My Ireland Journey: Week 3: New Places

Hello everybody, how are all of you guys doing? I’m doing pretty awesome this past week has been crazy fun, and have some pretty interesting things to talk about. Going back to last week last Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday (for some if you’re not sure what this is Shrove Tuesday is it’s a catholic tradition that it’s the day before Ash Wednesday, and typically people feast on pancakes because they try to use up all their dairy products to make them before their Lenten fast. This is my understanding from one of my classes). So in spite of Shrove Tuesday half of our group of students went to Galway to get pancakes for the occasion. When my friends, and I got to Galway we walked around for a while then after a little bit we tried finding a place that was serving pancakes, but we unfortunately couldn’t find one so we ended up not being able to eat pancakes which was kind of sad, but oh well. Instead we ate at a chicken place called Hillbilly’s (we laughed too hard at the name of the place since we come from Nebraska so it was pretty fitting) but it was a really tasty place, and for cheap as well which is always a plus. Later in the week was the most eventful part of my week, last weekend (Thursday afternoon-Saturday evening) a group of friends, and I went to explore a city called Kilkenny! It was exciting to go somewhere different besides Galway, and Spiddal. So we traveled the Thursday afternoon we took a train (a train! That was a pretty awesome experience to be on a train!) From Galway to Kildare then from there to Kilkenny. The adventure was going great until our stop in Kildare we had a problem when me, and the girls in my group went to the bathroom and when we came back the guy in our group had accidentally got onto a different train, and left us so that was crazy trying to contact him only by Wi-Fi (in order to do that we had to go into the city of Kildare into a pub to contact him) after we were able to get a hold of him we waited for him at the train station, and were able to get onto the correct train to Kilkenny so we got to our hostel a little late but we were just glad to have everyone in our group together. The next day we got up at 7 in the morning to go explore the city we were actually able to go see a lot of things since we got up so early. We had toured a castle called Kilkenny Castle (which that was amazing there was so much history!) we also saw 3 different churches (all of them were catholic I believe) the inside of the 3 of them were similar yet different in their own way, but oh so beautiful they all were. We also did some shopping, and went to different stores, as well as a big outlet mall that they had there. We also walked all over the city, and I took so many pictures it was great! It was very astonishing that we saw pretty much almost all of the city in that one day which was pretty good to get accomplished. The day after the girls, and I got up at 7 again to go on a morning walk we went on a walking trail, and that lead us to see some intriguing things! We saw an old abandoned mill, and oh my goodness the inside was so fascinating! It looked like a rainforest inside a building, like it was breathtaking. I also noticed the graffiti that we had seen, and this may be weird to say but the graffiti here looks stunning! I’m not sure why I feel this way, but I think it just looks better than any graffiti I’ve seen in America. Anyway that afternoon we left Kilkenny to go back to the cottages, and it was a struggle coming back because we weren’t sure which connecting train to get on and it just took a while to get back, but we eventually did. That evening I was able to Skype everyone at home for my niece Emaleigh’s birthday party, and it was incredible to be able to see everyone’s face when I talked to them, it helped my homesickness to be able to talk to everyone, but at the same time I still miss everyone however it gets better every day. Looking back to our time in Kilkenny whenever we talked to locals about politics in the United States mostly with the election that’s going on, and who they think will win in the end, it always surprises me that people say they want Donald Trump to win and their explanation for why. I just can’t fathom why anyone would want him to be president, but it certainly is interesting to hear the perspective of someone who doesn’t live in the United States on this topic. Also one last thing this past week I have planned everything for my spring break!! I’ve booked hostels, and bought tickets for everything I am so relieved to finally have all of that done! But in order to know where I’m going for spring break you’ll have to wait a while I can’t spoil that quite just yet, even though a lot of people already know where I’m going. Thank you all for reading my blogs it means a lot to me! I’m glad I can bring my Ireland adventures to everyone back home! I’m excited for my next post because I have a lot of field trips that are coming up, so can’t wait to tell you all about those!! Well until the next blog post I will talk to you all then! Bye!