Today, after going to sleep at the perfect time of 530, the girls in my room started getting ready around 745. We were leaving the hostel at 9. My alarm was set for 830 (in true Tosh fashion). I laid in bed until my alarm went off, jumped down from the top bunk with a spring in my step that can only be caused by a full night's rest. I threw on a random sweater and my jeans and was the third person from our group ready and downstairs for breakfast. Exactly. Tosh time is the right time. I had some bread with the Irish equivalent of Nutella (which was basically just chocolate) and was in heaven. It was sooo delicious on toast. After eating that AND cereal with cold milk I was ready to head out. As soon as everybody else got down there and I locked my laptop up in the locker and put my backpack in storage we left in the direction of the Guinness Brewery. We thought. After walking past the wrong side of the factory we were stopped by an Irish gentleman who clearly, from the look of our confused faces and completely unfolded map in our hands, knew we had no idea where to go. We ended up following his directions and were at the brewery about 10 minutes later.

The brewery has audio guides or self-guided tours. We ended up doing the self-guided tour, which was pretty cool due to the fact that there were arrows all over the ground telling us exactly where to go. It also included a few informative videos, which taught us more about the magic of Guinness. Oh and we were able to pour our own glass of Guinness. After the integrated 6-step program was explained to me and I tried it once I am almost positive I could go professional. We ended up spending a bit more time and a bit more money in the gift shop and then we were on our way to lunch. I ate a FEAST of Irish corned beef, carrots, potatoes (3 kinds), and broccoli. With a light gravy just poured all over the top. It was excellent (even picture-worthy).

After lunch we rolled out to the street and split up. Half of us went to see Trinity College's campus and the other half went to Grafton Street to do some shopping. I decided that since I only toured one college before Loyola and I was only in Dublin once I wouldn't spend my hour walking around the campus.

It was the coolest street with a pretty good mixture of popular stores and little Irish ones. It almost felt like home. I LOVE people speaking English around me. It makes everything so much easier. I actually asked someone directions today and knew what they said and followed them and, get this, found the places I was looking for. We found a Starbucks and Maura really wanted to go so I made the sacrifice of going with her and getting myself my first vanilla latte since Barcelona. Worth it. I didn't do much shopping afterwards although I did fall in love with a pair of boots that was a bit out of my price range. I need to learn to check price tags before trying on things. (Hay and Syd…. Christmas is coming up….). We ended up stopping by a different Starbucks for the other girls in our group to get their fix and then headed back to the hostel.

On the way back to the hostel we walked by Hard Rock Café, which ended up being a block away from our hostel, which was amazing. One more pin to add to my collection :) we got back, grabbed our backpacks and walked to our bus stop. We hopped onto the bus (which was just parked on the side of a road) and realized there was free Wi-Fi. Hell yeah Ireland. After taking advantage of the internet by sending some very important and time-sensitive emails I took a 15 minute nap until I was awoken by an Irish argument. I love Irish arguments. I just sit there and ogle at their accent. Even angry it sounds awesome. The bus ride ended up being about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Not too bad with an open laptop and endless entertainment in the form of my fellow passengers.

We walked to the hostel from the train station and were welcomed by Fargo, the extremely helpful deskman who may or may not be an attractive Irishman... I digress. We got up to our room to find our window open. CHILLY!!! I decided right then that I was definitely not wearing my going out shirt. It was turtleneck sweaters or bust. The girls decided that we would get ready, pregame (drink before we went out), then eat dinner (no this doesn't make any sense), then go out to the bars. We found a liquor store a few blocks away and everybody brought a few beers each. I decided to buy this bottle of radioactive-waste-green colored kiwi-apple vodka mix. We headed back to the hostel, everyone chugged their beers. I drank some of my concoction but soon realized that every sip had the same sugar content as a whole airhead so I gladly passed it around to everyone to help me finish it. Which didn't even happen. We decided (around 915) that it was about time for dinner.Little did we know that most restaurants are closed by 8-830.

We ended up finding some random little place and sat down. I would have to say that the lack of heating, although very environmentally friendly, sucks. I'm just not the biggest fan of eating while shivering. It creates too many spills. I ended up getting a salmon on soda bread appetizer and some Guinness and beef stew. Although the meat in my stew definitely wasn't beef it was still pretty good. The table next to us was actually filled with a group of juniors from Notre Dame University. Small world. To make it smaller, they knew like 10 of the same people that we knew, including one person who went to kindergarten with a girl from our group. Weird.

After dinner we headed to a fairly popular bar called The King's Head. There was a live band playing but I wasn't too excited about it since they basically played only music from America. I didn't come to Ireland to hear that garbage! We were there until super late (around midnight) and then decided to head back to the hostel to get some sleep since we had to be up early for the Cliffs of Moher the next day.