I’m on a Beach! – June 29th, 2009

This morning we woke up early and headed out to Malahide Castle for the day. Malahide is on the coast, not far from Dublin. Our first adventure was finding the train station, which thankfully we managed pretty easily. We then had to wait a while for the train, but it was a good chance to rest. Obviously the traveling is starting to get to us, when we rest at like 9:30 in the morning. Oh well.

The train out to Malahide was nice; it was cool to see outside the city. When we arrived, we made our way to the castle first. The town is really small and cute. The castle has huge grounds with gaelic footall fields and cricket fields and playgrounds for kids and all sorts of stuff, and we saw lots of families out enjoying the weather. The castle itself was also pretty cool, but a little disappointing. The tour was weird…we thought we would have an actual guide like in most places, but instead you walked through the rooms with a group and audio played in each room. It was informative, but not as much fun as a guided tour. Also, we didn’t get to see very many rooms. But it was fun, overall. It’s hard to believe that one family lived there for over 800 years.

After our castle tour, we grabbed lunch at a café in the village…you guessed it, pizza. It was delicious though. Then we made our way down to the harbor…it wasn’t very pretty, but there was a very pretty stretch of beach that didn’t look too far away….it was pretty far away. But completely worth it. The beach wasn’t white sand like in Alabama…it was much darker, but the sand was really soft and the water was FREEZING. It was lots of fun though, very pretty and very relaxing. We played on the beach and just sat around and collected shells. It was great. We finally made our epic journey back to the village, and caught the train back to Dublin.

In Dublin, we did some shopping on Grafton street, a very popular street with lots of cool shops. I bought a new Swatch, as is my tradition on all my overseas trips – it’s cute J Also, H&M is my favorite new store in the world. I wish we had one in Alabama. Apparently there is one Atlanta, according to Anna, but the clothes in the US aren’t as nice. Boo.

We headed back to the hotel to lay down for a bit after our exhausting beach day. Then we took our computers over to the mall to use the internet like hobos and figure out when and where we had to get on our train to Cork. We then spent some time repacking our suitcases, as we have purchased a few things and had made quite a mess in our room. For dinner we had….Burger King French fries. Haha. We just weren’t very hungry because we had a big lunch, so we just had some fries and some Bulmer’s and watched Private Practice. Awesome.

For our last night in Dublin, we though we might try a new place, but then John, our friend from last night, texted and invited us out to Temple Bar again where he was there “with some mates”. Btw, I think I’ll add mates to the list of words I want to start saying because they are precious. We headed over to Temple Bar, where there was another live band, but definitely not as good as the one the night before. But it was much less crowded, so we hung out in the courtyard and talked. The other two guys were both Physics professors – needless to say, I felt a bit dumb around them at times. Although I did learn a bit…like the importance of actually studying physics. As well as that kangaroos are actually quite violent, and like deer in Alabama, will run out in front of your car and stuff. Oh, and Australia has more dangerous or poisonous animals than the rest of the world combined, according to Jason. And they have a lot of animal epidemics, like rabbits and foxes toads.

It’s really hard to try to explain Alabama to people who have never been there, especially when the only thing anyone knows about is “Sweet Home Alabama” (that the band definitely played)….but I guess it’s better than people thinking we still have slaves like the people I met 2 summers ago. The physics guys did seem pretty interested in the space and rocket center though, and the idea that kids go to space camp. Quite hilarious.

Overall, I would call our trip to Dublin a great success. Our hotel wasn’t the nicest thing in the world but it was clean and safe and worked out fine. We really got to see a lot of cool things in the city, and I really liked that we didn’t have to stick to a schedule, so that gave us flexibility. Everyone we met was ridiculously friendly, from people hanging out in restaurants or Temple Bar, to people on the street we had to ask for directions in County Sketch. Dublin is really an awesome city. We saw a lot, but I feel like there’s so much more we didn’t have the chance to see…and I definitely plan on coming back!