U of R Invasion Part III: Dublin

After a couple of hours of sleep at Katie's apartment on Friday night we got up on Saturday for St Patrick's Day in Dublin! We met up with 3 other U of R students to go watch the parade. By the time we got to the parade route it was pretty packed, and the best we could do was about 8 deep. So we didn't have the best view of the parade. But the atmosphere was enough of a show, with people wearing green as far as you could see. From the parade the 6 of us left to go to a double header of Gaelic football and Hurling. Gaelic football was awesome, it is like soccer, but with football, rugby and basketball all mixed in. Hurling was like lacrosse, but with some baseball in there too. They also had Irish dancing and music during halftime. The games were really interesting, but it was pretty cold out, so we left before the Hurling match was over. From there we just walked around the city center and checked out the celebrations. When we were hungry for dinner we couldn't find anywhere that wasn't packed, so we ended up eating at an Indian restaurant, which was kind of funny. After dinner we checked out a carnival, and some pubs, looking for live music, but everywhere was packed and crazy, so Adam and I called it a night.

Adam left for New York early the next morning. I spent the day with Katie, and her friend from home who had just gotten in for the week. We walked in to the city center again and went into St Stephen's Green, which was beautiful. It was kind of hard to enjoy though, because it was absolutely frigid. After that we walked around Merrion Square and looked at the Georgian Houses and rode the ferris wheel at the carnival. Then it started violently hailing, so we took cover in one of Dublin's free museums, where we checked out the bog bodies (bodies that had been incredibly preserved by the bogs.) At another museum we saw tons of stuffed animals (not the cute kind, the taxidermied kind.) It was such a strange museum, with every animal you could ever think of preserved in there.

After that we had a really good dinner at a pub called The Duke, then went to hang out at a pub called The Bleeding Horse. We met some locals in there, and Katie ended up singing a rousing (and Irish-accented) rendition of Piano Man with them, which was really strange.

The next day I caught a bus to the airport and was very glad to finally get back to mild-weathered Madrid. Overall an excellent trip that I will not soon forget.