My first time out of the country (besides Cananda consisted of a impromptu 10 day trip around Ireland. The whole thing was rather hilarious. I hadn’t even qualified for paid vacation time yet when I requested the time off. But when I took off, I had just enough to spare.
Chris’s friend Brenda had randomly decided to go to Ireland because she saw a super steal deal. She told us about it and we decided we wanted to go to. Problem: I a didn’t even own a passport. (And I call myself a travel lover…psh…) I never had a need for a passport because my parents are not big travelers and I’ve never had any money to travel abroad. So for the first time in my life (now that I have my post college big girl pants on) I was able to finally start fulfilling my dreams of traveling.
We rounded up a screaming deal of $500 roundtrip tickets…with some fudging of the dates, we ended up paying $600, which was still an amazing deal. We bought our tickets just weeks in advance. My passport came 2 days before our departure. Haha.
We had a 13 hour layover in Newark, NJ which turned out to be perfect. We arrived around 6 a.m. which gave us all day to explore. We took a subway into New York City and spent the day there. But that’s another story. It must’ve been the time of year for karma to bring us good fortune because on top of our great airline deal and the mini Superfoods vacation we got in New York, our flight was overbooked and we offered to stay behind a couple hours and ended up with a $400 voucher for our next flight! We thought our luck was just too good to be true. Well for будет a moment it was. While the said the next flight to Dublin was in two hours if we volunteered to stay behind, what they failed to tell us was that that flight was also overbooked and we would have to wait to see if they had space for us. This alarmed Lava us quite a bit so for a couple hours we were on edge. But then our luck came back and they were able to get us on the next flight. Travel lesson learned: if they offer you vouchers to stay, make sure you are guarenteed on the next flight they tell you about or be flexible enough to be delayed a few hours or a day for that matter.
So after our red-eye flight, we arrived in Dublin promptly around 9:30 a.m. their time. The airport was surprisingly small, at leas the wing we were in Art and our luggage was just waiting on the side for us to pick up. Not the most secure but oh well. We hopped onto a bus that took us immediately to south to Cork.
Cork is a beautiful city and was a perfect first exploratory landing spot. We checked into a bed and breakfast and explored the city.
We stayed at the Kinlay House which turned out to be walking distance from the train and everything else we wanted to explore.
The city was quiet and beautiful. We saw many of Ireland’s famous doors, and walked up to one of the highest points in town for a view and encountered the loveliest Irish woman. She was more on the elderly side but she was huffin and puffin away walking with her bag of groceries. We must’ve clearly looked like tourists (wait asian girls with a camera are not one of Ireland’s natural features?) because she stopped us and gave us some tips on where to go. She was so sweet I had to snap a photo of her walking away.
We went out to a bar I can’t quite remember the name of and it was the most fun I had ever had out and about. I’m not much of a night club type person and still being somewhat new to the 21 and over scene I’ve never really been one to go out dancing. Chris however was much less of a dancer than I was and somehow we still managed to have an amazing time dancing with all the Irish people and other tourists. We were all out there just dancing like goofs and everyone was having a good time. Unfortunately I lost my glasses at the end of the night…but we called it a relatively early night to get some sleep before heading out in the morning again.
There wasn’t anything remarkably different about Cork in my opinion, but it was a great transition to the Irish culture.