I've just arrived in Cork about an hour ago... a day sooner than I planned.
Let's start with Dublin first. After I arrived to the city center, I found an internet and baggage storage place. From there, I met up with a girl from California and wandered around for a while, took pictures, and had to chicken curry before I hopped on a train to Tralee. The train to Tralee stopped early and we all had to hop on busses (provided for us) the rest of the way... something about a strike. At Tralee, I shared a room with 3 Irish guys, 1 Swedish girl, and a Scotish guy... there were 2 others but we didn't talk. There was another person in the hostel that I found out lives in Bothel.
Saturday morning, I caught a bus to Dingle and ended up talking to an Italian guy who was with with 3 other guys heading to Dingle. Two of them were from Italy, 1 from France, and 1 from Spain... all 22-24 years old. We all ended up in the same hostel. They mostly spoke Spanish to each other (one of the Italian's didn't know Spanish though) but they spoke semi-fluent English also so we understood each other well enough. I just spent 2 days speaking fairly simple English and trying to remember a few words of Spanish and Italian. We walked around town, tried to rent bikes but the 2 bike place we found were closed already. This morning we paid for a 2 1/2 hour mini-van tour by a man named Sean O'Conner of the Dingle Peninsula together. Very beautiful out there. I probably took too many picture lol. There are a lot of sheep out there too, and most of the sheep are colored in red, blue, pink, purple, whatever on their back (I assume to tell the herds apart) so it's kind of funny seeing tye-dyed sheep everywhere. After the tour, we grabbed some lunch in town and then got on a bus back to Tralee where we transfered to Cork. The boys live in Cork right now, 3 of them going to an English school and the 4th has come over to find work (not so easy in Southern Italy). They helped me find this hostel and 2 of them walked me over here while the other 2 went home. I had my first awkward encounter with the whole cheek kiss farewell... I'm so used to hugging haha. So now I have learned. They're all really good guys and it's been fun wandering Ireland with them.
I'm still deciding if I will stay here 2 nights before going back to Dublin or just the one night. I'm thinking that I might stay 2 nights so that I can meet up with the boys again when they are out of school because I really don't need to be back to Dublin until Tuesday anyways. Not to mention, I will have 2 full days back in Dublin at the end of June anyways. It's nearly 10 right now (got off the bus around 8:30) and I think I need to figure out food. I'm thinking that tomorrow I will go to the Blarney Castle and just wander around Cork (I'm basically in the city center).
I'm going to have to try finding somewhere to load some pictures onto the site soon... can't do it on this computer.
Well, as the Irish say...
Cheers!
Ireland's Flag
Map of Ireland