Day 5

Last night we got to our last hostel of the first week, and it is surprisingly nice for a hostel. They have breakfast, internet, and even a reception desk! What a concept. Anyway, today we had the day to ourselves in Dublin to do whatever we wanted. We had one requirement of a thing to do today, and that was to go to Trinity College and look at the exhibit of the Book of Kells. The book is a copy of the 4 gospels that is super old and monks copied it so it has some amazing illuminations and such. We (me, Robyn, Marissa, and Mandy) decided to go see that first so we wouldn’t have to worry about it. We also decided to take a tour of the college because it includes the Book of Kells and it is only 2 more Euro. On the tour they have an actual student take you around the campus and tell you about some of the buildings and history, etc. I loved it because a) our tour guide had a really cool deep voice and he was funny, b) the campus is beautiful! and c) he kept telling us stuff like “in this building lived this person, who won a nobel prize for discovering how to split the atom” and stuff like that. Also it was funny because some of the residence halls there are older than our country is. Wow. We finished the tour and went to actually go see the book, which we had to wait in like for like half an hour for. When we finally got to it it was kind of annoying because they had two parts of it on display along with some other books in this small display case, and there were people just standing right in front of it not moving for seriously 10 minutes. Finally I semi-pushed my way in and got to look at the books for about 2.3 seconds, but then of course I decided to go because other people were pushing on me. But it was really cool to see it up close. After we finished at Trinity College, the four of us decided to go get some lunch somewhere. We wandered around for a few minutes and then decided to go down Temple Bar, which is just an area/neighborhood of Dublin that has cobblestone streets and a ton of stores and restaurants and such. It was a pretty cool section of town, but there are tons of tourists, and apparently there are way more at night, especially on the weekends. We ate and Robyn got some cough syrup because she has had a cough for the past few days. It is actually quite entertaining because last night she fell asleep before my and that is mainly when she gets her cough. So she kept making these amazing noises that sounded sort of like a whimper/moan and I was laughing to myself in my top bunk.

Anyway, we also stopped in a really touristy shop and got a few souvenirs. We took some super cute pictures with leprechaun hats but decided not to buy them because really, what the dang heck would you do with a leprechaun hat? Honestly. For dinner we wanted to go back to the place we ate the night before, J. McGowans of Phibsboro I discovered it was called. We had to walk in the pouring rain to get there, and when I say pouring, I mean that even though I had an umbrella my pants still got soaked even though it was only a 10 minute walk. Last night we had had this amazing garlic bread and I really wanted some again, and that was the main reason we braved the torrential rain to get there. But alas, we asked the waitress about it and she said you have to order a certain dish to get it again, and I did not want to do that. So I didn’t get my garlic bread. Sad day.