Half a Year in Spain: Craic! Dublin! Part 1

Here I am, in Ireland, the country of my heritage (well a good percentage of it at least). The flight here went flawlessly, and I met a girl named Elyse (pictured below) on the plane. She's from Bedford, Ma and goes to Fordham in NYC so we had a lot in common. We figured out our hostels were pretty close to eachother so we decided to take a public bus there. When we got dropped off it took us a bit to figure out where to go, but we found it eventually.

Elyse, my plane buddy

Dublin Center is situated along the Liffey River and has tons of bridges along it. I'm pictured here on the Liffey or Ha'Penny Bridge, and it happened to be right near my hostel that I just stumbled upon in our search, a sort of, "oh hey, look, there's my hostel!" I met back up with Elyse later on a mission for french fries and a nice cold glass of Guiness (I'm in Dublin, I had to try it!) I'm staying right on the river in the Temple Bar area, which has a lot of nightlife, it's flowing with people, lights, and of course, pubs galore.

When I checked into the hostel I found out three other American girls had checked in right before me. I'm in a 6 bed mixed ensuite (meaning we have our own bathroom. They were really relieved to find out I was a girl, and there is a another guy who was in our room, but I never even met him because he was asleep when I got home and in the morning, and was gone when I got back today, so there are two empty beds right now. The three girls are from UMass Boston, studying abroad in London. They were all super nice and we had the hostel breakfast (coffee, toast, and rice krispies) together this morning before I headed out on my own to go see the sights.

On this beautiful sunny day I decided to start by to St. Stephen's Green:

From there I walked over to St. Patrick's Cathedral:

All of a sudden I head "Kelsey!?" and it was Elyse. What a coincidence! We then spent the rest of the afternoon doing more sightseeing like Christchurch and the Dublin Castle and then we grabbed a two course Italian lunch for 9 euro that we split our choices to make the most of it and got bruschetta, garlic bread, yummy pasta, and a big margharita pizza. We then took a long walk past the Guinness Storehouse (which I will be taking a tour of on Sunday) and over to Phoenix Park and afterwards got a bit lost wandering around a more residential area.