Trip to Dublin with API

This weekend was AWESOME! Went to Dublin Saturday to Sunday with the kids from API. We had to get on the bus for 8am on Saturday and rode for about 2.5 hours. Thankfully I slept most of the way! We got to our hotel and dropped our bags off in the lobby and headed to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells. When we got there it started raining and we found out that the line was long!! Fortunately our group is pretty awesome and we had fun waiting around. I wasn't able to take photos of inside the college where the book was held and the library because of privacy precautions.

Once we saw the book, we all moved on to the restaurant where we would be having lunch. The fun began there when we all ordered and found out that the bathrooms had black lights!! This was both fun and definitely gross when you think about it...I was also the unfortunate one to find out that our waiter was wearing plastic shorts and spandex. I thought I being sneaky about it, pointing at him and telling all my friends to look when in real life he could in fact hear me and decided to come over and have a chat. Oh Boy! He was pretty cute actually and he informed me that he had to wear the ridiculous outfit because of Oktoberfest. And yes, my face went red like the ketchup bottle.

Moving on...

We didn't have to stay with the group, so a few of us decided to go off and do our own thing. That mean GUINNESS FACTORY! We headed off and ended up finding it after a few tries. The factory was amazing, I never knew how Guinness was made and the tour was very informative. Too much happened for me to give it to you here in detail, but look on facebook and you will see all the photos from the factory and that weekend. When the tour was over, we all got our free glass of Guinness. I couldn't finish mine though. I still have to develop a taste for the stouts and heavier beers. But because the beer is made right there in Dublin, it was fresh and very STRONG! I could feel it in my hands and legs and so couldn't the others I was with. I couldn't believer I was getting tipsy off of a few sips of beer!

When we left the factory, we headed back to the hotel and decided to stay in. The night was pretty slow and we all had to get up super early the next morning so we didn't want to have a late night out. A few of us gathered in my hotel room and decided to make a joke of it. We pushed our beds together to make a huge one and decided to jump up and down like we were 5 again, doing flips and pillow fights of course. When things settled down we played a bunch of card games. We settled on kamikaze spoons. For those of you who have never played before, you are seriously missing out! What happens is, you sit in a circle and pass the cards around to get 4 of a kind. During this you have to check to see who is winning. When someone leaps up to get their spoon everyone else does the same! Well if there is 5 players, then you only have 4 spoons and the person who doesn't get one, gets a point till they are kicked out. The kamikaze version of spoons is INTENSE! People were flying all over the place and I had the lovely opportunity of getting hit in the face by Kevin! Thanks Bud.

The morning after, Amie and Caitlyn and I compared battle wounds and cuts and scrapes. Needless to say, I bruise like a peach. We went downstairs and got our breakfast and made plans for the day. We had to be back on the bus for 3pm so we could only pick and choose a few things to do. Luckily we had a Hop-on-Hop-off bus tour ticket which brought you around to different tourist sights. We chose to see the Jail and the Dublin Zoo.

The Jail was so amazing! You could feel the history as you walked down the crumbling hallways and looking at the small cells. I could not believe the way people were treated there and how people were executed. The tour guide told us that the youngest person to ever have been detained in the Jail was an 8 year old girl who stole a ladies jacket to keep warm. She only spent 5 months there, but had to do the labor of an adult; clean the clothes and bedding and make the food for all the inmates. The tour also had a lot of other information about the political activists and extremists who were locked up and later executed in their fight to separate Ireland from British rule.

When the tour was over, we jumped on the tour bus and went straight to the zoo. We only had a few hours to run through it and make it back to the hotel so we had our game plan and checked out all then animals as fast as we could! I'm not really a fan of zoos, but this was probably one of the cleanest ones I have even been to. There were no weird smells, there was sufficient room for the animals and in general they all looked pretty happy.

When we were done, we headed back to the hop on hop off bus and made it back in time for a quick lunch and then our bus back to Galway. The ride back home seemed a lot longer than the ride there. I didn't get much sleep and it rained the whole way, which seemed to be putting everyone in a somber mood. Also, everyone including myself seemed to be catching the bug that has been going around lately.

I know there isn't a whole lot of detail in this post, but so much happened in Dublin, it's really hard to pick and choose my favorite parts and then to break it down. Look at my album in facebook labelled Dublin with API and you will see all the photos I took and I explain some of the history below the photos. This weekend I leave for Liverpool, UK with Tim and Caitlyn. Looking forward to that!

I also could not upload any photos on to this blog for some reason. It was taking a half an hour to upload one photo and it would come out looking horrible. It seems blogspot has made some changes to their software and I will have to find a better way of getting some pictures up here!