Day One: Dublin

Our trip to Ireland got off to a rocky start before we even left the country. Before we even left the state, actually. We awoke Wednesday morning to find our flight from Detroit to Philadelphia had been canceled, and after a phone call to the airline, they placed us on another flight at 4:15, a couple hours before our previous flight. This meant we had to race to finish packing and get on the road to Detroit, roughly an hour and fifteen minutes away. Arriving at around 1:15, we are informed immediately upon checking in that the four o’clock flight has also been canceled. Our last chance is a flight at 1:15. Oh wait, it’s already 1:15! Good luck catching it, because this is Detroit and we will absolutely not help you any more than we absolutely have to. Long story short, after begging a few kind strangers to cut in the security line and running halfway down a terminal in my socks, my mother and I are the last ones on the plane and make it to Philadelphia, where we have like four hours before our connecting flight to Dublin! Hooray U.S. Airways!

Cut to: Dublin airport. I’m delirious from lack of sleep. There are absolutely no red heads in the airport. I try to look as cool as possible, standing next to my mom and dragging my purple luggage. As I scan the crowd gathering for our tour group, a horrible realization dawns upon me. These are all old people. Old or at least middle aged. Young people stay in hostels. Young people go backpacking across Europe. Young people do not take bus tours. What have I done?!

We get to the hotel and are allowed a brief time to sleep before our trip begins in earnest. In our room, my mother and I are baffled by an inability to turn the lights on. We discover a key slot beside the front door. Apparently, to either save money or energy, you have to keep your room key in this slot anytime you want to turn on the lights. While I appreciate the effort to save on resources, it is rather difficult to stumble around in the dark looking for a keycard when you have to pee in the middle of the night.

After a lot of juvenile whininess on my part and a lot of Mother Teresa like patience on my mother’s part, we walk to a nearby café to enjoy a bit of breakfast. Now the traditional Irish breakfast is made up of the following: sausages (bangers), bacon (rashers), another type of sausage, fried eggs, a grilled tomato, and something that may have had mushrooms in it, and toast. So basically, a whole lot of meat and carbs. What they did not have was fresh fruit. This is the moment where I realize how incredibly spoiled I’ve become living in southern California. Not everyone lives in a magical world of sunshine and citrus. But a impending case of scurvy is a small price to pay for escaping the traffic and smog of Los Angeles.

So our first night in Ireland, I almost got my mom murdered. Okay that’s an exaggeration. After ditching the old people on the bus, we set out into Dublin, happy and carefree, ready to enjoy all that this beautiful city had to offer! Our first stop was at a Starbucks. YAY!!!! No, this was just a stepping stone. A coworker had recommended to me a good area to find tradition Irish music. We set off in what I thought might possibly be the right direction. Now, I’m usually rather good at following maps, but since I refused to take out said map because I didn’t want to look like a tourist, we ended up wandering into some sketchy area. I don’t know if it was actually sketchy but it looked and felt sketchy, so I ended up having to take out my map anyway and steer us onto safer streets. Afterwards, I realized we weren’t anywhere near where I had been trying to get us. The lesson of the day is acting like a tourist might be uncool, but so is getting murdered in an alley in Dublin.

END OF DAY ONE