I had a long, great weekend, but it’s already almost the next weekend.  I wish I could have updated sooner.  Well I traveled to the west coast of Ireland.  My friends and I rented a car.  It was such an adventure with that car.  In Ireland the car steering wheel is on the right side, and people drive on the left side of the road.  Most of my friends driven on the right side of the road, so driving this car was definitely a challenge.
 It was a 3 hour drive from Dublin to the west coast, most of us were trying to keep the car on the left side of the road, because sometime when the driver turns, it was easy to shift right, when we’re supposed to keep left.  I wanted to drive, but the car was a manual gear shift, and I don’t know how to drive a manual.  The image to the left is on the way to Doolin, Ireland, and the image on the bottom is in Galway.

We took our trip to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, we decided to go to the smallest Island, Inis Oirr because it has the greatest scenery.  It was raining all day on Inis Oirr, and I couldn’t take as many pictures as I hoped without my camera getting wet, but I took well over 200 pictures this past weekend.  There was one word that described the trip, rocky.  There was many rocks…that by the end of the trip, if we saw another rock, we were going to go crazy. lol, well it wasn’t that bad, the scenery was full of rocks.  It was raining very hard, even with rain jackets and umbrellas, we definitely got wet still.

We had a nice warm cup of tea at a small tea shop, and the waitress had a totally American accent lol. I can tell the difference between accents now! People have very distinct accents coming from different places in Europe. But while everyone decided to have tea, me and the rest of the other Americans decided to continue the journey towards the castle on the island out in the pouring rain haha. We ended up playing around in the playground for little kids in the rain. Personally, the castle was kinda boring, it was an old rocky structure that had been there for hundreds of years, here a few pictures of the boring castle:

But on the island, there were rock walls that went on for miles, sometimes leading to nowhere, serves no real purpose.

After getting off the island, we went to a Irish pub for dinner.  I packed pasta from home to eat for dinner, so I just have a pear cider (I love pear!!)  lol, felt like an alcoholic, because I only ordered a drink.  There were some traditional Irish music performance (I uploaded it to you tube) below:

Preformed by the locals, apparently whom of which have been coming to the pub for a while and preforming. It was great!  Unfortunately I had to leave early to get to our hostel, because it was getting dark out.  I forgotten what it was like to not live in a city… the roads were small enough to fit one car (even though it’s a 2 way road), and when it gotten dark, there’s no light around at all, the only light on the road is from your headlights on the car.  We had some trouble finding our hostel, cuz it was too dark out to see the signs on the road, and when we got to the hostel, we got really lucky, because the owner just got home, and was closing up to go to bed.  We should had checked in before 10pm, but we got there at midnight.  We were lucky to have catch him still awake because we wouldn’t have a place to sleep if we couldn’t check in.  I was thinking, if worse comes to worse, we can just crash in the car lol.  The hostel was quite eerie because we were the only guests staying there, and it was out in the middle of nowhere, couple of km away from the small town we where in, so we ended up telling some scary stories and falling asleep. =D

Next morning, I met a resident who had been staying there for a couple of weeks already, who was from the States, Utah, US, who was just taking a trip around Ireland, and blogging her travels.  Which is what I’m doing too lol.  We headed off to the cliffs of Moher, one of the greatest pieces of nature in the world, here are a couple of pictures:

It was definitely a breathtaking sight.  Fortunately, we drove to the cliffs, and the rest of the group walked to the cliffs from Doolin, which was a 2 hour hike.  I kinda wished I was able to hike with them because the scenery was beautiful (I saw pictures my friend took).  It was a great day, we drove back up to Galway, had some dinner(at 3pm) at drove back to Dublin.  At Galway, I tried Fish n’ Chips for the first time!!  It’s one of the most famous dishes in the UK, where it’s just fried fish, and chips (fried potato wedges- called french fries in the US).  It was great, but I felt it was such a plain dish, I don’t understand why people would make such a big deal out of it.
I looked around the city for around 2 hours or so, it wasn’t much to see.  It was somewhat similar to Dublin but much smaller.  I heard the night-life there was good, but I didn’t stay late enough to experience it, it’s ok I’m not that big of fan of drinking.  Here are a few pictures:

It’s definitely a small city.  After getting back to Dublin, the world cup final match of Netherlands vs. Spain was on at 7:30pm.  My fellow Spanish friend had to watch the game immediately.  The world cup was a big sensation for everyone in Europe (probably because most of the teams in the finals were European counties).  As soon as we returned the rented car to the airport, we found a TV and sat waited until Spain scored a goal in the second half of overtime, which decided the match.  It seems that every match I decided to watch, it goes very slow and no one goals until the end.  lol, the other match I saw earlier that week was Spain vs. Germany and the score turned out to be 0-1 with Spain winning as well.  Eh well, I predicted Germany would have won 3rd place, and Spain winning the world cup, Paul the Psychic Octopus told me lol.  That octopus was dead on the spot.  (YouTube Paul the Psychic Octopus if you don’t don’t who/what I’m talking about) lol, but going back to Dublin, I saw all the Spanish celebrating in front of Burger King  (it was open for 24 hours) singing Espana! Espana! lol  I didn’t get home till midnight, didn’t eat dinner (except some cookies and biscuits), and crashed into bed, with work the next morning.  Phew, what a weekend…Well I’m up until 1am writing this blog, when I should be up at 7am getting ready for my trip to Newgrange to see the 5000 year-old Tombs…  My trip to Intel was amazing earlier this week as well!  You’ll hear about that in my next blog post.  I’ll probably post it tomorrow after I get back from Newgrange, and post about my Newgrange trip on Sunday.  Until next time… and I still suck at updating my blog…  I’ll try to do better! 😀