Cliffs of Moher (and more!)
I apologize for not posting sooner. After I got back home late last night, did my homework, showered, and ate dinner, I was pretty tired and didn't quite feel up to writing a blog post. This week has been pretty crazy and pretty busy, but it's also been very exciting and fun!
As I mentioned, I was able to sign up for clubs and societies this week, so I joined the Food Society, the French Society, and the Trampoline Club. Trampoline Club welcomes complete beginners and I have a few friends doing it, so I'm actually pretty excited about doing that. I am potentially going to join the Netball Club as well, which is a fun sport that I played a bit when I was in New Zealand. Practice/events start for those this upcoming week, and I can't wait to meet some more people and make some new friends through those!
The school week was otherwise fairly normal, and I definitely like that we are getting into the real material in most of my classes. I like my Irish language class in particular, as it enables me to at least pronounce, if not understand, words and phrases that I see around the country! It is a very complicated language with a lot of rules and very strange pronunciations, but I am already getting the hang of it and I think it's one of my favorite classes.
On Friday, a friend and I went into the city centre for practically the whole day! We did some more exploring of Dublin. I am already able to navigate throughout the majority of the city, which is awesome. I love Dublin because it feels like a small town but it has the culture and goings-on of a much bigger city. We ended up staying downtown for the whole evening, as it was Culture Night. This meant a lot of free events and things were happening across the city. The first thing we did was get lunch... here's a picture of my first Irish potato, followed by some shots of the shopping mall at St. Stephen's Green.
We started Culture Night off by checking out virtual reality goggles, which were pretty awesome! We visited Dublin Castle and then went on a tour of St. Patrick's Cathedral, which we found out was restored in the 19th century by the Guinness family (yes, the same family that founded the beer). We were able to go to this really cool place called the Clockwork Door that normally charges people by time. So you'd pay to enter by the hour, but once you're in, you can do anything they have- use their rooms, their TVs, play board games, study or hang out, eat their food, drink their tea/coffee, etc. It was a really cool concept. It was free during Culture Night, so we got to join in some laughter yoga, saw an improv comedy show, and ate some free yummy snacks.
After that, we made our way to Trinity College in hopes of getting free admission to the library and the Book of Kells exhibit, but they closed 7 minutes before we got there. We decided to just go home after that.
On Saturday, we decided to do the Guinness Storehouse tour! We meandered our way over to the storehouse and had a wonderful time while we were there. I'm not a huge beer fan, but it was so cool to learn about Guinness and of course, to taste test a few different brews. While we were tasting one, the waiters starting dancing on the tables! They put on a little Irish dancing show for us, and it was a great experience.
Fun fact about Guinness: Guinness uses 2/3 of the barley produced in the country of Ireland in order to make their beers. Also, there are precisely three million bubbles in each pint of Guinness. The tour was capped off at the end with a 360 degree view of Dublin and the surrounding area in the sky bar, which was just absolutely beautiful. After such a fun day, we went home and rested for our next big adventure on Sunday: the Cliffs of Moher.
We woke up very early on Sunday so that we could get to our bus in time. The famous Cliffs of Moher are on the exact opposite side of Ireland than Dublin, but it's only about a 2.5 hour drive if you were driving directly there. The drive was so beautiful! We went on the Wild Atlantic Way, which is a road that goes right next to the Atlantic (west) coast of Ireland on one side, and the Burren mountains on the other side. We got to see some absolutely breathtaking sights. The Ireland that we saw today was the Ireland that I expected: green, craggy, sparsely populated by humans but very populated by livestock, and gorgeous. Take a look:
We stopped at a few fun locations on our way to the Cliffs of Moher, but we were most excited to see the Cliffs. In case you didn't know, the Cliffs of Moher feature in many films and are quite famous. You can find them in the Princess Bride, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Leap Year. I was absolutely blown away...
So after that, we had a nice drive ahead of us. The views of the countryside on the way home were even more beautiful than the views on the way back. It was really cool to get to drive through so many parts of Ireland. Ireland is split into four provinces, Ulster in the north, Leinster in the east (where Dublin is), Munster in the south, and Connacht in the west (where we were today). The next distinction are the counties. We drove through a great many today (Dublin, Meath, Westmeath, Roscommon, Galway, Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, Laois, and Kildare). While on the bus, our tour guide/bus driver told us a lot about Irish history; some people slept through it, but I thought it was really interesting!
This weekend involved a lot of adventures and a lot of fun! I really liked getting to know my host country more... me and my friends did a lot of typical tourist things that we definitely had to cross off of our list! The Irish people are incredibly amazing, and the Irish countryside is just as awesome. It was wonderful to get out of Dublin and see some true Irish towns.
