Weekend Trip to Dublin

This weekend we spent some time in Dublin. It was so different from small, quiet Waterford. It felt like an Irish New York City. We left Thursday morning, and had a field trip there with through school. The first thing we did was go to the Dublin National Museum of Ireland. We didn't spend a lot of time there, but the building was really pretty.

The ceiling was so pretty!

Afterwards, we went to St. Stephen's Green, which is a park in the middle of the city. We ate lunch there and people watched. It was really pretty, and we saw swans! 

This is the entrance.

You can't see them, but there were a ton of baby swans on the side :)

We also got to go into St. Stephen's Green Shopping Centre, which is the Dublin Mall. The outside is almost completely glass, and it looks like you're outside. 

I don't know how well you can see it, but there is a giant clock in the back.

Unlike American malls, there were actually a lot of stairs at this mall. 

Walking back from the field trip, we got to walk through Trinity College's campus. It was so beautiful!! 

I definitely felt like I stepped into the world of Harry Potter :D

You can't see it, but there was a graduation going on. 

I just thought this was so pretty.

A lot of the Coke ads had different people's names in them. The name on this sign is a very common girl's name in Ireland. There was a famous marriage in their history between Strongbow and Aoife (pronounced ee-fa) that changed Ireland. We have met several women with this name.

If you have been to Dublin, you probably noticed that all the doors are painted different colors. We learned that this is because they didn't number their doors in the past, so this was your way of knowing where your house was.

That night, we met my friend Blair for dinner. Blair is a friend from GCSU who is doing an internship in Dublin for the summer. It was so fun to see her there. She showed us a really good gelato place on Grafton Street. 

I got Nutella Mousse gelato- it was delicious :)

On Friday (they spell it Fryday haha), we went to a pub called T.W. Sweetman, and the food there was amazing. A lot of us said it was our favorite meal so far. The woodwork on the inside was incredible; it had to have been a really old building. 

There is a JFK quote on the wall. The people there really love JFK, and they are having a celebration of the 50th anniversary of his visit to Ireland. 

Me and Rachel :)

We tried to go to the Dublin Castle, but for some reason, it wasn't open to the public. That night we went to The Temple Bar, which is a really famous bar in Dublin. If you come to Dublin, you have to go there. It was so crowded, so we weren't there long. I love going to pubs at night here. Everyone sings and claps along with the music, and you really get a chance to talk to the locals. 

The Temple Bar is both a bar and an area with lots of bars. 

Because there wasn't a place to sit down, we went to another pub called the Bad Ass Cafe (sorry Mom). It was a really cute place with great live music. We heard a ton of songs we know like Galway Girl (which I was particularly excited about), Ring of Fire, Ho Hey, etc. While the band was on break we also heard the Old Crow Medicine Show version of Wagon Wheel, and we sang the whole thing- and we were the only ones. There was a German couple sitting next to us who asked us about the song; it was pretty funny. 

Between the five of us there, we had a Bulmers and a Guiness just to say we had one in Ireland. It was a real struggle to finish the Guiness- it was disgusting. 

Saturday, we slept in a bit and then lunch at a place called O' Shea. Most of the girls got fish and chips, and they said it was really good. I'm not the biggest seafood fan, so I got something else. Then we got on a bus for a tour of County Wicklow, which is also called the Garden County. It was so incredibly beautiful. 

We spent a lot of time in the Wicklow Mountain National Park. This was taken on Green Road, which leads to Upper Lake.

This is Upper Lake, which is where the marriage scene from Braveheart and the wedding scene from Leap Year was filmed. It was so gorgeous. 

This is another road in County Wicklow. It was where they filmed the scene from P.S. I Love You where they first met each other :) The next couple pictures are in the same place.

Our tour guide said that one time a man asked him to take a picture of him and his girlfriend here, and when he went to take the picture the man got on one knee and proposed :D

This is another lake we saw in Wicklow- it was breathtaking. 

After our tour, we got on a bus back to Waterford. Today we have been resting and doing homework.