Day 29: Ireland
Disclaimer: the following post contains a significant amount of alcohol consumption. If you don't want to know about those activities then I would stop reading when you get to the line.
For those of you that don't know, I have a significant amount of piercings, only in my ears, four on one side and five on the other. I got most of them this summer, and I may have an addiction. At least it is not tattoos, right? Or on my face.
Molly wanted to get her tongue pierced. But not her actual tongue, the part underneath her tongue. I think it is called the frenulum. We decided that Ireland would be the most modern country that we would be stopping in from now on, although Spain would probably be fine too. So it had been in our plans to get the piercings sometime while we were in Dublin. I couldn't decide what kind of piercing to get but my roommate suggested a triple helix and that sounded awesome. Its basically just three cartilage piercings that they thread a spiral through. The pictures that I managed to find of it looked really cool.
On the second day, Molly had a field program in the afternoon. She had signed up for the literary pub crawl before she knew that we were going to be doing the same exact thing for class. She tried to sell it but had been unsuccessful. This meant that she had to be back to the ship by 1:45 in order to make the bus.
We headed off the ship at 10 o'clock, not thinking that that was the exact time that the shuttle left. We missed it by a lot and ended up sharing a cab with two other girls who needed to get to the city.
While we had wandered around the activity fair at Trinity College the day before we stopped two people who had tattoos and piercings and asked them for a place to get them done. They both mentioned the Temple Bar area so that is where we headed.
It turned out that absolutely nothing was open. Well, the tattoo place that I had walked by the night before looked like it was open. There was a guy laying on the table getting a tattoo on his leg. A giant tattoo on his leg.
It was then that we decided getting piercings on an empty stomach was probably not the best idea. So, with a lot of effort, we found a bar with a sign out front that said they were serving breakfast. We ate full Irish breakfasts in a completely empty bar with great wifi.
What is an Irish breakfast you ask? It's bacon, a hash brown, a fried tomato, a fried egg, two pieces of sausage, two pieces of toast, a pile of baked beans, and black pudding, which is made of ox blood. I tried it, it wasn't that bad. But I couldn't eat the whole thing, the concept of eating blood was a little creepy.
Our breakfast was nice and relaxed, partially we have a wifi addiction and partially because Molly was nervous about her piercing. We finally made our way back to the piercing place that we walked by it took her a long while to work up the courage to go in there. When she finally did she asked if they did piercings and they said no but they recommended a place called Snakebite that wasn't too far away.
We got to the street we thought it was on and decided to ask someone where it was so we didn't spend too much time looking for it. The person we asked was standing right outside another piercing place that also happened to be a clothing and cell phone store. We talked to the piercer and she seemed really nice and really qualified but it was just a little too sketchy for our taste. Piercings and cell phones are not really things that should be sold together.
Snakebite ended up being right down the street, it was on the third floor of the building and wasn't combined with any other store. So far, so good. The guy was really nice, he gave us forms to fill out and told us that the piercer would be out shortly to talk to us. The form asked if we were on any meds, when we were leaving the country, and if we had been sick recently. Well, we were leaving on Monday, that was only two days away. I asked if that was a problem and he said that it might have been if we were getting some really elaborate tattoo but that it should be fine for piercings.
There was another problem, Molly was still recovering from her nasal infection that she had while we were in Disney. The piercer himself said that he wouldn't do a piercing on someone who had just been sick, especially a mouth piercing. Her nasal infection could come back if her body starting fighting to heal the piercing. He was really, really nice and we appreciated that but it was also really disappointing. He also didn't recommend getting them done when we were traveling. Especially because we were traveling. That would mean that different waters would be cleaning them and that there was a higher risk of infection.
It was interesting because a girl in one of our classes had gotten a tattoo in Paris, and they hadn't said anything to her about traveling being an issue. Maybe they weren't as nice as this guy. If I ever go back to Dublin and want to get something done then I will definitely go to him. Not that that is in my plans but they were that nice.
We left that building really sad. We had both been really excited about the piercings. Molly said that I should have still gotten mine but I felt bad doing it without her because it was her that wanted it the whole time.
At that point there was nothing else of us to do but head back to the ship. Molly needed to make her field program. I didn't really have anything to do that afternoon. Everyone had already gone off to do their own things and I am not too keen on doing things on my own. So, I decided that I would try to get into the program with Molly. Granted, we had already done it the day before but at least we would be together and I wouldn't be sitting on the ship alone.
