Monday, 26 November 2012

The Not So Happy Side of Traveling


After being in Dublin for quite awhile, we decided it was about time to venture out again and go see Northern Ireland. A bunch of people we had met so far suggested going to Belfast so not really having any specific plan, that is what we decided to do Friday morning.

As we walked to the bus stop, both of us started to regret going shopping the other day. Although we are not exactly sure how much we were carrying, it felt as if both of us were carrying a really big dead body on our backs (kind of morbid, but true). To make it worse, we passed the bus stop and kept on walking another twenty minutes until realizing we had missed it in the first place.

When we finally made it to the bus, we were thrilled but unfortunately our bad luck was just beginning for the day. We ended up taking a double-decker bus, which is quite exciting; however, being on the top we realized it sways a lot and both of us got nauseas, not to mention the overwhelming amount of round-abouts we went around at least once (we think the bus driver may of thought himself actually driving a roller coaster (if that is at all possible), so we actually went around the round about a few times before actually making a turn).

After our heads stopped turning when we got to the central bus station, we headed to the information desk to see if we could get a map. The lady was quite helpful and she asked if we needed help getting to our hostel; however, us not being the brightest had forgotten to write down the actual name of our hostel and gave her some very vague ideas of what we thought our hostel might be named. “Well,” she said, “It could either be this one,” as she pointed out on the map, “or it could be this one on the other side of town.” Well, with us not really having a clue we took our chances and headed to the one that sounded most promising with our big backpacks in tow.

Sadly, if you have not figured this one out yet, we had picked the wrong one. So after Kristen asked a very drunk man for directions (not her smartest moment) and we had been walking in the ghetto for awhile, we went to the first hostel we saw, stupidly asking if we had made a reservation at their hostel. Sadly, we had not. After finding out the news, we headed out again, not only annoyed from walking to the opposite wrong end of town and being sore from our backpacks, but becoming hangry pants.

After a long silence of walking through one of the most depressing cities we have ever seen, we finally made it to our hostel, which really was on the other side of town. Fortunately for most of our trip we have been very lucky with our hostels, but this one did not hit the mark. We had done very little research on it and ended up staying in a very ghetto part of town.

At this point, we were both a little down, so after getting some food at KFC (Ireland seems to have a lot of them and let’s just say the food is not like it is back in America) we decided to go to bed. Yes it was only five o’clock, but we really were not in the best of moods and to be completely honest we both pretty much wanted to sleep away our time there (even though we had booked the room for three nights).

Funny enough, it ended up that neither of us were able to sleep the full fifteen hours we had been wanting to, but it was okay. We both ended up getting some sleep so although we both still were not exactly happy with the circumstances, we ended up laying in our beds, laughing at the whole situation, talking for hours, and figuring out answers to the world’s problems or more so ours. What started off as a very bad day, ended up being not so bad and filled with laughter :)

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