Leannes Visit

Now for an update about Leanne's visit (I really need to keep up with this). So she got here really early the Sunday before St Patrick's day so Pat, Fal, and I went to meet her at the airport. Then we came back to DCU before going out to walk around Dublin. Monday morning we left for Galway. It was so pretty, we spent a lot of time just walking around and enjoying the quaint Irish feeling of the city. That night we went to some pub and listened to this really cute Irish band. Then Tuesday we walked around some more by the water before heading back to Dublin. That night we went out with my roommates, Pat, and a couple of guys from the CIEE group. The great thing about the Westport trip was that we actually meet people from the group that are nice and really fun to hang out. So we went out to a club and had a really good time but didn't get back until really late which meant maybe 4 hours of sleep before waking up for St Patrick's Day :) We got up around 8 or 9 to get all decked out in green and we just hung out in our apt while we painted each other's faces. Then we eventually made it out of the apartment and down to the city to watch the parade. The parade was definitely not what I expected but it was still really entertaining. It had more of an international feeling rather than the traditional Irish stuff I thought I'd see. But anyways, then we went to Croke Park to watch a hurling match and a Gaelic football game. I was confused when I heard a lot of the Irish call soccer soccer instead of futball like other places in Europe but I found out why. Its because they have Gaelic football which they just call football. Its a really interesting but difficult to understand sport coming from the US. Its a mix of soccer, rugby, and who knows what else. Both the games were really fun to watch though. Then we came back and just hung out for the night. On Thursday Leanne and I went to Howth which was amazing as always. We spent Friday walking ALL OVER Dublin and the Saturday we did a tour of Dublin's south coast. We went to Dun Laoghaire, Enniskerry, Bray (where all the famous people in Dublin have houses- Bono for example) and this amazing estate called Powerscourt. It was so sad to have her leave too but it was good to have time to get working on school work!