On our second night in Cork we went out for dinner with our French hostel-mate, Steve and had awesome conversation with him. We then joined two of his friends (both French girls) at the same pub we'd gone to the previous night. One of them, Alicia, didn't speak a word of English, but the other girl did and we had a great convo. I tried my first Irish car bomb (you drop a shot of Bailey's into a Guinness and chug), and found my new favorite cider, a Swedish kind called Kopparberg. We walked Karley home and went to a second pub with the group, where I was kissed by the Irish bouncer, yahoo. Since Steve lives in Bordeaux, France and Shirlea and I were planning to stop there on our 10-day, we got his email and will probably meet up with him again when he goes. By the way, for those of you who know him, Steve looked eerily like Jacob Howell. The next day, we got up early to go to the Waterford Crystal Factory (they make the New Year's Ball for Times Square) and bought some stuff for Shirlea's family. Unfortunately we missed our bus to Kilkenny and while waiting for the next one tried to grab a bite to eat - somehow we wound up in the we-think-lesbian hippie bar. The later bus stopped in Clonmel for two hours, so we sat drinking the rest of our Jameson, playing Uno, making dorky videos on the digital camera, and calling our boys back in Galway (who were spending their Saturday doing the same ol' thing in the same ol' place). Kilkenny was awful- not the city itself, but the experience we had. The hostel was 9 miles out of town, there were buys in our beds, no phones, and the rude staff people stranded us there by leaving to go to the pub with no locks on any doors. We had no choice but to stick it out for the night, but woke them up at 7 am demanding a taxi and letting them know that we'd tell our friends never to come there. We got to the bus station 2 hours before our bus was due to leave, but lucky us- there was a Catholic church across the street so we went to Mass. Once we got back into Dublin we ate a real lunch (we'd been eating chocolate chip muffins from Spar for two days) and made our way back to the sweet sweet hotel, were we took bubble baths and naps and repacked our things. We "splurged" on room service (first time in my life) by getting three course kid's meals... they only cost 10 Euro and the portions were huge. It made up for the bed bugs from the night before. The boys met us for drinks in the hotel on our last night and the next day we flew to Vienna.