Today I'm being pretty lazy and catching up on my blogging/journaling/skyping. I've been so busy here, and I'm totally exhausted.
Yesterday we went to the Guinness Factory. It was an excursion that took up most of the day, since it's on the outskirts of the city. Even if you aren't a huge Guinness fan, it's definitely worth seeing. Getting to it is pretty sketchy, so I'm glad our group was large.
The museum is super cool and surprisingly interesting, even though I'm not knowledgeable about the process of brewing beer. I really loved the collection of advertising items. They trace the history of Guinness advertising, and even play the old 1950s cartoons that claim "Guinness is good for you!"
The top floor alone is worth the visit. At the Gravity Bar you receive a free pint of Guinness direct from the storehouse, but the best part of all is the 360 degree view of Dublin. The city has next to no tall buildings, so you can see for miles. When we got up there it was dark (it's only light 8:30am-4:00pm this time of year), but the lights were absolutely incredible.
After splitting into smaller groups we headed out for dinner. A bunch of us wanted something cheap, bad for us, and filling, so we decided on Chinese, which is supposed to be excellent in Dublin. Some people went to a take away, but Amanda, Rachel, and I decided it would be better to search around for something of better quality. It was a wonderful decision! We found this all you can eat Chinese buffet that smelled incredible, so we went in there and got such a bargain! It's the first time of the entire trip that I've actually felt full and the Chinese food here is way better than it is in America! It's more fresh tasting or something, I can't quite pinpoint it.
I think the food issue is by far going to be one of the biggest cultural adjustment issues for me here.
Before we headed back to DCU the three of us stopped at a pub called Donnahuges. It was yet another super old and cool looking place, but very very calm. So calm it was kind of boring. It was all locals in the place, and they had American football on the TV. When we looked around everyone was drinking Budlight and Coors, because it's trendy to drink imported beer. Then we realized we had been sitting under a Budwiser sign for most of our stay. We decided we hadn't come all this way to spend an evening like that so we went back, where I promptly fell asleep for the next 12 hours.
I took yesterday off from doing anything productive or fun because my body simply wouldn't let me. We watched a movie as a group at night, and now today is going to be the start of classes after some more orientation session stuff.
haha and what?
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