Day 4: Dublin

We started out the day walking from our hotel to a train which took about 15 minutes.  This was a public train and you bought your own tickets before you even got onto the train.  Today was a free day so I went with Katherine Hess, Peggy Cox and 4 other girls.  We had a great time.

 First we went to the Natural History Museum and wasn't the best because it was a room full of stuffed animals and it was a little creepy and overwhelming!  But it was funny to remember.  Luckily we only stayed there for a little bit which everyone was glad about!

Next our group went to the HRA art museum and it was amazing.  There was so much great art and my favorite painting was of a tree blowing in the wind.  For lunch we went to Munchies and I got an extremely good BLT and we ate at a park.  Then we went to an Archaeology museum and it was really cool.  I learned bout the Bogs and Bogmen.  A bog is like mud with grass growing out of it and if you step in it you sink.  It is kind of like the side of a creek where it isn't totally solid.  At the museum there were people way back in the day who were either thrown into the bog when they died or died in the boy.  Apparently there is an acid in the bog that preserves the body and clothes.  After that we got to walk down Grafton Street and shop a little bit.  As we were trying to look for a place to eat, Katherine was looking through all the restaurants  windows to see the price of the food and one window that we were looking through, there was an Irish family and they thought we were staring at them, it was pretty funny!

Tonight we got to see Irish dancing an singing.  It was absolutely amazing and very good.  When we were about to leave we found out our bus and a flat tire so we ended up waiting for about 30 minutes till a taxi came to pick us all up.

Day 3: Dublin

This morning we have already done so much!  We got onto our tour bus at 8:40 am and met our local tour guide, Shane who told us about many places as we drove to St. Patrick's Cathedral.  He had a very thick Irish accent and it was kind of hard to understand him.  St. Patrick's Cathedral was very interesting.  We learned about a man named Jonathon Swift.  He loved two girls at the same time and ironically they were both named Esther.

 Many of the stained glass windows told stories from their religion.  The local guide really helped me learn about this place because he knew a lot more information than wheat was written in the museum.  Plus he didn't stop at every single description or sculpture, instead he stopped to tell us about the most important parts.

After this we stopped at Phoenix Park and got to walk around.  Phoenix is the largest park in Europe and it was absolutely gorgeous.  The two main sports in Ireland are Football ( in America we call this soccer) and Hurling which is kid of like Lacrosse but the stick has no basket on it, just a flat surface.  There was even a retired Hurling player we saw in the park named Joe Towel who showed us how to play and even let us play with him.  It was very hard and really fun!  I had never even heard of this game before so it was a great new experience.  There was also a cute little ice cream truck and our tour guide said it was considered the best ice cream in town so I got some and our tour guide was correct!

Once we left the park we waited in line for the Book of Kells for about an hour.  Once we got in it was amazing.  I especially loved the longhouse, where the library was.  The room reminded me of Harry Potter and it was very beautiful.  After dinner we had a little bit of free time and our group headed down to a clothing store called Penney's so some of the kids could get dirty clothes to bog dive in.  The store was super cheap,  one of the shirts was only 4 pounds.