Day 2

Last night was a pretty chill night (which was nice after the travel debacle we went through). We walked around a little after we checked into our hotel and wandered around Dublin Castle and Trinity College. We went to bed around 10 (even though it was still kind of light outside) after watching some interesting Irish tv - who knew anyone still watched Sweet Valley High? Wasn't that show from the 90's?

I woke up around 9; Melissa had been up for a while since she wasn't feeling good. We met her roommate from college, Maria, and went with Maria back to her hostel to check it out (we needed a place to stay for tonight). Since it looked clean and not scary, we decided to stay and got a double room. We walked back to our hotel and then took the bus back to the hostel since it was too far of a walk with our luggage. We took the elevator to the fourth floor and looked for our room before noticing we had to climb up about 10 stairs and then down 4 (with the luggage) in order to get to our hallway. The room is about the size of a bathroom but it's fine for just one night. Plus it has a sink! (If only it had it's own bathroom....)

Today was fun. First, we went to the Dublin National Library in order to use their geneology services. We though someone would be able to help us but it was kind of serve yourself - they had computers with geneology websites saved on them, so we just used the suggested websites. We did find some things (like dates and people) but we have to double check with grandma if what we found was correct. After about 2 hours, we left and went to St. Stephen's Green, which is a pretty park in the center of Dublin. We got some sandwiches for lunch and then took them over to St. Patrick's Cathedral where we sat outside and ate. The weather has been really sunny and nice and I hope it stays like this.

We did a literary pub crawl tonight. There were about 30 people in the group and it was led by two Irish actors. They acted out scenes from various books/plays and after each monologue, there were trivia questions. We went to 3 pubs and then at the end, they asked all the questions again and the person who got the most correct got a t-shirt. We knew about 3 answers out of 12 questions, so unfortunately, we didn't win. Afterwards, we wandered around for dinner (it was after 10pm) and found a Arabian fast food joint where I ate a sharma (which was like a chicken wrap with some sort of sauce - it was good). So no Irish food yet for me, but we're starting our car adventure tomorrow so I'm sure I'll get some in the towns that we visit!