Last of the Dublin pictures, I promise!

Temple Bar - another famous part of Dublin, known for shopping and pubs.

The River Liffey

Inside of Dublin Castle

Inside of St. Patrick's Cathedral (or ca-deedle-doo as the tour guide pronounced it!) I was in tears when he said and he kept saying atleast 10+ times!! I think the Irish guy had a speech impediment.

More Dublin pictures

Buy me I'm Irish!! This made me laugh and I needed a picture of it. Also, this was in the same Tesco where a very drunk homeless man tried to barge his way into. The security guards did not like this guy and basically grabbed him by the throat and threw him out! It was interesting!

Here is Ben with the James Joyce, Irish writer and poet, statue near O'Connell Street.

Here is the General Post Office in Dublin. The GPO was the headquarters for the Easter Rising in 1916. The Irish wanted freedom from British rule, go figure, and thus resulted in an uprising that lasted for seven days. There is a monument a few feet away from the GPO to the left, where bullet holes can still be seen!

Here is Ben with the General Post Office sign. We went inside because we'd heard there was a little museum about the ordeal inside. We didn't see anything we went in, not sure what was up with that.

Ben with his Guinness and yummy baguettes with stuffing, cranberries and turkey! One of the best meals ever, well minus the Guinness :)

I actually couldn't believe this sign! In case you can't see it they sell party pills, legal highs, smoke XXX, snow, lime fantasy, salvia (legal for Brits, illegal for military members) and kraton. Okay at the time I thought this was bad and then I looked at the website!!! Umm...wow!

This is a must see! Also, they do not ship to the UK, Austria, France, Germany, Norway or Sweden.

http://www.nirvanaheadshop.com/new-products

Dublin part 2

17 Jan 10, Sunday:

We went to Grafton Street and looked around. This street is known for its fantastic shopping. There were a lot of stores and we ended up getting coffee at a coffee shop because many of the store were not open yet.

Here I am with the Molly Malone statue near Grafton Street. Molly sold mussels and cockles from a wheelbarrow in Dublin. There is a song about this and was played several times on the tour bus! I had heard this song before but couldn't remember where. This song is considered the unoffical anthem of Dublin.

We also walked in St.Stephen's Green and then the National Portrait Gallery until it was time to go to the National Museum of Ireland - Archaeology. Here are some picture of St. Stephen's Green:

It was finally time to go to the museum and unfortunately, we could not take any pictures. We did get to see the Cross of Cong, which is an Irish cross said to have a piece of the cross in the middle of it.

 This is the Irish Parliament:

We were are with the city and river Liffey behind us:

18 Jan 10, Monday: We left Dublin and headed back home!

Dublin part 1

14 Jan 10, Thursday: We flew on Ryanair for the first time. It was better than I thought it was going to be - one of the smoothest flights I'd ever been on. We landed in Dublin at around 9:30 and got to the hotel around 11.


15 Jan 10, Friday:
We decided to do the hop on hop off tour bus for the three days we were going to be in Dublin. We rode around and decided to go the Trinity College to see the Book of Kells. The Book of Kells contains the four Gospels in Latin and was transcribed in AD 806. It was extremely beautiful with it's intricate calligraphy and embellished with pictures of human figures and animals. We could not take pictures, as we found with a lot of sights in Ireland. But alas the internet had a picture of some of the details seen here:

Here are some pictures of Trinity College

We also saw St. Patrick's Cathedral, the largest church founded in AD 450.

Kilmainham Gaol was a prison for 130 years in Dublin. It housed many of those involved in the fight for Irish independence. Even though the prison was dark and grim, it was one of my favorite stops! We didn't even know what it was but decided to get off and explore.

Afterwards, we ate a late lunch at Ryan's, which is the oldest Victorian pub in Dublin.

16 Jan 10, Saturday:
The first thing we did on Saturday was visit the National Library, which opened in 1890, to see the William Butler Yeats exhibit. This library contains almost every book ever published in Ireland.

It took a while to actually find the Dublin Castle (it was harder to find than you could even imagine). But we finally did and it was cool. We got there right before they took down an awesome exhibit outside of the castle. I took a few pictures because the decorative angels were very pretty and intricate.

Last but not least, we visited the Guinness Storehouse. We saw the ingredients for Guinness and got to see how it is brewed. We also got to taste some Guinness straight from the brewery, and it was really good! But once we got to the top of the storehouse and I tried some, not so good. The view was lovely though and we got to see all of Dublin from the Gravity Bar.

Ireland bound

I got an awesome deal on tickets to Dublin, Ireland for Thursday 14 Jan! We have a goal day (is the base meets set goals then the commander will give us a day off) on Friday and Monday is a holiday! Back in December, I found an awesome deal on plane tickets to Ireland for the three day weekend. The tickets were only 45 dollars, for two people, both ways! SCORE!