Phew! What a first day!!! It start out a bit rocky but now things are running smoothly and I’m really enjoying this city 🙂

The rocky bits all happened whilst still in the glorious USofA. While I was in the Indy Airport, waiting for my flight, I decided to eat my first burger in two months. Some of you know that I’ve been doing Jenny Craig since the end of June. I have desperately missed my burgers and I thought, ‘Well, half of a burger won’t hurt, right?’ Wrong. I had a bit of a headache before I even got to my terminal (which eating helped) but then I got on the 1 hour and 6 minute flight to Atlanta. We hit a lot of turbulence and my headache returned with a vengeance. Eventually my stomach started to disagree with me, too. Then just as we were about to land in Atlanta…I ended up spending it in the lavatory 😦 Bye bye burger, fries and the excedrin I took. I managed to walk off the plane, buy a sprite, get to my next terminal and nurse my sprite until it was time to get on the plane. Luckily I felt better by then until….

It turned out that Delta had overbooked the flight….by 20 people. Yes, you read that correctly: 20 people. They asked for volunteers to take the next day flight out to Dublin. I had hoped that there were enough volunteers, but then I thought, ‘What if they didn’t? What if I get there with my ticket and they say “Sorry, Charlie, you’re SOL. Gotta wait until tomorrow.”‘ So I planned ahead. I moved to a mere ten feet away from that ticket counter, waiting for them to call my zone so I could shove passed old people and baby strollers to get to the ticket counter first. I kid, they were already on the plane, I was competing for a spot against other young and able bodied people like myself so it was okay if things got violent. Sadly it didn’t. We all got on the planet, enough people volunteered and before I knew it we were on our way.

It was a seven hour flight (er….7 hours and 11 minutes to be exact) and it managed to pass by rather quickly (I slept). Then we arrived, I flew through customs and managed to find my hotel without a hitch 🙂 However, I couldn’t check in yet, so I left my luggage in their closet thingy and went exploring. I will admit I was a little disappointed that our landing wasn’t reminiscent of the episode of Family Guy when Peter went to Ireland.

If any of you go to a European country (and you don’t already do this), I highly recommend taking the “Hop on, Hop off” tours. You can get a two day pass on this double decker bus and it will take you to all the major sights of the city. You can hop off whenever you’d like to see a specific sight and then hop back on one of the many other buses that pass by every 15 minutes or so. They’re super easy to spot:

See? Found one! From there I got to see a lot of the attractions of Dublin. This way, I can make a list and go back to tomorrow and get off at specific spots 🙂

Here are some of the highlights:

This is the statue of O’Connell, the liberator of Ireland

River Liffey

Trinity College

The House of Oscar Wilde

House of Parliament

Temple Bar

St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Guiness Brewery

Monument to the Duke of Wellington

While on the tour, I decided that I should take advantage of this city and go see Riverdance! So I found the theatre, a simple 20 minute walk from my hotel, and I made the trek:

I walked down Grafton Street where all the major shops are:

Walked a crossed River Liffey:

and got my ticket for an early evening matinee. The show was awesome 🙂 It blew me away. The theatre was tinier than the Buskirk Chumley but a lot nicer:

Ugh, it’s exhausting just writing this down…today was a big day and tomorrow will probably be just as big 🙂 I will hopefully go into more details of some of these places.
See you tomorrow, folks!

besos,

MLT

Location:St. Stephens Green, Dublin, Ireland