Dublin

We (me and my 4 other roomates) arrived in Dublin around 8 pm and decided to jump on a bus looking for our hostel. mind you, we had no map and just knew it was somewhere in the city. So after a lot of bickering on the bus we had like 2 people explain directions to us in a detailed fashion. we then got lost again and decided a taxi will do.
.. the hostel (issac's hostel).. well um... i am a hotel guy and don't think hostels are safe for your health and in general are good places. we had a 10 by 10 room with just 3 bunk beds and had a crazy roomate. our roomate was like 50, prob homeless and def an alcoholic.
once we locked our stuff up, we finally headed out to 'temple bar' ( an area in dublin with pub after pub). It was awesome! we decided to pub hop and just got a guinness in everyone. great night and irish people are way way way more friendlier than italians. I also wanted to point out that Irish women are prettier than they are given credit for, although you do see a lot of heavy set women.
once we returned back to our hostel, our drunken roomate was sleeping so we weren't to bugged out. BUT then out of no where about an hour later he jolted us all awake by jumping out of bed and running for the door. He couldn't get the door open and we were all freaking out because he had no clue what was going on.. then we found out. He then began peeing himself and turned on the light looking for the trash can while getting it all over the floor. After realizing we were all scared and looking at him he headed for the door and then to make things crazier some guy darted in as our nut roomate walked out claiming we were in his room. So we all kicked him out and then after a lot of laughs our roomate came back and acted like nothing happened. Needless to say, none of us really slept after that.
But today was awesome and we went to the guinness factory and the jameson old distillery. I loved the guinness factory and I poured my own guinness and am not a certified pourer. At the jameson factory, Joe got selected to taste test whiskey's which was pretty cool... he was the only person to pick Jack Daniel's over Jameson, ha. After a long day, we checked into our new hostel where we would be staying for friday and saturday night. The new hostel was called youth irish international or something along those lines. So we expected to have young roomates, but we wound up with 2 guys in their 50's and a crazy french guy (this was still an upgrade from our previous roomate). This hostel was a lot nicer and was in an old church which put me at ease. The weird thing about Ireland is that even when it is 9 or 10 oclock at night, the sun is still out. So when we went out to pub crawl it was a bit weird. We decided to pub crawl again friday night and at the end we found a pub called quays. Let me give you a back drop of irish pubs from my experience. No matter what pub you go to, there are tons of older people. It is not like in America where you go to a bar or club and you hang out with college aged kids, every pub has a ton of older people getting smashed. So... the reason we liked quay's was because it seemed to have a younger crowd.
No crazy hostel story for friday night, just a good nights rest.

After getting up at 10 to catch our free breakfast we all decided to go to the Howth cliffs which sounded like a great idea. After stepping outside, I wasn't excited. We had gotten 2 days of sunshine in Ireland and now it turned to a typical rainny gray irish day. But we got train tickets for Howth and went. Once we got there the rain picked up so we did what the irish would do... we posted up at a pub and waited it out. After a good 2 hours as the rain slowed we headed for the pier because we were told we would see hundreds of seals. As we were walking to the pier, the rain picked up and so did the wind. Once we reached the pier and were next to water it seemed to be like a hurricane. But being dumb we decided to continue and get to the end of the pier. These winds were fierce and I'm talking like they were pushing us over. So after getting about halfway to the end I turned back .. and this was also due to seeing a wave break on the pier about 50 feet ahead of us. ..Soon after my roomates turned back and that was the end of our trip. It was just a miserable day and we were advised by locals not to go up to the cliff's. So we headed back to Dublin.
After a warm shower we decided to have a fun last night and picked up a few guinness to have before we went out. Once out we went straight to Quays and posted up. About 6 girls from our Florence program also went to Dublin for the weekend and we ran into them so they stayed to drink with us. It was the best night I had in Dublin and everyone was having a great time. We all took a shot of Jameson with a guinness just to say we did so in ireland. One of my roomates drank a bit too much and asked the bartender "do you have guinness on tap"... the bartenders response was "yes your in ireland you stupid american." haha

Then on Sunday we had some time to kill before our flight so we went to the Dublin Zoo. It was a huge zoo and a good time since I haven't been to a zoo in years. We also watched the seal feeding and I thought about Lauren and here training animals.

We then flew from dublin to pisa and then had to take a bus back to florence... that was a 10 hour day of travel so I am whipped and I hope this all makes sense.