Galway

Today was spent looking around the city of Galway; turns out there isn’t much to see here.  The downtown area is very cute and has gorgeous authentic buildings turned into quaint cafes, pubs and stores.  We spent some time walking down the river and saw two seals swimming around. For brunch we had an Irish breakfast which along with dry toast, bacon, sausage, eggs and hashbrowns included blood pudding and white pudding!  Blood pudding is sausage that is filled with blood and white pudding is oatmeal and pork in a sausage... both were satisfying.

At one point, we were geocaching but had given up because the coordinates were off so I put the GPS in my pocket to take some pictures of the 15+ gorgeous swans swimming around.  There were some old rickety brick stairs going into the river and I commented on how dumb/pointless they were because who would be walking into the gross river?!  Moments after that comment, my GPS falls to the bottom of the river, through a group of startled swans!  Luckily the GPS is bright yellow, the river wasn’t to deep and those stairs I had just made fun of were only about 10 metres away.  So I had to take off my shoes, roll up my pants and shamefully walk down the stairs into the freezing cold water.  I gathered a small crowd and was humiliated and cold AND Jan captured it all on film (so I’m sure it will get posted to Facebook for you all to see at some point).  I rescued the GPS and it was undamaged!

The rest of the day was really just walking and I found a cheap salon to finally get my hair cut.  Haircuts in Norway are ridiculously expensive and I meant to get my roommate to cut my hair but we never got around to it.  My hair was getting out of control and now it feels so nice because the dead ends are gone and it got blow dried and straightened.  I do not have a hair dryer here and my straightener only seldomly works so it is refreshing to have normal hair for once.

Now we are on the bus back to Dublin (yes there is wifi, free coffee and a toilet on this bus) where we will spend the night again.  Tomorrow we are planning to check out the famous prison then hop on the train to Belfast in Northern Ireland.  I didn’t really know much about Ireland before coming, but turns out Northern Ireland is a different country then Ireland.  N. Ireland uses the British Pound and is part of the UK where as Ireland is part of the EU and uses Euro as its currency.