TGIF

It has been quite an exhausting weekend!

Friday night we headed to a few of the bars in the Temple Bar District. It’s so crazy busy there at night, I can’t even explain. It’s also been an extreme mad house here because U2 is performing in Dublin this weekend. As you can imagine, they have quite an Irish following, and the amount of people milling around in U2 tee shirts is ridiculous and there are a ton of cover bands performing at every bar. We came home a little bit on the earlier side after hitting up a few nightclubs and a pub, but overall, great night!

We’ve been having a series of late-starts this weekend, because Saturday morning again we didn’t get up and get out until around 1 or 2. My three roommates, a girl from the room next to us, and I headed straight to Dublina, a Viking museum located in Christ Church Cathedral just a block from our apartment. It was pretty cool (dorky history major part of me kicking in right now.) Did you know the word slave comes from Slavic people because so many of them were captured and sold into slavery by the Vikings? Or that the swastika is based off of a Viking symbol because Hitler idolized the blond-haired blue-eyed Viking people. The museum was also a little scary, kind of more like a haunted house. It was composed of all these wax figures acting out daily Viking life. Pretty scary when you’re actually near them.

From there we went and toured Christ Church Cathedral. It was absolutely stunning. I was partial to the intricate floor tiles and the colorful stained glass. There were at least fifty windows highlighting chapters of the bible, and the rose window was, ah I can’t even describe it! I’m such a dork. But everyone really enjoyed it. It was much larger than I had expected. We also went down into the church crypt. Another creepy aspect of our day. It was so cool though. All underground, it had a ton of memorials where people were buried. Also, there was all this old stuff the church used to use or hide during dangerous times, including jewels and gold coffers. Pretty legit. Oh, and the best part was a mummified cat and rat that got stuck in the organ pipes. You can tell how it looks like one was chasing the other.

After the church we headed to Temple Bar District to have lunch at Quays, a traditional Irish restaurant. A little more on the expensive side, but a nice treat. Then Jena, Mary Marshall, and I headed back to Grafton Street to explore a little more vigorously, stopping by the beloved Molly Malone statue.

After a ton of walking, we headed home and made a classy dinner of white wine and pasta. Everyone goes out really late here, so we didn’t even head to the bars until after midnight. But we went to this super intense dance club that I had seen when my parents and brother were here. It was four floors with a roof top terrace. We met up with the guys in our program and got our groove on the dance floor. It was a late night, but I have never laughed so hard with my awesome roommates.