We stood by the bus until exactly 2 o'clock when it was scheduled to leave. There were two people that didn't show up so I was able to go! We went to the same pub that we went to the day before and sat in the same room and got sung the same song, just by a different person.
It was actually really interesting to go on it again, it seemed like we kind of got jipped the day before. Then we had only been led around by one actor and this time it was two, and they performed more then the other guy did. We got a lot more material and a lot more performances even though the information was the same.
The awesome thing was that I knew all the answers to the quiz questions so I won the T-shirt at the end!
On this pub crawl, we spent about 20 minutes in each pub as opposed to the walk through we got the day before. It was just enough time to get and finish a drink. I was interesting, the actors themselves were also allowed to drink on the tour. I feel like if I went to a pub crawl in the states the person leading it would not be able to at all because they are working. Not in Ireland.
At the end of the pub crawl Molly and I decided to just keep it going. So we signed out of the program and stayed in the last pub. We ordered food which turned out to be interesting. Molly ordered a homemade steak burger. Which makes it sound like it was going to be a hamburger. Nope, ball of meat. It was basically a meat ball, a giant meat ball. I had a steak panini, which was actually a steak panini. In the first three pubs I had cider. Which is my current favorite drink of choice, apparently it is becoming huge in the states. I recommend trying it if you like apple cider.
With dinner I had a glass of wine, it wasn't as good as the wine we had that first night in Russia, but it was good. We also had dessert, which was Bailey's cheese cake and chocolate cake. Some of the best dessert that I have eaten.
When we left that pub around 6:30 we didn't really know where to go so we made our way back towards the Temple Bar area. When we first got there we went into the Hard Rock Café because I wanted the pin that said Dublin on it. We talked to the guy at the counter, Adam, for a little bit. He told us about a few other places we could try to get piercings and then pointed out a pub that we should go to when we said that we wanted live music.
That pub was awesome. It was very crowded but that was something that we had gotten used to by that point. The guys playing guitar in the pub were awesome. There was a lady that was doing face painting, of course we needed to participate in that. I got four shamrocks down my cheek and Molly got the Irish flag, a shamrock and a harp.
Soon after we got our face paint we left that pub. The music was awesome but we needed some fresh air.
We decided to go back to the pub that we had eaten breakfast at. That was an awesome place. It was really spacious and had cool lighting and live music. It was there that we met two guys, Aiden and Connor. Aiden was from Australia and Connor was from England. We asked them how they came to know each other but I don't remember. It is really interesting that we rarely meet locals in the places that we go. We always seem to meet other people who are traveling or people who are from other places but have lived in that country for a really long time. When we were in Brussels, Belgium and talking to the SAS alum who now lived there she said that she worked with a group of about 25 people and only three or four of them were actually from Belgium.
Aiden and Connor hung out with us for the rest of the night. At one point Molly just kept giving her coins to the bathroom attendant. She has no idea how much money she gave her because they have coins that go up to 2 euros. She could have given her 15 euros in 2 euro coins or two dollars in 20 cent coins. At one point we were dancing. At another point I tried Whisky and took it straight. The whole night went really, really fast. We got to that pub at about 9 o'clock and then all of a sudden it was three in the morning and we were on our way back to the ship. We walked back, and I think that we left the pub around 11 and walked for a really long time because at one point we were at a burger king and at another point we went to the boy's hostel so that Molly could pee. Aiden and I sat out on the front steps and while we were waited we got confronted by a homeless guy who was yelling at us that he didn't like Australia or America. So weird.
The walk back to the ship is pretty straight forward, it just takes a really long time. I made it into my bed around 4. I wouldn’t really recommend marathon drinking. It was quite a fun experience but the next day was a hell of a struggle.
Someone told me that the Irish tend to be more depressed then any other country and there is research done to see if their heavy drinking has something to do with it. When Molly and I were sitting and eating breakfast at 11 in the morning there were people coming into the bar to get beer. Who needs to drink that early? Aside from those in Tampa during Gasparilla I see no need to begin drinking that early in the day.
It was definitely a very big, loud, boisterous culture. Even more so then Germany was. They love their music, they love to party and we definitely experienced it.
