The One With Ireland

I ended up skipping my Thursday class (Shh don't tell my parents) so that I could get a head start on my weekend in Ireland. Over the weekend it was Unofficial St. Patrick's Day which is U of I's biggest holiday on campus. Students that are abroad during Unofficial always make their way to Dublin for the weekend festivities. Lucky for me, my friend Spencer is studying abroad in Dublin and allowed me to stay at his house over the weekend. However I was not the only one staying at his place, about eight other people stayed at his place as well. I did get extremely lucky though because I somehow managed to have my own bed and room during the entire duration that I was there.

Friday was Unofficial which started bright and early at 6:00am. Spencer woke everyone up by blaring Illinois' Alma Mater song throughout the house exactly at six. I have to admit that while it was painful getting up that early, it was pretty cool waking up to that song. Also I do realize that it does sound crazy to wake up at 6:00am to drink but one simply must wake up early on Unofficial. When I came downstairs, Spencer and his roommate Joel were making breakfast for everyone which was actually pretty good. The drinking began immediately with most people clutching a beer in their hand. I decided to start with the hard cider which is apparently a pretty big thing in Dublin. Eventually more and more people made their way over to Spencer's place and at one point we must have had 50 people at his house. People were scattered around having a good time chatting and playing drinking games. I am proud to say that I can now check "Beating British kids in beer pong" off of my bucket list.

We then all made our way over to my other friend Bridget's house and continued the party at her place. After that we made our way into the city center for lunch at a place called Tolteca which is exactly like Chipotle. If you didn't see the sign out front you definitely would have thought that you were in a Chipotle. After lunch, we made our way to the bars. We managed to continuously get kicked out of each bar that we went to, so we had to hop from place to place. After hitting up a few bars we went back to Spencer's to nap for a little while before heading out again for the night. Later that night we went to an awesome bar that had a live band performing. They were performing American classics and it was a really good time. All in all it was one of my favorite nights out in Europe so far.

After getting very little sleep, I woke up again at 6:00am on Saturday morning in order to make the bus for the all day Ireland tour. The major destination of the day tour were the famous Cliffs of Moher in Galway. There were also various stops along the way their and back that were quite interesting as well. We went with a company called Extreme Ireland Irish Day Tours that I would strongly recommend. After we got back from the tour we went out to the famous Temple Bar in Dublin. It was a huge place that had live music as well. If you go to Dublin, Temple Bar is definitely a place to check out.






On Sunday we had more of a casual day. We went to a restaurant for breakfast that served traditional Irish breakfasts. After breakfast, we went on a free walking tour of Dublin. Walking tours are always a solid option to city the highlights of a city in a short amount of time. One of my favorite parts of the tour was seeing the Dublin Castle, which you can see above.