So my weekend in Dublin was fantastic! I had so much fun, and I hope to go back there again someday. My friends and I arrived Thursday night, and we stayed at the Spire hostel. If anyone ever visits Dublin I would recommend staying here. It was super close to O'Connell Street, which was one of the main shopping districts. The staff was also super friendly, and breakfast was included, which was nice.
One of the things we did was walk along some foothills outside the city. This was probably my favorite part of the trip. We saw this really old concentration camp on the hill, but unfortunately couldn't go inside because the gates were all locked shut, and there was barbed wire around the perimeter. As we were walking along the hill the building was on, we turned the corner to see a herd of deer. We got really close to them, and it turns out that they really like bananas. It was probably one of the coolest experiences I've had on my trip by far. Even after we ran out of bananas, the deer continued to follow us.
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| Old concentration camp |
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| Kelsey and Duarte feeding the deer. |
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| walking along the foothill. |
Another thing my friends and I did was visit the Guinness Museum. This museum was way better than the Heineken Museum we went to in Amsterdam. We got to see what ingredients are used to make the Guinness beer, and how it is produced. The museum was huge with seven floors, and something different on each one. Because it was close to St. Patrick's day, one floor had a stage with a bland playing traditional Irish music. There were also dancers showing people how to do the traditional Irish dances, which was really cool to watch. Another floor had old props that were used for advertising the beer, which I thought was really interesting. The museum also had a room where they played old Guinness commercials. The top floor, called the Gravity room, was a huge room made entirely of glass so we could see the entire city of Dublin. There were so many things to see inside the museum that we spent almost three hours there.
The touristy areas of Dublin were obviously a little more expensive, so we found a restaurant in a little shopping center on the outskirts of the city called the Pepper Pot that had really good food. I had a tuna sandwich with avocado and sea salt, which my waitress told me came straight from the east side of Ireland. My friends had bagels with smoked salmon on it, which also looked really good. They also had fresh blackberry apple and sage lemonade, which was easily the best kind of lemonade I've ever had.
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| Our food from the Pepper Pot |
I had a lot of fun in Dublin, and I'm sure I'll go back again. I'm very excited for this weekend though, because my friends and I are heading to Krakow, Poland. We are going to see the Auschwitz concentration camp, which should be super interesting. I know it will be sad, but I'm really looking forward to it.
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| Most of the buildings were lit up green at night |
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| Kelsey, Stefy, Hayley, and I |
