Dublin- Yvonne

Yvonne came to visit!! She came on a Thursday (May 8th) and stayed here for ten days and we had a blast! Friday we went to Padova, which is about an hour away. We got lost in the morning but eventually made it to all the sites we wanted to see, and even found a September 11th Memorial. It is a big city which I don't love but the places we saw were very nice and we still got home in time to take a little nap before going out at night. Then we just hung around Monebelluna for the night and on Saturday.

Basilica di Sant'Antonio da Padova

Yvonne in front of Prato della Valle, the biggest square in Europe

Then on Sunday we flew to Dublin, Ireland. We were trying to think of somewhere to go away for a long weekend and that was the place we finally decided on. We got in at about lunchtime and checked into our hostel. We had lunch and then I insisted on stopping at Starbucks!! (I was sooo excited!) We had a pretty relaxed time, seeing a couple sites a day. On Sunday we took the bus to Kilmainham Gaol, which is an old prison, and that was really cool to see. On the way back we stopped at a local pub before getting ready for dinner and to go out. That night we went out to Temple Bar, and discovered that Dublin is VERY expensive. My Malibu and pineapple juice (exactly one shot of Malibu) was over 9 euros, which is about 13 dollars! But we met some Americans and some Irishmen that night and had a really great time.

Kilmainham Gaol (old prison, still can't pronounce the name)

Temple Bar

Monday we went to Christ Church, right next to our hostel and to tour the Guiness storehouse, which was huge and has a "gravity bar" at the top with 360 views of the city, where you get a free Guiness. We hung out there for awhile enjoying the views, including that of some people nearby... Then we had lunch and went back to the hostel to rest a little. (Every single meal took us about an hour to find so by the time we were finished we were exhausted!). That night we went out again in the Temple Bar area, but tried some new bars.

Christ Church

Guinness Storehouse

Yvonne and I in front of the awesome fountain in the storehouse

my favorite picture of the whole trip, notice the row of butt cracks....

Tuesday was our last day, and we had a lot left to do. After having breakfast (bagels, which is another thing I have missed over here), we headed out to Dublin Castle, which was ok but a little long for me. You could only see it by guided tour and it got a little long, but it was nice to see and interesting. After that, we went over to Grafton Street, the major shopping street, which ends at St. Stephen's Green, a giant park. We ate lunch and then went to see Trinity College and finally Merion Square. After that we went back to get ready, and get our stuff packed up, to go out for the night.

Dublin Castle

St. Stephen's Green

map showing how big St. Stephen's Green is

Chatham Street (off of Grafton Street)

Yvonne and the cute old man musician in front of Trinity College

We ate in the Temple bar area and then headed to a different part of the city to a bar that was recommended. It was a cool bar, but apparently weekends are its thing because there were about six people in there including us. Needless to say, we ended up back in the Temple Bar area, enjoying live music at Oliver St. Johns.

our taxi driver on the left side of the car!

Oliver St. John's Bar

Our plan was to stay out all night (we had to leave for the airport at 3 30) but we were getting tired so we decided to go home and take a nap (it was about 1 30). So I set my alarm for 3 15 so we could get up and walk to get the aircoach. My alarm went off and we jumped up (exhausted and feeling like that was the shortest nap ever), got our stuff together and walked to the aircoach stop. When we were almost there, Yvonne stopped and looked at a clock in the street. Now we had noticed over the past few days that almost evey clock has been wrong in Dublin, but she looked at me and said, "Wait, I have a question. Is it 2 30 or 3 30?" I am an idiot and my phone (which i set my alarm on) was still set on Italy time (an hour ahead), so in Dublin it was only 2 30, which meant we really had slept for only about 20 minutes! We were already almost there so we just decided to get the earlier aircoach, which didn't come and we ended up taking a taxi to the airport.

Yvonne in our hostel

We figured we would just sleep in the airport, and when we got there we were happy cuz we could check in and even go through security and get to our gate. Unfortunately, our gate was the farthest possible away and downstairs and the temperature felt like it was outside. So it was a freezing cold, miserable two hours until our flight finally took off. But it was empty so we both got a whole row and we got to see the Alps in Austria from the windows!!

Austrian Alps from the airplane