Day 7: Galway to Dublin - Shopping, Porn, Pints and Craic

Day 7 we got up early to pack our things for the drive to Dublin.

After eating breakfast at the hostel Lauren and I went to Eyre’s Square to walk around, take pictures and shop.

The pubs are really cute in Ireland but especially in Galway. I loved seeing the Gaelic on the store fronts too. We went into a ton of stores. We looked at clothes, jewelry, aran sweaters. I bought a cute pair of sunglasses from Pagan a neat little shop in the middle of the Square. Lauren bought a cute green sweater that she was going to wear home to meet Perry in. I got a get well card with a Gaelic blessing on it for my uncle since he has cancer.

The Square is pretty cool with lots of little cobblestone streets and alleys that all lead to one central area. We must have walked around Eyre’s Square 3 or 4 times just looking at everything and taking pictures. Lauren and I found a tiny little porn store. So for the shits and giggles of it we went in! The places was so small. There was a young guy working in there, he was sitting there watching a video of a chick spanking a fat guy when we walked in...... he asked what we were looking for... ewww! NOT THAT! It was mainly videos and a blow up doll of a fat ugly woman. After seeing that we left!

Of-course when we went outside there had to be a ton of people passing by. Some old ladies gave us dirty looks, and a couple of young guys were smiling at us! We were laughing so hard!

We went back to the hostel to get Katie and Michelle. As we were getting ready to leave Steve caught up with us and asked if we would drive him out to Salthill to pick up his car. He left it at the wedding reception place because he got really shit-faced.

We drove him out there and he told us about some good places to go in Dublin. He even told us that there was a Porterhouse in the Temple Bar District! The drive from Galway to Dublin took 3 hours. Along the way I saw a “Frie Pub” I knew I was going to have to tell Jen and Ken about that!

We got tired of listening to Green Day and the Foo Fighters so we decided to give the car radio another shot thinking we’d have better reception near Dublin. We managed to get one station.... This horrible rap song came on. It was called “This is my Comeback, Yo!” It was a 3 and a half minute song and pretty much the only lyrics were “this is my... this is my... this is my comeback, yo!” I don’t know if it was lack of sleep, booze or a 3 hour car ride but everyone was rolling! It became the joke of the day. Katie started doing this crazy dance and singing the song, people passing our car thought she was nuts!

We got into Dublin about 4:30 and checked into our hostel. After settling into our room we went right up the street to another Centra Market to get food for dinner, we stopped by an off-license to get some Rum. We wanted to get drunk before we went out.

We already knew we were going to the Temple Bar district to check out the pubs. Returning to the hostel booze in hand we came across a group of very rowdy guys from Northern Ireland. They were checking into our hostel. We had to walk through the lobby to get to the kitchen and back patio. The guys were hooting and hollering at us.

We got down to the patio, made some drinks and sat down to play cards when we heard what sounded like a herd of cattle running down the hostel steps. It was the guys from the lobby. They brought beer down and jumped into our card game! They were from County Armagh and were in town to see a Gaelic football game the next day in Croke Park. They had the thickest accents and you had to really listen to understand what they were saying.

The one kid Dennis, just turned 18 and they were taking him out drinking for the night. He was already wasted! He had the thickest accent of all of them, none of us could understand him at all. He kept asking Katie if she wanted some sex....and she would nod because she had no idea what he said. The one guy Roland had to tell us what he was saying. We taught them how to play Bullshit and Up and Down the River. We drank all of our rum and beer then we went out to the Temple Bar district.

We sure didn’t need to ask directions there were literally hundreds of people walking to the Temple Bar district, alot of them were already shit-faced! We barely got inside the Temple Bar it was that packed. You could hardly move and men kept grabbing your ass as you walked by...... We stayed for a pint or two then went to find a less crowded pub.

We walked a block up the street and came across a club called F.U.N. which was part of the Fitzsimon’s Hotel. Katie talked the bouncer into letting us in for half-price. It was crowded in there too, we went up to the 4th floor open air bar and it was still really hot and crowded. We downed a few more pints and went in search of another pub.

We went outside crossed the street and walked up an alley and ran right into the Porterhouse. We couldn’t have been more thrilled. We walked up to the bar and ordered pints of “An Brain Blásta” again, you would have thought we would have learned our lesson the first time! We got some random guys to buy us shot of Jager then we went up to the third floor balcony to watch the band. They were no Backstreet Law but they were pretty good. They played alot of 70’s music we knew like Zeppelin and Hendrix. We had quite a few rounds of An Brain Blásta and took a bunch of pictures. Some random Irish guy came out of the bath-room and jumped in our picture! I think we left the Porterhouse at 2:30 a.m. when they were closing.

We went outside and there were thousands of people stumbling out of all the pubs in the Temple Bar district! It was amazing, I’ve never seen so many fucking drunks before. I mean this beats Ozzfest hands down! Michelle and Lauren had to have Chinese food and apparently 300 other people had the same idea, it took forever to get the food!

We couldn’t remember which way to go to get back to our hostel, thankfully we met some local Irish guys who took us back to our hostel. It was about 4:30 a.m. when we got back. We all put on our iPods and passed out. We were woken up at 6:00 a.m. by the rowdy Armagh boys falling up the steps! I could tell we were all going to be hurting tomorrow!