Dublin, Day 1

We arrived in Dublin late Saturday night, just in time to catch the free shuttle bus to the hostel. Checking in, trying to get in to the building our rooms were in, and choosing our bunk beds left us with just enough time for a quick wander around the area. We found a McDonald's and were so hungry, being touristy and eating local went out of the window - when on a student budget and all that!

Our first day in Dublin (and weirdly, the only whole day of the three that we spent in the city) was super chilled. The main thing we wanted to do (and this is why I'll never be a travel blogger) was to just catch up with one another. It had been 11 weeks since we had last seen each other which meant we had 11 weeks worth of University/Work/Boyfriend/Everything else to catch up on... It just turned out that a bonus of being together and catching up was that the backdrop to this was the fantastic city of Dublin.

Our first stop was a local Starbucks. We needed coffee, tea, wifi (it was Father's Day!) and a space to work out what we would be doing with our day. We marked off different points of interest on the map  (they were ultimately ignored) and decided to walk by one of the local theatres to see if we could buy tickets for a poetry recital that evening.

Unfortunately the theatre was closed and the website showed that tickets were sold out. Not that we minded too much since the walk there had been so pretty. We ended up accidentally finding Trinity College and decided to walk around the grounds.

I was actually debating whether or not to go to Trinity on the year abroad programme offered through my University course. I obviously decided not to go but when I was walking around the grounds, it was nice to realise that I would have been happy there. The grounds are stunning, as well as the buildings.

In true Soph and I style, we managed to get lost. We even tried to follow two women who had been behind us and seemed to know where they were going... But that was another mistake. They didn't know either. After the four of us tried to get through a locked gate, Soph and I thought it would be best to just retrace our steps.

Somehow we made our way back to familiar surroundings. We even managed to find some shops! And outside those shops, we found a multitude of street performers. From a voice choir to a teenage boy band, we were spoilt for choice. What we couldn't find however was somewhere to eat...

Since we had already visited Starbucks twice (we are such good tourists) we wanted to go somewhere local... and cheap. This ruled out most of the places we were passing on the high street. In the end we found a little Italian tucked in behind a pub. It was serving pizza and a drink for €10 which was the first meal we had found that we could afford. Since we apparently have a habit of eating Italian while not in Italy and we were so hungry, we sat on the first table we could see.

Thankfully, the hunger-fueled gamble paid off. The only bad thing about the pizza is that try as we might we could not eat more than half of each pizza. It felt wrong leaving half of a pizza that good. Eyes bigger than our stomach every time!

We ended our day by going to a local cinema. We had seen a poster for a film called Jimmy's Hall and after watching the trailer, we thought it would be fun to watch a film about Ireland. Somehow (and I blame the trailer for this) we thought we would be going to see a fun, happy film about a dancing hall. Oh we were wrong. The film actually focuses of the story of Jimmy Gralton, an Irish activist who was deported to the United States during the 30's. It was such a hard-hitting, heavy to watch film that left us feeling both uninformed and quite deflated... We did enjoy the film though!

By the time we got back to the room, we were already feeling excited for the tour we were booked on to the next day. We packed our bag (Gavin! More about him tomorrow), got everything ready and set our alarms for 6:30am. One recurring theme of this trip was the devastatingly early mornings... I am yet to go on holiday with Soph and not come back even more tired than when I went!