Dublin

The National Museum

So here I am at 9:32pm on Friday evening already ready for bed thanks to good old jetlag and Irish beer. After getting in around 8:30am this morning, we didn't get through customs and to the hotel until around 10:30 or 11. The hotel we're staying in is very nice, and is has a view overlooking the immediate area of Dublin. It is fantastic! After working out and showering, I joined the group at the pub next door for my first legal beer, which was a lager called Tom Crean's. The culture here is so different! There are pubs every couple buildings, and when we asked the taxi driver the drinking age, he said six years old ha! But then Travis took us down St. Steven's road, on a tour of the National Museum, past the equivalent of the Irish parliament, and on a tour of the National Library (where we saw an exhibit of Yeats and his works), and finally through Trinity College to Temple Bar.

Dinner venue!

The Temple Bar area is very touristy and expensive but it was fantastic, and the girls and I stopped into a pub just down from the famous Temple Bar itself where we befriended the bartender and hung out with him for half an hour with a pint of a local beer (but custom says he couldn't tell us the name of it). He was a friendly guy, who told us about everything from how a guy buying a pint for a girl in Ireland is equal to a date, how to hide our purses from pickpockets, and that if we're not drunk by the end of the night the bartender hasn't done his job. We want to go back with him tomorrow night and he said he might be able to get us free drinks, but we will have to see. We ended up going down the block to eat dinner at Gallagher's Boxty House, which was very nice, but I fell asleep twice at dinner. The plan was for all of us to take a brief nap when we got back, which was around 8, and then go back out at 10, but both Leondra and I had to call it a night. Between our first legal drinks of our lives, the jetlag, and the fact we have to wake up at 7:30am tomorrow to work out, we called it a night. Have no fear, Ireland, this is not defeat! Tomorrow night and the rest of my time here will not be spent in bed sleeping. Just...need...some...zzzzzzz