Independent in Ireland

Independent in Ireland
I arrived in Dublin Thursday evening with my friend Annie.We arrived just in time to find our hostel and set off on a pub crawl. The pub crawl was really fun, we went to about 8 different pubs with a guide who knew everything about each one. My favorite was the one were Bono had his birthday party. The next day we woke up and decided to discover Dublin the daylight. Well Dublin is nice, but there really is not too much to discover. Dublin has about 2 million people and is the biggest city in Irealnd. Annie and I started our tour 10 and finished everything by 2, the most notable site was probably the Guiness factory. We toured the factory, and it was really awesome, Guinness is so good, I loved the foam on the top, it kind of tasted like a beer milkshake.
Anyways, as we finished our Guinness’ we rushed to the bus station, and caught the 3:00 bus to Cork. Cork is the second largest city in Ireland, and I think it has a population of 200,000. The bus to Cork was great, it was very long though because of some traffic (a.k.a. sheep in the road!). We made it to Cork and met up with Annie’s friend who is studying abroad there. We walked around Cork for a while and there really wasn’t too much to do. So I decided that I wanted to see more, you know everything that you see in the pictures of Ireland. Annie, however,wanted to stay in Cork, which was fine with me. I felt like I could do anything I wanted in Ireland because they speak English!
I woke up early Saturday morning and caught a bus to Killarney National Park. The bus ride was so beautiful, everything is so green, there are sheep everywhere. Killarney National Park is the most well-known Irish landscape in the world, it has huge lakes, rocks, mountains and castles. The mountains looked kind of like the appalachians, all covered in forests. There were big oak trees everywhere, and lots of streams. The town of Killarney was so cute too, much better than Cork or Dublin. So I checked myself into a hotel, well that was after I went to a hostel and thought it was sketchy, so I decided I would
splurge on a hotel room, which was so wonderful! It was the first time I have had my own room in a very long time.
Sunday I woke up and went for a walk in the park up to Ross Castle, which is just a really cool old castle. I also went horseback riding for 2 1/2 hours later that morning around the park! It was so fun, it was just me and the guide, who is also 20 yrs old. She was really great, I told her that I had some riding experience and she flipped out! She was so excited that we would be able to canter, and canter we did for almost half of the tour. I also have not ridden English in a very long time so it took some getting used too. We cantered through this awesome trail in the woods for about 10 minutes, which is a really really long time for a canter. And my horse jumped over a stream, which was kind of scary but really fun, I am normally not a fan of jumping at all. But I saw Anna's horse jump it and I was just like well here we go! It was so awesome, I love to ride, and just the fact that I got to ride through Killarney was seriously like a dream come true.
Everyone in Ireland is so nice too. Killarney was great because everyone there is so active, there are tons of people out in the park running or walking the trails (it is a huge park, I mean like hundreds of square miles). I met this man on my walk Sunday morning named Patrick, I asked him for directions and he was like you know I don't have much to do today I will just walk with you to the stables. And he walked the two miles with me to the stables. Same with some other boys when I couldn’t find the bus station, and everyone at the hotel was so helpful.
I sadly left Killarney on Sunday evening and flew out of Cork Monday morning. Just in time to make it to my 12:00 cass. So that is my independent Ireland story!