantly annoyed and started shoving him away, while kindly asking him to please not return. Then I turned away for a moment, turning back around just in time to see Rose full blown punch this guy in the gut. Sent him staggering back. He rebounded and went to take a hesitant step back, probably mid apology, when I slapped him straight across the face. Hard. He went reeling backwards and staggered away, tail between his legs. I’m not sure which hurt worse: his body or his pride. After he left, I asked Rose why we were so upset with him. In hindsight, this question should have been asked prior to the reality-tv worthy slap in the face.
Overall, we had a wonderfully interesting night. I have a few other stories from the visit if anyone ever wants to here them, but they’re probably not as acceptable for my blog. Most of the stories involve Guinness. And/or vodka…
Speaking of Guinness, we spent our last day in Dublin doing a tour of the brewery! Not a huge beer drinker, I was still amazed by the brewery. And while I hadn’t been a huge fan of beer back in the states, travel seems to have changed me (Imagine me saying that in a super pompous and annoying voice.) But really, I took a pretty keen liking to Guinness in Ireland At one point, I’m pretty sure my blood was essentially dark beer. I also have a certificate to prove that I have officially poured the PERFECT PINT.
After eating pizza from our favorite spot one last time, we headed back to the ship. Usually, I’m at least somewhat ready to go back “home” to the MV Explorer. This time, I was essentially a small child being dragged to the dentist. If it was at all socially acceptable, I would have started kicking and screaming in the security line before boarding the ship.
I love Ireland.
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