I don't have any adventures planned for this weekend yet, but I also didn't have any planned for this past weekend at this point last week either, so who knows what could happen! I apologize again for another late post. Thanks for reading, cheers!
As I mentioned, I was able to sign up for clubs and societies this week, so I joined the Food Society, the French Society, and the Trampoline Club. Trampoline Club welcomes complete beginners and I have a few friends doing it, so I'm actually pretty excited about doing that. I am potentially going to join the Netball Club as well, which is a fun sport that I played a bit when I was in New Zealand. Practice/events start for those this upcoming week, and I can't wait to meet some more people and make some new friends through those!
The school week was otherwise fairly normal, and I definitely like that we are getting into the real material in most of my classes. I like my Irish language class in particular, as it enables me to at least pronounce, if not understand, words and phrases that I see around the country! It is a very complicated language with a lot of rules and very strange pronunciations, but I am already getting the hang of it and I think it's one of my favorite classes.
On Friday, a friend and I went into the city centre for practically the whole day! We did some more exploring of Dublin. I am already able to navigate throughout the majority of the city, which is awesome. I love Dublin because it feels like a small town but it has the culture and goings-on of a much bigger city. We ended up staying downtown for the whole evening, as it was Culture Night. This meant a lot of free events and things were happening across the city. The first thing we did was get lunch... here's a picture of my first Irish potato, followed by some shots of the shopping mall at St. Stephen's Green.
We started Culture Night off by checking out virtual reality goggles, which were pretty awesome! We visited Dublin Castle and then went on a tour of St. Patrick's Cathedral, which we found out was restored in the 19th century by the Guinness family (yes, the same family that founded the beer). We were able to go to this really cool place called the Clockwork Door that normally charges people by time. So you'd pay to enter by the hour, but once you're in, you can do anything they have- use their rooms, their TVs, play board games, study or hang out, eat their food, drink their tea/coffee, etc. It was a really cool concept. It was free during Culture Night, so we got to join in some laughter yoga, saw an improv comedy show, and ate some free yummy snacks.
After that, we made our way to Trinity College in hopes of getting free admission to the library and the Book of Kells exhibit, but they closed 7 minutes before we got there. We decided to just go home after that.
On Saturday, we decided to do the Guinness Storehouse tour! We meandered our way over to the storehouse and had a wonderful time while we were there. I'm not a huge beer fan, but it was so cool to learn about Guinness and of course, to taste test a few different brews. While we were tasting one, the waiters starting dancing on the tables! They put on a little Irish dancing show for us, and it was a great experience.
Fun fact about Guinness: Guinness uses 2/3 of the barley produced in the country of Ireland in order to make their beers. Also, there are precisely three million bubbles in each pint of Guinness. The tour was capped off at the end with a 360 degree view of Dublin and the surrounding area in the sky bar, which was just absolutely beautiful. After such a fun day, we went home and rested for our next big adventure on Sunday: the Cliffs of Moher.
We woke up very early on Sunday so that we could get to our bus in time. The famous Cliffs of Moher are on the exact opposite side of Ireland than Dublin, but it's only about a 2.5 hour drive if you were driving directly there. The drive was so beautiful! We went on the Wild Atlantic Way, which is a road that goes right next to the Atlantic (west) coast of Ireland on one side, and the Burren mountains on the other side. We got to see some absolutely breathtaking sights. The Ireland that we saw today was the Ireland that I expected: green, craggy, sparsely populated by humans but very populated by livestock, and gorgeous. Take a look:
We stopped at a few fun locations on our way to the Cliffs of Moher, but we were most excited to see the Cliffs. In case you didn't know, the Cliffs of Moher feature in many films and are quite famous. You can find them in the Princess Bride, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Leap Year. I was absolutely blown away...
So after that, we had a nice drive ahead of us. The views of the countryside on the way home were even more beautiful than the views on the way back. It was really cool to get to drive through so many parts of Ireland. Ireland is split into four provinces, Ulster in the north, Leinster in the east (where Dublin is), Munster in the south, and Connacht in the west (where we were today). The next distinction are the counties. We drove through a great many today (Dublin, Meath, Westmeath, Roscommon, Galway, Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, Laois, and Kildare). While on the bus, our tour guide/bus driver told us a lot about Irish history; some people slept through it, but I thought it was really interesting!
This weekend involved a lot of adventures and a lot of fun! I really liked getting to know my host country more... me and my friends did a lot of typical tourist things that we definitely had to cross off of our list! The Irish people are incredibly amazing, and the Irish countryside is just as awesome. It was wonderful to get out of Dublin and see some true Irish towns.
I don't have any adventures planned for this weekend yet, but I also didn't have any planned for this past weekend at this point last week either, so who knows what could happen! I apologize again for another late post. Thanks for reading, cheers!
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