Ireland Recap

Hello!

               This spring break apparently wasn’t all it was cracked up to be here in Iowa. It was supposed to be cold and rainy, and there was still snow on the ground. To make it worse, the last day of the break it was actively snowing. Who wants snow on their spring break? I blame global warming. In other news, I didn’t spend my spring break here, I spent it in Ireland! I’ve already talked about everything I wanted to do, so this post is mostly going to be a recap, as well as some pro tips in case you’re internationally traveling anytime soon.

               Firstly, Ireland was fantastic. Going over there as a first-time international traveler, I had no idea what to expect. So when we first stepped out of the airport in Dublin and they had a bunch of high school kids there to welcome us to Ireland, I knew we were in for a very interesting time. In America, everyone is going where they need to go at a billion miles per hour. That means a lot of people end up coming off as rude. In Ireland, it’s way different. Everyone we met was very nice, and would stop and talk to us for a while. Therefore – The average person we met in Ireland was more polite than their American equivalent.

               The next point I’m going to make is the scenery. While descending in our plane onto Irish soil, everyone was looking out the window and talking about how green everything was. This was a huge contrast to Iowa, where everything is brown and frozen. Things are green over there even when it’s below freezing. That’s just talking about the grass and trees you see everywhere, too. There were a lot of really cool sights otherwise. We saw Blarney Castle, which had very beautiful grounds. Then there was the Giant’s Causeway, which is without any exaggeration the prettiest thing we saw on the trip.  It’s essentially just a very odd rock formation that happens to be right next to the Irish Sea, which makes it infinitely more majestic.  Point Number Two – Ireland was super pretty.

               The third point I’m going to make is about the cities. We went through Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, as well as a city called Limerick. In Northern Ireland we went through Belfast. These cities were laid out very nicely, with residential and commercial districts within walking distance of each other. This means that there were a lot more methods of transportation, as well as a lot of people riding around on bicycles. All of the cities just seemed a lot more people-friendly.

               A final point that I’m going to talk about is security. I’ve always assumed that security was pretty tight everywhere you went, but that’s really untrue. See, coming home from Ireland to the United States we had to go through Irish security first at the airport in Dublin. They actually laughed at some of the kids – All because they tried to take off their shoes. We Americans didn’t think anything of it because that’s what we’ve always done at airport security.

               Anyways, Ireland was fantastic. That is all. (530)