July 2

(12:00) I woke up at 6:30 am this morning. My watch uses Roman numerals instead of numbers so I though it said 12:00 pm before I realized I was holding the watch upside down. I fell asleep for a little while longer but made sure to wake up in time to get my free breakfast. The breakfast consisted of my choice of cornflakes or rice krispies, wheat or white toast, and coffee or juice. I never realized how good rice krispies and toast could taste. Sadly, I was stuffed after only a small bowl of cereal and two pieces of toast. I sat and drank some coffee and read the paper for about an hour before I went up to the room to wake Ben up before breakfast ended. Before we checked out for the day, we went to look at some of the videos and realized that they all had been deleted from the hard drive somehow. Now they come up on the computer but not the camera. Hopefully I will be able to upload them somehow. I have done a lot of updates on the videos; I am almost caught up.

We went for a walk to see the Dublin Castle and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It rained the whole time and I was worried that my computer and camera would get wet, but they are fine. The weather forecast says that it is going to rain everyday for the remainder of our stay in Ireland. Today was supposed to be the only day of sunshine, yet it hasn’t stopped raining yet. Besides the rain though, we are enjoying Dublin and all the people here. It is funny how well Dubliners follow stereotypical Irish protocol. It seems everybody is short with pale skin, rosy cheeks, and red hair. We walked by two twin Irish girls in front of our hostel as we returned from our walk. They were pretty good looking (so much so that it was worth putting in the blog I guess…haha). We are now relaxing in the common room waiting for the rain to stop and to find out if we will be staying here after tonight or moving on to another hostel.

(24:00) We ended up hanging out in the hostel until about 5:00 pm until we headed back toward St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the daily evening mass. It was quite interesting to partake in a traditional mass similar to thase of about 1,000 years ago. After the mass we walked around the inside of the cathedral and checked out the tombs of many famous Irish people including Jonathan Swift. Once we left the cathedral, we went to a couple local grocery stores to buy our meals for the next few days. Everything is ridiculously expensive, so we didn’t get much. I bought a loaf of bread, a ten pack of hot dogs, and some sort of pot pie in a can filled with steak and kidney meat. That should make for an interesting meal. We then went back to our hostel and checked out the pubs next door. We found out where the entertainment was and came back about an hour later to check it out. We saw a live band playing Irish music followed by an Irish dance group. The band was okay but the dancers were pretty awesome. We both had a Guiness draught while we sat and watched. It took me about an hour and a half to drink mine. Now I am not quite as excited about our idea of drinking Guiness on the coast of the Irish sea tomorrow. We might have to find another Irish beer to try (although we haven’t seen one can of Killian’s yet, so I’m not sure what else there is).

Right now, Ben is sleeping, of course, since he sleeps about twelve hours a day. We need to plan for the next couple days and tomorrow we are supposed to be on the beach all day so hopefully he can stay awake for more than fourteen hours one of these days….haha. I am off to my top bunk bed. I need to wake up by 9:00 am for my free breakfast again.