Dublin, Ireland

Last weekend, Charla and I took a trip to meet the Irish. It was a last minute decision to split away from unofficial plans to go to Luxembourg and stay with a girl we met in training. Our flight was fairly cheap and luckily we found a great hostel to stay in.

Here is the Abbey Court Hotel on the River Liffey. I have to admit that it was a little noisy at night, but that's what you get for being in the middle of all the action. It was clean, comfy, and well worth the money. Our hostel-mates were a couple girls from Warsaw, Poland and we didn't hesitate to ask them everything they knew about Krakow (because we would be headed there the following weekend). They even met us for a pub crawl one night.

Since we arrived into Dublin late on the first night, we didn't see much of the city, but got to go out with true Irish guys (and one girl). When Kyle was in Israel for Intel, he met two other Intel guys that worked for Intel in Dublin and when he heard Charla and I were going, he contacted them to see if they were in town that weekend. To our luck, they were and they ended up meeting us after dinner and took us to some traditional pubs. We had a great time!

For our first introduction to the city, we decided on a walking tour and were very pleased with what we got. The tour-guide was a professor at Trinity College and had an amazing amount of history about Ireland (starting from the 12th century on) in his brain:

This is me in front of entrance of Trinity College (I was a bit chilled at the moment):

Christ Church Cathedral:

The Ha'penney bridge:

The Temple Bar in the Temple Bar Area:

Guinness Brewery and my 2nd official pint of the dark side--and probably my last (sorry Guiness lovers...its like drinking a whole meal):

These are the girls I mentioned earlier, our roommates at the hostel, and we are at our first pub on the pub crawl that night:

This pic was after the 5th bar + 1:

After a weekend of pint after pint, we made our way back home to Holland. I would have liked to have seen more country-side and less of the party town, but that's for next time!

Gorgeous clouds seen outside the plane window while flying into The Netherlands: