Assignment for the Task on Travelling and Holidays

The assignment says:

You are going to write a travel blog. EITHER write a blog for a journey you made in the past (imagine you are there now). OR write the blog of someone visiting your area for the first time. 


We arrived in Dublin on a Sunday night in August around 9:00 p.m. We took the airport shuttle bus into the city, and we got off on O'Connell Street downtown, near the River Liffey. We followed our map a few blocks and found the street where our hotel was. But, it wasn't there! At the address, we found an apartment block instead. After an hour or two of complete confusion, searching for clues in a nearby internet café and contemplating the idea of getting on the next flight back home, we discovered that a hotel on the next street over from the apartment block owned those apartments, and that one of those flats was the one that we had booked. 

We got up early the next morning and went to the public transportation office on O'Connell Street to get maps of the bus lines. I tried to use my limited Gaelic to ask for everything, and the workers looked at me as if I was a teacher's pet, and then they answered me in English. In four days in Dublin, only one person answered me in Gaelic, a middle-aged man from the west of Ireland. It turns out that in the 120 years from the failed rebellion in 1798 to independence in the 1920s, the language situation went from 80% of the population using Gaelic in their everyday lives to only 20% of the people having a minimal knowledge of it. Nowadays, only 70,000 people speak Gaelic in their normal lives, when before the United Kingdom was invented, over 3,000,000 did.

We enjoyed learning about the history of Dublin in the Dublinia museum, which was full of information on the original Viking settlement. We also paid a visit to the Guinness Brewery where we learned how its dark beer is made. They have a fascinating museum, full of the green of hops and barley plants, the smell of fermenting beer, and a fantastic view of Dublin from the bar on the top floor. The cold Guinness was also very tasty and very good for satisfying our thirst after a busy morning of sightseeing. We also discovered that the Temple Bar area is great for dinner and singing in pubs at night.

Dublin is a very green city: full of parks and squares. It is also a very grey city: with rainclouds forming and getting you wet every 15 to 30 minutes. We spent our days putting on and taking off our rain jackets until the action just became another unconscious routine of ours, like breathing in and out.

All in all, we had a wonderful time in Dublin. It's full of surprises, and most of them are pleasant ones.

My EOI 3 blog

This blog is a place where I can post work that I'm doing in my EOI 3 class and where I can see the work that other members of the class are doing. So, you will see posts on different topics, and it will seem a little random.