Week 4 in Dublin: Braden Beagle

My fourth week here in Dublin has been an absolute blast! Since I left off last week, the first excursion that we have had since then was going to an Irish pub and listening to traditional Irish storytelling. I learned a lot about the world of fairies that was believed in old Irish times and is even still believed by many Irish people today still. After we heard all of the old Irish traditional tales, we went to Merchant’s Bar for a very good three course meal.

A few days later on Saturday, we took a pretty long bus ride to tour a few castles including the extremely famous Blarney castle, which is more well known for the Blarney stone which is held in the castle. Supposedly, kissing the stone gives you very good luck which makes sense why there was such a long line to go inside the castle and kiss the stone. Unfortunately, I didn’t think waiting in the hour and a half line was worth especially when we were hungry from a very long bus ride and wanted to sit down and eat somewhere, so some of my friends and I decided not to end up waiting in the line, but it was still cool to see the castle from the outside. After that we got to see another castle which was pretty cool as it was actually guided by a tour guide so we got to learn some very interesting stuff about the castle such as the different traps and defense strategies that they used there in the medieval age. There also was still a cannonball from the seventeenth century that was still in one of the outside walls of the castle which was really cool to see! After that we had a long bus ride home and since we got back a little bit earlier then we were expecting too we explored some more of the city of Dublin.

Then our most recent excursion was on Monday where we got to see the Kilmainham Gaol Museum which is a famous prison that used to hold criminals and political prisoners the past couple of centuries. It was really cool to see this as I have never actually been inside a prison before. We learned a lot about the history of the prison and about some famous Irish prisoners that stayed there that were a big part of the Easter Uprising in 1916, and some that were even executed inside of the prison. This was definitely one of my favorite weeks here in Dublin and I am very excited for the next!