Dublin night 1&2

the first 2 days of our trip began in Dublin, after numerous and quite frustrating delays we landed at the Dublin airport and took the free shuttle to our hostel where I had an argument with the front desk about why they had charged my credit card for a random amount which they shouldnt have done, after about 20 minutes of arguing (during which Joe was asleep on the couch) we came to an agreement and the lady handed me a key which had a sticker with a room number and told me to go to room 21.

I however did not hear/understand what she said so i looked to the room key to see what number we were in and went to room 7 which turned out to be the nicest suite at the hostel. we stayed there for a night not realizing how lucky we were until the staff told us that the room was booked for the next night and we needed to move so then we got transfered to a room with 6 other people which was nowhere near as fun or nice.

After finally figuring out the whole lodging situation we were both quite tired and although we felt like falling asleep i demanded that we first go out and get Joe his first authentically Irish Pint of Guinness. Joe hates Guinness in the States and was pleasantly surprised to find that it tastes so much better in Ireland we then each ordered some food hung out a local pub listening to a band playing lots of popular American songs for an hour or two befriended one of the bartenders and then left to go back to the hostel.

on our way back we struck up a conversation with one of the locals who told us that we needed to go and see the local nightlife and not the one geared at tourists. Alan who was an Irish football player who studies at a University in the area (cant remember which) ended up taking us to the Purdy Kitchen a local pub where drinks are relatively cheap (although EVERYTHING is more expensive in Ireland especially because i have to pay with the euro) and there was a fun disco dance floor.

we ended up hanging out with Alan and his friends until about 2:30 AM when the pub closed and then instead of taking a taxi back i manged to successfully navigate our way to the Hostel that we were staying at. thus ended night 1.

on our second day in Dublin we both overslept because we were both Jetlagged and tired we woke up around 2:30 pm were planning to go touring but decided that it wasn't worth the price to catch a bus at that point because it was so late in the day the tours would soon stop running. instead we spent about 2 hours hammering out the rest of our travel plans and deciding what we were doing and where we were going, booking tickets and the such...... minor details of course.

We then went and got some food (Breakfast/lunch) at a Japanese all-you-can-eat Buffet. After that I bought a charger for the unlocked Israeli cellphone that I own only to discover that it was broken and spent most of the next hour trying to get it fixed. Once that failed and I refused to pay 30 Euro to fix the phone we went to the shopping center next door to hang out. Joe was enjoying looking at clothes but I was not Particularly interested so we decided to split up and meet back up at the entrance to the shopping center at 6 (at least that is what i heard) I had a great time frequenting all of the little tiny bookstores and coffee shops where they had a very different more *Irishy* atmosphere. At every bookstores i walked in to i would amass a pile of at least 10 books that i wanted to buy and then just as i was about to approach the cashier i would realize how impractical it was to travel/walk with that many books when i already had enough luggage to lug around so i would sadly put all of the books back and wave goodbye.

I then made my way back to the entrance of the shopping center and got there 15 minutes early at 5:45 and saw Joe there who asked where i had been for the past 15 minutes... apparently he thought we were meeting at 5:30 and i thought we were meeting at 6 OOPS.... after that mixup we went back to the hostel and showered and prepared for the night. this night we went to a whoel different area and did not intend on even going to the pubs as they were expensive and we had a flight to catch the next day.

Since it was friday we decided to go to Chabad for a meal, and looked up their address on the internet and took a taxi there because it was about and hour and a half walk from our hostel. Once we arrived and the Taxi drove off we realized that the house which we had arrived house was a vacant house with a for sale on it (Later we learned that for security reasons chabad does not list its true address on the internet .... great help for tourists like us....) After spending money on a taxi to get all of the way to where we were we decided to save money by walking back, and on our way to the hostel. On our way i made Joe stopped at 'the pav' which is the on-campus very cheap bar at trinity which i had discovered on my last visit to Ireland, after that we stopped at temple bar (the tourist area) and ran into 3 other Students from College Park that i know, (David & Josh Goldstein and Jonathan Siegel) so we ended up going to the Purdy Kitchen with them just to show them where to go and stayed there until about 12:30 when we made our way back to the hostel because we had to wake up early to check out and catch our shuttle to the airport so we could fly to Paris.

Thus ended the first half of our trip to Dublin