Exploring Dublin

Last night we arrived in Dublin, our final stop in Ireland. It's much different than the other parts of Ireland that we have seen so far, being a big city and all, and it's interesting to see a different side of this country. The major highlight of Dublin for me is that one of my best friends from high school, Kim, is interning here for the summer, so we've been able to go around with her as our own personal tour guide, it's great. Yesterday we only had time to go to dinner, so we met up with Kim and went to a restaurant in Temple Bar, which is apparently a super touristy part of Dublin. The street was very busy and I was shocked by how many musicians there were, I guess Dublin is a big music city.



Today we had the whole day free to do whatever site seeing we wanted to, so a group of us set out to explore the city. We started out trying to go to Dublin Castle, which is really more of a palace compared to the old stone castles we've been seeing. We got there only to find that it didn't open for another few hours, so we took a few pictures and moved on. We made our way to Christ's Church and then had authentic fish 'n chips from the first fish 'n chips place to open in Dublin (I wasn't quite brave enough for the fish and stuck with chicken nuggets.) We continued our journey on to Pheonix Park, which is essentially Dublin's Central Park and is the largest urban park in Europe. We relaxed there for awhile in the sun that had actually decided to appear, then continued on.


Our last site for the day was Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin's old prison. This was by far our favorite stop of the day. It was so interesting to learn about the history of prisons, something we've never really thought about, and this prison has a lot of Dublin's history. We finished the day with a little shopping, dinner, and a walk home in the pouring rain. All in all it was a great day, which is evident by how exhausted we all are. This is pretty brief, but hopefully the pictures help to show more.