Welcome to Vertigo

We made it! The flight was less than stellar, but after a long morning nap, we made the most of the afternoon. I tried my first Guinness and surprisingly enough I really didn't hate it. After a few though I kind of felt like I'd had Thanksgiving dinner - tasty, but really heavy and probably not something I will be ordering too often.. Enough about the beer though. We stayed with the sister of a guy that works with Andrea. We only saw her once, but it was nice to be able to stay somewhere we could just come and go. She lived in the south side of Dublin, but we spent most of our time in Temple Bar, which was kind of in the downtown area. We met some really, really cool guys our first night - Eddie, Philip and Padric. They all live in the city, but are from smaller towns outside of Dublin. We hung out with them on Saturday night and went to this club and danced and left at what we calculated was 3am. The taxi driver dropped us off at a "mexican restaurant" which was actually run by Asians and sold Greek food - go figure. Yesterday, Eddie picked us up and drove us all over Dublin and gave us the basic history of the country. Did you know that Northern Ireland is still owned by the UK and the rest of Ireland just recently in like 1927 got their independence from the UK? So he told us lots facts and things like that. He also mentioned that he thought it was funny that we went home so early the night before...clearly we did the math wrong becasue Eddie said we left the bar at 10:30. I figure we'll get the timing right eventually. So then he took us downtown to this kind of industrial area by the river and wouldn't tell us where we were going. I know this must sound super creepy, but it really wasn't. So we pull up beside what looks like the back entrance to like a factory or something and in huge spray painted letters across it said "Welcome to Vertigo" - it was U2's recording studio. It was so cool, people had written all these notes to the band so of course Andrea and I wrote something too. Far to lame to mention what we actually wrote, but it was really cool to see the place. We were going to do a tour of the Guinness factory afterward, but ran out of time, so Eddie dropped us off, we regrouped and stopped by an internet cafe to book our flights to Paris and met up with the guys again for one last night on the town before they had to go back to work on Monday and we had to leave. So ladies, just in case you feel like going to Ireland, Eddie said my friends and I were welcome to stay at his place anytime!
Now we are in Galway and will be here until Wednesday when we leave for Paris. It's sooo beautiful and green and tomorrow we are going on a day tour to see some castles and visit the Cliffs of Mohr, so I can't wait for that. So far so good. Everyone has been super friendly and I have had a really great time. I'll update you more once I get to Paris. That should be really interesting considering I don't speak French nor do I understand it. I'll be there until my tour starts on the 22nd.