Luck O' The Irish!

Cliffs of Moher!!!

Kylemoore Abbey :)

Well! It has surely been a while, sorry I haven't kept up to date on my posts, as I have been busy preparing for finals and studying hard core! On May 19th I left Estonia foe the beautiful country of Ireland. A couple friends accompanied me and we flew into Dublin, which turned out to be a smaller city than I expected, but with so many amazing buildings and churches! For that night we walked around the city, seeing St. Peters Church, the Dublin castle, and eating some traditional fish 'n chips! We ended the night at a traditional Irish pub, a local pub so we were the only foreigners. It was refreshing from the constant hustle and bustle of foreigners running around everywhere snapping photos of everything. Which yes, I admit I have been there before. But stopping and experiencing things that the locals do, made me really appreciate their culture, and even made me fall in love with it. That night was the soccer championships between Munich and Chelsea. I was of course rooting Munich on because all of my German friends live there, but surrounded by Irish folk there was a lot of cheering for Chelsea. It must have paid off because after a 30 minute overtime Chelsea won. Oh to be in London that weekend.... it would be insane! The pub played some traditional Irish music and after a couple Guinness we finally walked home to go to bed. The next day we woke up extremely early to catch our bus that would take us to Galway (the West coast of Ireland). It was the best decision we could have made because the west coast was amazing! So beautiful and part of our tour was to go to the infamous Cliffs of Moher and Galway city. Such beautiful cliffs, I have never seen anything so amazing.... That night after a long day of history and traveling we spent the night in Galway city. The next morning back up again to take the Connemara and Cong tour! Connemara is an amazing part of Ireland, full of huge green fields stretching out as far as the eye can see. We learned all about the famine of Ireland and our tour guide should us many villages which were abandoned because the people either left or died of starvation. Quite a sad period in Irish history, and it is amazing how their attitudes are so upbeat. I realize it was nearly 200 years ago, but still something that serious and detrimental to a population usually has those kinds of repercussions. Anyways, we also got to tour the Kylemoore Abbey, an amazing castle complete with a Gothic style church, a mausoleum, and acres of Victorian gardens. The village of Cong was amazing as well, I guess it is where they filmed "The Quiet Man". A very picturesque village! The bus took us back to Dublin that night and after a very long day of traveling and touring around we crashed real hard at the hostel! Unfortunately the next morning we had to go back to Estonia. But it was an amazing trip, full of energy and really great people.